How To Build a Project Portfolio Dashboard To Manage Projects (2024)

For project management offices and managers who manage multiple projects simultaneously, it’s easy to get lost in the everyday grind. Tracking and measuring progress, ensuring everyone is aligned, and optimizing team workload can be challenging. Nothing puts things into perspective as seeing the whole picture via the project dashboard.

The project portfolio dashboard gives you a complete overview of the project’s health, how the work is progressing for each project, and comprehensive real-time reports on the overall timeline, budget, and status. They guarantee critical project information is available and accessible whenever you or your stakeholders want it.

Building a project portfolio dashboard for the first time can be intimidating owing to the planning and design work involved, and you might even complicate the portfolio dashboard.

What if we tell you advanced project portfolio management software has simplified the process?

Read on to learn how to build dynamic project portfolio management dashboards to optimize your project planning and execution using ClickUp, the best examples, and templates to help you get started quickly.

What is Project Portfolio Management?

Project portfolio management is a strategic way to manage an organization’s projects to achieve its business objectives. It includes narrowing down and prioritizing a set of projects that align with the goals of your business.

Project portfolio management aims to maximize the value of your projects by assessing and managing aspects like risks, budgets, and available resources.

What is a Project Portfolio Management Dashboard?

The leadership team, portfolio managers, and project managers use a project portfolio management dashboard to visualize all projects and their progress centrally. The dashboard has charts and metrics that allow you to monitor the performance of health indicators and view key milestones, budget information, and resource availability.

In modern organizations, projects are interrelated regarding resources, timelines, and deliverables, and outcomes and success are interdependent; a central portfolio dashboard presents this information in a single pane of view.

You can either build a project portfolio management dashboard or use project portfolio management solutions like ClickUp to make it easier.

ClickUp Dashboards allow you to visualize and analyze your projects from a single control center. Not only do you have an overview of the projects you are working on, but you can share them with key stakeholders. This way, everyone can keep track of how different projects are progressing.

As a project management platform, ClickUp allows you to set goals, track the time spent on individual tasks and projects, identify bottlenecks, and resolve them promptly to ensure project completion.

Benefits of Using a Project Portfolio Dashboard

Improved visibility

Get real-time visibility into the overall project status, identify bottlenecks, monitor task performance for high-stakes projects, and gauge customer satisfaction.

Enhanced communication

Since project dashboards are a central hub for everything related to single or multiple projects, they ensure everyone is on the same page about deadlines, tasks, allocated budget, and progress.

Better decision-making

Comprehensive and portfolio-level views of the existing and potential projects enable project and portfolio managers to make data-driven decisions for project planning and execution, financial forecasting, and risk management.

Performance tracking

Dashboard software helps you visualize crucial metrics at a glance, including team productivity, budget allocation, company goals, and project health status.

Improved efficiency

Get a complete view of the project activities, budget, workload allocation, resource utilization for various projects, and dependencies to simplify task allocation, avoid employee burnout, and increase the team’s efficiency.

For successful project completion, consider using different project portfolio management software until you find the right one that matches your requirements.

Practical Examples of Project Portfolio Dashboards

Here are some real-world examples of project portfolio dashboards to help you understand how they can manage multiple projects.

1. Agile dashboards for scrum teams

An agile team dashboard brings transparency into your project health and gives you visibility into the team’s performance and sprint progress.

When used in the software development workflow, the agile project portfolio management (PPM) dashboard gives a granular view of the potential bottlenecks, key metrics, progress, and high-priority issues for ongoing projects in a highly visual format.

The elements in the agile dashboard include:

Sprint backlog

Displayed as a list or Kanban board, it shows the remaining work items, their statuses (to-do, in-progress, done), and estimated workload. With added visibility into the sprint workload, you can see how you progress toward the sprint goal.

Burndown chart

This line graph shows story points (the remaining work) plotted against the time remaining in the sprint—to visually track your sprint’s progress and allow proactive adjustments to ensure sprint completion.

Lead time

The lead time displays the total time from starting a work item to its completion and release. It is used to identify delivery delays, optimize release processes, and improve the time to market.

Pro tip💡: For the burndown chart to be an effective tool for your team, set reasonable goals, learn from past sprints, and make sure you don’t overload your teams.

2. Resource allocation dashboards

When you have shared resources working across different projects or planning for resource allocation for a potential project, this project portfolio dashboard displays how resources are distributed across various projects.

