What it is (plain English)
Running projects and grouping them into portfolios: planning work (waterfall, agile, or hybrid), tracking progress and status, managing deliverables and milestones, and giving leadership a portfolio-level view of what's in flight and how it's going.
Problems it solves
- Projects tracked in disconnected tools (MS Project, spreadsheets, Jira) with no portfolio view.
- Status reporting assembled manually and always out of date.
- No consistent method across teams running different ways.
- Leadership unable to see the whole portfolio's health.
What must exist first
Core platform users, groups, roles, financial assumptions, project governance, and delivery templates. Demand Management can feed approved work into projects, and Resource Management can support staffing, but neither is a universal prerequisite.
What the customer needs to provide
- Your delivery methodologies (waterfall, agile, hybrid) and templates.
- Project/portfolio structure and how you group work.
- Status and reporting expectations for leadership.
- Existing tools to integrate or migrate from (e.g., Jira for agile teams).
Where it can go next
Resource Management can staff projects; Strategic Planning can align portfolios to strategy; Enterprise Agile Planning and test management extend delivery; timecards capture actuals. Project-level risks remain part of project governance. Enterprise Risk Management should only be connected when that separate integration and operating model are in scope.