Filtering Projects for Portfolio Selection
By blurg64
A question came up in the Project forums recently around how it was possible to filter the available projects for a portfolio analysis, so I thought I would post a little tip here, which from a majority of the Project Server 2010 implementations I have seen is usually forgotten or managed by business process.
When you create a portfolio analysis, Project Server allows you to choose which projects you want to use as part of the analysis, out of the box, this shows you all the projects currently within the PWA instance, irrespective of their status. This is fine, but can be confusing for end users who need to go in and manually pick out the projects they wish to include and can be prone to errors (you don’t want to include a project already selected in a project selection analysis again do you?).
Luckily the project selection component supports views. It’s tucked away in the top right hand corner but it’s there. Through the views we can choose to restrict the default view of the project selection dialog to show just those projects that are at a certain stage in the project lifecycle, for instance, ready for selection.
To configure the view, navigate to Server Settings > Manage Views and look for the Portfolio Analysis Project Selection views. By default Project Server creates a single Summary View. I would suggest leaving that view intact and create a new view that we will place a filter on, in this example I will call it the Projects for Select view. Within the view, choose the project custom fields you wish to have visible.
In order to only show those projects at a certain stage, we need to add a filter to the view, to do this click on Filter and configure it as follows:
In this example, the view will now filter for those projects that are in the workflow stage of 3. Select Checkpoint
Finally, assign the view security category as you would with other views and click on Save.
The new Portfolio Analysis Project Select view is now available to be used, ensuring only those projects that should be considered in the portfolio analysis are available.