Working with Portfolio Items and Decision Points

The Hybrid Development company wants to enhance its software for recording the working times of their employees. John is the project lead of the project. Together with Sarah in her role as portfolio manager, he evaluates the various options available when using SAP Portfolio Management.

The data for an item can be entered manually, derived by using questionnaires and scoring models, or determined from allocated projects and controlling objects through integration with Project Management and financial systems.

When you create an item, you must always specify a portfolio item type or an item template. The portfolio item type specifies several properties of the item, such as decision points. In addition to the portfolio item type, the item template includes additional master data, such as area and priority.

You have different options for creating items. You can create items individually or you can create multiple items at the same time. You can use an interface in the SAP Portfolio and Project Management core system to generate portfolio items based on a Microsoft Excel file.

The item data is clustered on various tab pages.

You can use decision points to subdivide the planned progress of portfolio items and initiatives into individual stages. Examples of decision points:

• Prepare
• Realize
• Deploy
• Run

The progress of an item (such as its specification, planning, and execution) can be represented by decision points. Based on their decision points and data, you can monitor a set of portfolio items in SAP Portfolio and Project Management. You can compare them with each other, and make decisions about future progress.

Each decision point has its own status and status sequence. If the final status of a decision point is reached, this decision point ends automatically and the next decision point with the corresponding start status begins.