ClickUp’s Workload View helps you determine what a team (and team member) has on their plate, where the priorities intersect, what is prioritized, and the tasks that can be pushed—all on a single dashboard.

Pro tip💡: Set daily or weekly workload capacity for individual team members. You can set capacities for hours, tasks, and Scrum story points.

3. Business management dashboards

This project portfolio management dashboard shows you the health and progress of your business goals.

Customize ClickUp Dashboards to plan and track your quarterly business goals easily. When multiple departments are involved in product portfolio management, ClickUp’s list view helps you track the status of each task, the estimated budget, and progress.

Everyone, including the team members, project managers, stakeholders, and leadership, gets insights into their project portfolio’s strategic initiatives and priorities.

Pro tip💡: Use portfolio management templates to track your tasks. After all, PPM dashboards improve a project management office’s efficiency and strategic foresight (PMO).

4. Operations management dashboards

In project management, an operations dashboard provides real-time insights into how your organization’s different operational processes are proceeding. It allows stakeholders to monitor day-to-day activities, track strategic and operational priorities, and explore data at many levels to analyze and pinpoint your operations’ weaknesses.

Pro tip💡: With role-based access, ClickUp allows you to customize which team members can make changes in the Dashboard and who can view it to track progress.

Key Components of a Project Portfolio Dashboard

1. Project overview

Share a summary of the project scope and objectives so everyone knows what they’re working on. It will include high-level information such as project names, team members involved, descriptions, total budget, and strategic goals to be achieved.

2. Status indicators

Set visual indicators on PPM dashboards to easily identify the project status. For instance, red color can indicate incomplete tasks, green indicates completed activities, and orange indicates work in progress.

3. Charts and graphical reports

Project management charts are a great way to visualize data, trends, and metrics related to your projects. There are many different types of charts, such as Gantt, project timeline, velocity, burnup, line, work breakdown structure, and line chart.

For instance, ClickUp’s Gantt Chart View lets you see your projects on a timeline. It gives you information such as the tasks and dependencies so you can manage deadlines from a single source of truth.

4. Project trackers

Project trackers measure the progress of tasks and activities throughout a project’s lifecycle, helping team members stay organized, track their respective tasks, see overdue tasks, and monitor timelines.

However, setting up a detailed project tracker can be an effort-intensive process. ClickUp offers project tracker templates that can be customized for any project.

Case in point: ClickUp’s Project Tracker Template is widely used to manage project budgets and deadlines. It helps team leaders see the bigger picture with real-time updates and keeps all projects in one place for easy cross-departmental collaboration.

Pro tip💡: Use this template to create multiple trackers for repeatable projects. This will help you save time after the kick-off call to hit the ground running.

5. Resource management

Resource management allows you to see how effectively different resources (employees, budgets, equipment) are distributed for various tasks and if they are utilized effectively.

ClickUp offers several features that can help you manage your resources.

• ClickUp Time Tracking: Track the time linked with any task across devices, create reports to view the time spent on each task, and share time estimates to plan your project deliveries.

• ClickUp Views: With over 15+ views, you can get a high-level overview of all your projects and their progress. Using these views, you can adjust timelines and priorities, add dependencies, and see what’s next.
• ClickUp Goals: Add tasks from your projects to a Goal and ensure you’re on track to meet your project deadlines. You can create goals for multiple projects and view them in a single place.

6. Risk management

It highlights the potential risks that can impact your project portfolio. Risk management gives stakeholders a better understanding of roadblocks, their likelihood and impact, and how to mitigate them. Additionally, it helps you track and assess whether your risk mitigation efforts are working and ways to minimize the impact of risks on project outcomes.

7. Earned value

The earned value represents the total value of all the work completed within a specific time. It is expressed in currency and can be gauged by studying the percentage of tasks and deliverables completed until a certain point in your project timeline.

8. Financial and budget metrics

Financial and budget metrics include measuring the total budget vs. actual spending, cost variance, ROI, and financial performance so that stakeholders can keep an eye on the budget in a one-page view on the dashboard and make decisions regarding resource allocation.

9. Web browser access

Your project managers should be able to view and manage the project portfolio dashboard on their web browser to monitor the progress remotely across devices. This is especially critical when you have distributed teams.

