Project portfolio dashboard: Examples and tools

Key elements in a project portfolio dashboard

The best project portfolio dashboards are customized to you. But although I’ll show you many different combinations and visualizations in this post, it’s fair to say most dashboards are built around the same key performance indicators (KPIs).  

Let’s break down this example dashboard, built to bring together the latest project performance data from across the portfolio. Here, you can see: 

• The number of projects in progress. The first part of the dashboard shows the team’s current workload. It also gives the portfolio manager an idea of how steady that workload is. If new projects are added before older ones are signed off, they’re facing a future crunch, which needs to be mitigated. If the number is trending down, they need to focus their energy on scheduling new projects. 
• The team’s capacity. By showing the number of projects by owner, the manager can quickly identify areas where projects need to be redistributed or where team members need more resources to complete the work on time. 
• The overall status of the projects. In this dashboard, project status is shown by the color coding in the ‘Projects by Owner’ section and in the overall completion percentage. This gives the portfolio manager a view of their project progress on multiple levels, so they can plan effectively. 
• The project budget tracking. Here, the portfolio manager can view their actual spending, the amount remaining, and the real-time data on budget utilization. Since the PM is ultimately accountable for any cost overruns, this is an essential part of their dashboard. 
• The number of overdue projects. A good project portfolio management dashboard is built with risk management in mind. Here, the portfolio manager can instantly view the number of overdue projects, so they can help project managers to prioritize effectively and keep the portfolio on track. 

This should give you a sense of what’s possible with your project portfolio management dashboards, especially when you use the latest portfolio management software. However, the dashboard above is only one example. 

Since customization is key, let’s look at some more examples from across industries and project management methodologies. 

4 project portfolio dashboard examples to compare

From graphs, to percentages, to tables, to roadmaps, there are as many ways to visualize project health as there are types of projects. Building a portfolio dashboard is all about choosing the key metrics you want to put front and center, versus the ones you keep in another section of your portfolio management system. 

Your challenge is in finding a way to pull this information from your teams and translate it into the overview your PMO (project management office) wants to see. 

So, before you settle on the structure of your dashboard, try some of these potential layouts for size. 

1. PMM dashboard for manufacturing

For a portfolio manager in the manufacturing field, coordination, efficiency, and quality are key. These dashboards are a tool to keep them on top of tight, interwoven schedules, while ensuring their product meets the highest standards. 

This means their dashboards tend to foreground: 

• Project timelines showing your schedules and upcoming milestones. Depending on the complexity of the projects, a calendar or a Gantt chart could both be at home on a manufacturing portfolio dashboard. 
• Risk management alerts. Because of the expensive knock-on effects of a missed deadline in manufacturing, portfolio managers need to be aware of project risks as they emerge, and not just when the overdue tasks mount up. A dashboard that shows low-level as well as critical risks is an indispensable tool for the responsive project planning this industry needs. 
• Actual vs. projected costs. I’ve already touched on the importance of budget metrics in portfolio management dashboards. In manufacturing, where the fluctuating costs of raw materials play into a company’s wider strategic goals, it pays to make these crucial metrics as accessible as possible. 

2. PMM dashboard for professional services

In the professional services sector — whether that’s consulting, legal, accounting, or agency work — you want an overview that helps deliver results for your clients, while keeping your own company running well. 

Portfolio management dashboards for these companies usually include: 

• Resource utilization statistics, so you can monitor who’s working on what, and how you’re burning through the project hours you’ve agreed with your clients. 
• Profitability metrics. Showing KPIs connected to your profit margins — like your forecasted vs. actual revenue — helps portfolio managers identify the projects that are performing well (and the ones that need more attention to get them back on track). 
• ROI metrics: When your company exists to provide a service, you want to be able to prove your results. When you foreground ROI data in your dashboard, you keep yourself familiar with the statistics you’ll need to report on whenever you meet with your clients. 

3. PMM dashboard for creative and design teams

Teams and agencies in the creative sector can juggle hundreds of tasks and projects for a range of different clients. Part of the portfolio manager’s role is to provide the structure that supports the team’s creativity, while still getting projects over the line. 

