Understanding Portfolios and a Portfolio Structure

Several portfolios in SAP Portfolio and Project Management can be used to set up completely separate areas of responsibility. Many SAP Portfolio and Project Management functions, such as reviews or reporting based on collections of portfolio items, refer to objects of only one portfolio. Cross-portfolio functions in SAP Portfolio and Project Management are resource planning or reporting using queries.

Portfolio items contain information about critical success factors, outline dates, financial details, or statuses, for example. You can perform strategic planning of finances and capacities on portfolio items for example, but also on portfolio buckets.

Initiatives can contain several (portfolio) items and they are used to aggregate the data of these (portfolio) items.

Portfolios and their general information (with the exception of the description) are listed in a tabular manner in the portfolio dashboard. You can use filters in the portfolio dashboard to selectively restrict the list of portfolios displayed. You can also use the portfolio dashboard to create new portfolios and to change or delete existing portfolios, if necessary.

As stated before, within a portfolio, you can perform strategic, financial, and capacity planning, or analyze the financial and capacity data of assigned portfolio items in an aggregated manner at bucket level. A bucket always belongs to a portfolio.

How you structure your portfolio using buckets depends on your requirements. The structuring can be done for example from an organizational or a functional point of view.

The following are characteristics of structuring a portfolio using buckets:

Just like portfolios, buckets are also typically created by the PPM administrator. When you create a new bucket, you decide where the bucket is inserted within the portfolio structure.

The data that you enter in a bucket is spread across different tab pages.