Portfolio review

An operations leader needs to know which projects need help, which owners should act and which dates have changed. Project records hold status, target and actual end dates, task and milestone exception fields and percent complete. Inspect the dated tasks and milestones before acting on a summary. A portfolio review should start from a specific exception, then open its project and ask the manager what decision will change the outcome.

Suppose two projects have the same target end date. One has completed its dated tasks and has an upcoming checkpoint. The other has overdue tasks and an at-risk milestone. Their status can still both be Active, so the leader needs the exception measures and the latest written update to understand the difference. The Project Manager can explain whether a dependency, staffing gap or scope change is driving the slip.

• Project summary. Projects carries progress and exception fields for each initiative.
• Work detail. Tasks and Milestones show the dated items behind the summary.
• History. An activity entry has an action type, summary, actor and occurrence date.

Agree on a regular review period and the minimum explanation for an at-risk project. The leader should know who owns each project and which manager will bring a recovery option. Decide how to handle on hold projects so they are neither mistaken for active delivery nor quietly removed from leadership visibility. Decide when a cancelled project stays in reporting history and how its outstanding tasks are resolved.

Time entries can help compare effort with estimates, but hours alone do not say whether an outcome was useful. Read the task status, milestone outcome and manager’s update together. The manager’s written assessment helps explain the current position. Keep the review grounded in the project record’s dates and the actual changes in the work list.

Open Projects at Risk and select the rollout with overdue tasks. Inspect the affected work in Overdue Tasks, then check the milestone target and the latest shared project status update. Ask the manager to name the next action and owner. If the target end date changes, update the project and affected tasks, then communicate the new commitment in the next status update. Check Recent Activity Feed for any recorded change that bears on the decision. A Viewer should be able to follow that story without editing the plan.

• Projects at Risk — Active projects and their exception fields in one review list.
• Overdue Tasks — Dated work that needs the manager’s attention.
• Recent Activity Feed — Dated activity records associated with projects.

Review and close connects exception review with a final outcome. Data model shows the records behind each view.