Is anyone using portfolios in a franchise organization? I’m trying to decide if I should group projects into portfolios based on each franchise business having all of its projects in a portfolio or if I should group projects into portfolios based on types of projects (i.e., all ADP projects for all franchises into a portfolio while all CRM projects into another portfolio and all office moves into a portfolio, etc, etc.). Does anyone have suggestions based on what you’ve done?
Hey @Christine_Fiorentino, first of all welcome to the forum!
In my experience, the best approach really depends on what your reporting and decision-making priorities are.
-Franchise-based portfolios work well if your goal is to monitor the overall performance and resource allocation of each individual franchise. It makes it easier to see all projects affecting one business in one place, track ROI per franchise, and manage franchise-specific risks.
-Project-type portfolios are better if your focus is on program-level oversight, standardization, or resource sharing across franchises. For example, grouping all CRM implementations together lets you track progress, identify bottlenecks, and apply lessons learned across the organization.
-Sometimes a hybrid approach works best: use franchises as your primary portfolio, but tag projects by type so you can slice and filter reports across the organization. This gives you flexibility for both franchise-level and project-type insights.
Welcome, @Christine_Fiorentino,
You don’t have to choose!
A project can belong to any number of portfolios, so you can have as many portfolios as helpful.
With all the capabilities of a portfolio, you can also achieve multiple solutions in a single portfolio by both adding custom fields to denote different attributes of each project, and combining that with multiple portfolio tabs, one for each view. They can independently be grouped, sorted, and filtered to present the kinds of alternatives you mention.
Thanks,
Larry