Managing Reviews

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to manage reviews.

Reviews

Screenshot of a scoreboard showing portfolio items with scoring models, commercial values, and calculated scores for technical and commercial success probability, annotated with explanatory labels.

Not only the data of portfolio items is evaluated within a review, but various change options of portfolio items are also considered and their effects are discussed. What-if scenarios are available in PPM to support this process. What-if scenarios can be created within reviews and include all or only the selected portfolio items of the review.

When you create a what-if scenario, the system automatically creates alterable copies of the assigned portfolio items, so that a what-if scenario displays a grouping of simulation versions or what-if scenarios of portfolio items.

In contrast to snapshot versions, what-if scenario versions are not only used for purely evaluative purposes, but can be used to simulate changes to the portfolio item data, without having to make direct changes to the original items. In a what-if scenario, you have your own reporting cockpit and your own dashboard to evaluate the simulated data and also compare it with the data of the original items.

Hint

In addition to items, you can also assign initiatives to reviews.

Using Reviews

After you create a review and assign portfolio items to it, you can call various views and actions from this review. You can go to an item dashboard or a reporting cockpit to report the portfolio items. Only the items of this review are then displayed in the dashboard or reporting cockpit.

To analyze the progress of the portfolio items of the review, you can also call the version history of the items. If you want to simulate changes to portfolio items in a review, without changing the operational items, you can create what-if scenarios within a review.

You can use the scoreboard of a review to compare and prioritize portfolio items of a review according to defined criteria. When you open the scoreboard for a review, you first select a scoring model on which the comparison and prioritizing is to be based. A scoring model is defined in Customizing for PPM and contains a selection of portfolio item fields, each of which can be weighted differently in strength. For each field (attribute) of a scoring model, you also define a scoring for the possible field values in Customizing.

The system can determine a total score for a portfolio item based on the scoring of the field values of a portfolio item and the weighting of the fields. After you select a scoring model in the scoreboard, the score of the portfolio items of the review and the field values of the individual items, which are used to calculate the scores, are presented in a tabular manner in the scoreboard. If necessary, you can display details for calculating the scores, sort the portfolio items according to their scores, or export the result to Microsoft Excel. You can change the choice of scoring model at any time, and therefore, you can compare portfolio items in succession based on different criteria.

What-if Scenarios

Reviews of portfolios are part of a business planning process, and they can be initiated either monthly, quarterly, annually, on certain key dates, or at random. On one hand, reviews are used to check critical success factors of items of a portfolio. On the other hand, reviews can be used within the approval procedure to reach decisions about the selection of suitable projects based on standardized factors.

Relevant portfolio managers create reviews in PPM. When you create a review, you assign it to a portfolio bucket. Each review is given a name, an external ID, and a more detailed description, if necessary.

When you create a review, you also enter a date on which the portfolio items linked to the review are to be checked. You assign the portfolio items to a review in the Items for Review section of the review. You can assign portfolio items of different portfolio buckets to a review; however, a review can only contain items of those portfolios that are assigned to the review. If necessary, you can also change the assignment of portfolio items to a review after you have saved the review. You can assign a status also to reviews. To do so, assign a suitable review status and status sequences to the relevant portfolio types when you define portfolio types in Customizing for PPM.

In the Authorizations section of a review, you can manually define which user is to have authorizations for changing or reading the review. You can also change or completely remove authorizations, which the review has inherited from the portfolio bucket to which it is assigned.

If you add comments to a review, the details about the user who created them and when they were created are automatically added to the comments and they can be reproduced later. The review dashboard provides you with an overview of existing reviews.

The dashboard displays the following elements by default:

Names of reviews
Review dates
Number of portfolio items in the review
The user who initiated the reviews
The buckets to which the reviews are assigned

Evaluating What-If Scenarios

From a review, you can display a list of all what-if scenarios of this review. You can use the general data of the review as sort criteria or filter criteria. By clicking, you can go from here to the processing of a what-if scenario.

You have various evaluation options available within a what-if scenario. You can display an item dashboard of the simulations of what-if scenarios and analyze various data of the simulations, depending on the dashboard settings.

If you set the Display Original Item indicator, a dashboard with the data of the operational items is displayed in addition to the dashboard of the simulations. This enables you to compare the simulated data with the data of the operational elements. By clicking, you can go from the dashboard to the processing of simulations or the operational items also.

A what-if scenario scoreboard is available to simulate the effect of data changes to the prioritization of portfolio items. In this scoreboard, you can perform a scoring of the simulations as well as a scoring of the original items. By clicking, you can go from here to the processing of a simulation, make changes, save them, and then analyze the scoreboard again with the modified simulation data.

Manage Reviews

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Manage What-if Scenarios

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