Portfolio management

Project portfolio management is one of the most complex, but most important tasks in multi-project management. By grouping, managing and monitoring individual projects in project portfolios, you ensure that you are actually working towards your overall goals. Without such an overview, companies quickly run the risk of getting bogged down in the minutiae of day-to-day business.

In a project portfolio, various projects are grouped together to work towards a specific overall theme or strategic corporate goal. Do you want to advance the digitalisation of your company? Should your company be acting in a more sustainable and environmentally friendly way? Both are good starting points for bundling individual projects into a portfolio.

How Blue Ant helps you manage your project portfolio

To successfully manage a project portfolio, you always need a good overview. With Blue Ant as portfolio management software, you have a wide range of tools at your disposal. With the portfolio dashboard, your project landscapes can be displayed clearly and transparently. The development of individual projects can be monitored and evaluated with the same ease.

With our project life-cycle tool, you have an insight into the progress, effort and overall development of your project portfolio. If you wish, you can obtain burn-down charts for all open tasks, a project and project milestone overview and much more. Using our simulation tool, you can create, run through, check and optimise various portfolio scenarios.

The program dashboard is helpful to get an extended overall impression of your project landscape. In contrast to a portfolio, a project program has a defined expiry date and projects must follow a certain sequence based on this exact date. The program dashboard makes project portfolio management even easier for you, because important topics can be highlighted in parallel thanks to the program dashboard and portfolio dashboard. This gives you an even better overview of their influence on the entire project portfolio.

From framework data to project data

Since a portfolio only provides the content framework for the individual projects it contains, little additional data is required to build a project portfolio. In Blue Ant's portfolio management, this data is often already available thanks to the integrated solution.

In order to include detailed information of individual projects in the context of a simulation, you first enter the necessary project data into your project portfolio: Which topic do portfolio and projects deal with? How great is the administrative effort? Is the goal feasible with the existing capacities and budgets? Once you have stored this data in the project portfolio, you can later create entire individual projects from it with just a few clicks - Blue Ant makes project planning and portfolio management easy!

Project portfolios do not have fixed deadlines or an end date. This makes controlling all the more important for successful portfolio management, so that the right resources, achievable tasks and a realistic time frame can be planned for projects and portfolios.

You can use our project life cycle tool to decide whether projects have matured to the point where follow-up projects can be started, or whether further quality gates or checks are still needed. In controlling, you can also turn off projects, implement project management, reschedule projects and, of course, generate the necessary key figures to keep projects healthy.

Our portfolio management software, Blue Ant, gives you the option of condensing key figures and evaluating them across projects, for example to display the earned value of a portfolio, to keep an eye on the progress of a portfolio or to monitor its budget utilisation. You can also evaluate the content of your portfolio by defining portfolio milestones. You can then pull these out of all projects at any time to see if progress is on track.

This will tell you a lot about the health of your project portfolio. It is also easy to look at resource utilisation this way and see how much real capacity is flowing into your portfolio.

For even more complex project structures, a portfolio manager can also do all this across all portfolios with Blue Ant's portfolio management. Or group different portfolios and create a portfolio of portfolios. Important key figures are quickly available in a central place, which can then be displayed in clear reports, such as a GANTT chart, a bubble chart or a BIRT report, for the management of stakeholders and shareholders. With Blue Ant, you have portfolio management software that maps even the most complex project landscapes in manageable blocks.

Our portfolio management software, Blue Ant, can be used as a web-based cloud service (Cloud Edition) anywhere, whether in the office, when working from home or when travelling on a smartphone. To do this, simply purchase a flexibly cancellable licence for your project management staff. In addition to the usual plug-ins and interfaces for importing and exporting activities, work-times, etc., Blue Ant also provides a secure VPN or secure file storage.

If you would like to operate Blue Ant as portfolio management software yourself, we recommend running it on a virtual server or in a Docker container. Our Enterprise Edition already includes interfaces to MS Exchange Server/Office 365, SSO access via Windows Domain and SAML 2.0, or the Jira plug-in as standard.

An especially practical feature is that, regardless of whether you choose the Cloud Edition, Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition, Blue Ant can be configured in modules according to your individual needs and extended with web services, plug-ins and connections to third-party solutions. Thanks to the assignment of roles and rights, each user is always guaranteed access to only those modules, screens and functions that are really relevant to them.