Lots of projects to manage? You need Portfolio in Teamwork

Great project managers make it look easy. But keeping all of the moving parts of a project in motion is no mean feat — and that’s just for one project. As you scale, it can become almost impossible to keep an eye on everything that needs your attention across multiple projects.

That’s where Portfolio in Teamwork comes in. Portfolio gives you the perfect vantage point to see all your projects once at once, and quickly get the insights you need. 

Whether you’re looking for top-level updates, real-time status reports for clients, or a quick way to jump to the important details, Portfolio gives you a bird’s eye view of where all of your projects currently stand.

So how does it work?

If you’ve been using Teamwork for a while, you probably have a good understanding of how information is structured. 

The TL;DR? Tasks are your basic unit of work, and you can break them down further into subtasks. All tasks are contained in a task list, and you can associate those task lists with milestones. All of these — milestones, task lists, tasks, subtasks — live within a project, and you can use multiple filters, tags, and views to organize your projects for maximum efficiency.

(Want to learn more? Check out this post for a more detailed breakdown.)

It can be difficult to keep track of all of these moving parts when you’re managing multiple projects. That’s where Portfolio comes in: to provide you with a panoramic view of where each project stands. 

Portfolio takes the intuitive concept of Board View to a more strategic level. By representing each project as a card, moving through stages represented by different columns, you can view multiple projects at a glance, quickly see what stage it’s at, and drill down for more details with just one click.

How can it help?

With all of your projects represented in Portfolio, you can get insights and take action on multiple projects from one central place. Here’s why that’s such a big deal.

Get immediate insights

Portfolio is a great way to get lightning-fast insights into your projects. Every project card has a progress bar that displays what percentage of all the tasks on the project has been completed.

You can even hover over the progress bar to see how many tasks are still remaining, so you can truly see where things stand at a glance.

From there, you can simply click the card to open its Project Summary and get even more detail. Project Summaries enable you to analyze the project’s progress even further: check how many tasks are overdue or completed, see the performance of individual team members, view what’s on the task board, review the project trend, and more.

The Project Summary offers tons of useful information about your project — and you can also use it to drill down into the exact item you’re interested in.

For example, if you see that you have 5 tasks that are currently marked as “Late” under “All Tasks”, you can click on the “Late” label and it will present you with a roundup of all of those tasks.

Manage every project from one place

With Portfolio, you can quickly take action on multiple projects, without needing to navigate to them all individually. This is great when you want to make quick edits to keep things organized and up to date. From Portfolio, you can easily quick add things to your projects like:

• Milestones

• Tasks

• Files

• Messages

• Events

• Notebooks

• Updates

• Links

• Logged time

We find it’s especially useful when you need to quickly update a few projects to reflect a change in timeline or resources that has a knock-on effect.

Automate your processes

Want to make it even easier to update your projects in a flash? You can use Triggers in Portfolio to automatically do the work for you, streamlining your processes, ensuring consistency across your projects (making it easier to search, filter, and sort them later), and reclaiming tons of admin time.

Just like with Board View, you can set triggers that perform certain actions when you move your project card into a new column.

Some handy things you can do with triggers include:

• Replacing, setting, or removing tags

• Setting a project owner

• Setting dates

• Updating a project’s category

• Archiving a project once it’s completed

For more on working with triggers in Portfolio, check out this blog post.

Find what you’re looking for faster

With multiple projects to wrangle, it’s essential for you to be able to quickly find what you’re looking for. 

Filters in Portfolio make it even easier to organize and search your projects, so the information you need is always at hand.

You can filter by options such as:

• Keyword 

• Project status 

• Show/hide columns 

• Tags 

• Company 

• Project owner 

• Project health 

• Starred projects only 

This lets you quickly focus on projects that are at risk of going off-track, all projects you’re competing for a certain client, and more, depending on your criteria.

If you find yourself using the same filter combinations over and over, you can save even more time by saving those settings and sharing your filter with the team. (Learn more about how to save Filters in this help doc.)

Oversee your operations with clarity

With such a panoramic view of all of your projects, it’s easier to spot trends — and notice warning signs — at a glance. Being able to quickly scan all of your projects and track their statuses allows you to predict bottlenecks before they happen, take action on potential issues before they become problems, and manage your resources more efficiently and effectively. 

Who is it for?

Portfolio is perfect for project managers, who have to coordinate tons of projects, all day, every day.

It’s also great for client-facing teams and professional services businesses because being able to juggle lots of projects — each with its own discrete moving parts — is essential when your client’s happiness depends on timely, reliable delivery.

Portfolio also shines when it’s time to give overviews to stakeholders, clients, other teams, and more because it lets you zoom out and give a status report on the big picture.

But really, we think Portfolio is perfect for anyone else who needs to manage large volumes of projects — regardless of job title, team type, or industry. 

Want to learn more?

If you need help getting started with Portfolio check out this help doc. Start using it today and see how it can make your life (and your projects) easier. As always, if you have any questions just leave a comment below or send us a mail at support@teamwork.com.

The Portfolio feature is available on our Grow and Scale plans.