For these portfolios, the dashboard hinges on the way the workflows are managed: 

• Workflow status visibility: A creative portfolio dashboard needs to reflect the structure of the workflow, especially the number of projects or deliverables sitting at each stage. This helps managers make informed decisions about scheduling new work and helps to prevent bottlenecks from derailing their projects. 
• Team capacity: To lead the team and streamline future projects, the portfolio dashboard should track the creative team’s capacity. You can choose whether it’s most helpful to show this as a bar graph, a percentage, or broken down by team. 
• Campaign performance: Especially in marketing teams, your project portfolio needs to align with your company or client’s specific goals for engagement, brand awareness, and conversions. With the right integrations, you can also include these metrics in your dashboard, so you gain real-time visibility into your results.                                                                              

4. PMM dashboards for Agile teams

Companies that use an Agile approach to project management work with a system of continuous delivery rather than the fixed milestones of a more linear project management style. They adapt to the flow of the project, rather than sticking to a fixed plan. 

To support this style of management and decision making, Agile portfolio managers tend to choose a different combination of elements for their dashboards: 

• Team velocity: Instead of the total number of tasks, your portfolio dashboard can show the ground your team is covering during their sprints and epics. Showing the number of story points completed in a given time frame, or the average time it takes to tackle an item in your backlog, can both be valuable metrics here.
• Sprint progress: During sprint cycles, managers want access to statistics on each team’s progress and whether they’ll meet their targets. For example, a burndown chart can show how many tasks are story points remaining in a sprint, and whether the team has the hours and resources left to meet those goals. 
• Kanban boards: A manager’s dashboard can also include a Kanban overview of where their projects sit between backlog and delivery. For a portfolio dashboard rather than a simple project management dashboard, your board can be divided up into swimlanes for different teams. 

With all this in mind, you can see how different priorities impact the way you build a portfolio management dashboard. 

And sometimes, that’s exactly where the problem develops. 

However they ultimately lay out the information, portfolio managers have to strike a balance. On the one hand, they need to coordinate their related projects and align them with their company’s wider objectives. On the other hand, they need to make smart decisions to get the best out of their project teams and remove the roadblocks that could compromise their results. 

If you’re going to get this balance right, you need a tailored, detailed, automated overview.   That’s why I’ve said from the start of this post that there’s no way of building a top-notch project portfolio dashboard without using robust portfolio management software to do it.

Planning a project portfolio dashboard with Wrike 

Wrike is a completely scalable work management platform. It’s an unbeatable tool for project managers, with customizable dashboards and resource management features for any type of work. And when it comes to portfolio management, Wrike translates all the data from your projects into a private, tailored dashboard that analyzes your portfolio health from every possible angle. 

Here’s how you can use Wrike to gain complete visibility across your portfolio. 

Step 1: Identify your goals and objectives 

Your portfolio dashboard exists to align your projects with each other and with your company’s wider goals. If you start by defining and breaking down these goals (and familiarizing yourself with the steps your company has laid out to reach them), you’ll be well on your way to choosing the metrics you want to include in your dashboard.

It’s also important to consider the decisions you want the dashboard to inform. 

For example, if a company’s goal is to cut costs, you might prioritize information on resource allocation and budget, and devote less space to metrics like projects by the owner. On the other hand, if you’re managing a set of initiatives connected to expanding to a new location, your dashboard is more likely to include a Gantt chart timeline and details on your recruitment or employee transfer processes shown as color-coded workflow statuses.  

One of the best things about using Wrike for portfolio management is the easy access it gives you to your past project records. As you decide what you want to include in your dashboard, look back at your past reports to find what worked well (so you can choose KPIs to keep monitoring that success) and what needs improvement (so you can look at additional metrics to control those risks). 

Step 2: Integrate your tools

Your next task is to build the dashboard itself. 

When you use Wrike for your portfolio dashboards, this is as simple as creating a PMO space (which you can even kick off with this template) and adding projects and folders to represent your ongoing work.