How to Create a Project Portfolio Dashboard

1. Define your dashboard objectives clearly

Before setting up your project portfolio dashboard, you need to understand why you are doing so and identify who will be using it. Then, set up the PPM dashboard to align with the needs, metrics, and requirements your stakeholders will need to track.

For instance, your dashboard aims to give senior management a high-level overview of your project portfolio and how related projects progress. This means your dashboard objectives will include information on the number of active projects, overall progress, key performance indicators, and potential risks.

2. Consolidate data

Gather critical project management data from the tools you use to manage your projects and track and analyze what’s working. Consider including data from your project management tools, databases, spreadsheets, and other third-party business sources the relevant teams use.

3. Identify your key metrics and KPIs

Next, you need to decide which metrics and KPIs should be tracked—that align with your business, department, or project objectives and allow you to make strategic decisions regarding the project, business operations, and processes.

Pro tip💡: Selecting the key metrics and performance indicators should be a team activity.
Start by brainstorming on ClickUp Whiteboards, collecting the team’s response with ClickUp Forms, and communicating with the team using ClickUp Chat View without breaking a sweat.

4. Choose a project portfolio management tool

A project portfolio management tool is a centralized system where you can store all the information related to your project portfolio. You can use it to create project plans, document necessary information, manage schedules, assign tasks to team members, and track progress.

For instance, ClickUp’s Project Management Software offers several comprehensive features that can help you assign tasks, view progress, track key metrics, visualize your project information, gain complete visibility into multiple projects with automated real-time reports, and manage your resources optimally—over a single platform.

5. Design your dashboard layout

With all the information you have collected, organize the dashboard into different sections and use charts and visualizations to create different portfolio dashboards.

Creating a comprehensive dashboard is no easy task if you’re short on time or experience.

You can use a project portfolio dashboard template as a starting point. For example, ClickUp’s Project Management Portfolio Template is a plug-and-play tool to ensure projects align across different departments while you monitor their health and progress.

Here are some interesting functionalities of ClickUp’s project portfolio dashboard:

• Tags: View the status of all your projects with the help of tags. For instance, ready, blocked, rejected, etc.
• Color codes: ClickUp’s customizable templates offer a wide variety of colors to choose from so that you can add specific colors to each status to monitor project progress with ease
• Views: You can use over 15 different types of views to visualize your work the way you want. Let’s take a look at three ways you can view your projects in ClickUp’s project management software:
  • List View: Organize and group your projects under different categories. Your tasks and activities can be seen in a single glance in a list-like format. It allows you to see which projects are in progress, under review or completed
  • Box View: Stay aligned with your team’s priorities using the Box View. You can track your team’s workload, completed projects, and more from a single dashboard
  • Activity: Get a granular view of your team members’ activity and see what each person has worked on in a project. You can select the types of activity and see the corresponding project details

6. Test and validate

You will need to run a few preliminary tests to ensure your dashboard works as you intended and gather your team’s and stakeholders’ feedback and approval to make necessary adjustments.

7. Deploy

Now, you’re all set to deploy your dashboard.

Take everyone involved in the project through your dashboard and what it entails. Provide proper training so that the team knows how to use these dashboards. Ensure these dashboards are regularly updated and stay relevant. You can even make periodic changes to accommodate changing business requirements.

Consolidate Your Project Portfolio Dashboards with ClickUp

A precise and well-structured dashboard can help you seamlessly manage all of the projects you are working on.

ClickUp takes this one step further and allows you to leverage its features, such as task and resource management, time tracking, KPI tracking, and customizable templates to streamline your project management.

As a project portfolio and project management software, the best part is that ClickUp automates several repetitive tasks, such as task and workload management, progress tracking and reporting, scheduling alerts in case of delays, and being accessible across devices for remote teams.

If you want to drive successful outcomes, regardless of your project complexity, start building interactive project portfolio dashboards by signing up on ClickUp for free.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. What is a project portfolio dashboard?

A project portfolio dashboard is a visual tool for tracking the progress of all the projects you manage. It gives insights into key metrics, performance indicators, and project status—critical to assessing the project’s overall health and ensuring it aligns with your business objectives.

2. What is the difference between a portfolio and a dashboard?

3. What does a project portfolio include?

A portfolio includes related projects critical to achieving an organization’s overarching goals. Each project in the portfolio has scope, deliverables, milestones, timelines, and documentation such as plans, schedules, guidelines, and status reports.