Your first portfolio

What is a portfolio in IntelliPPM

A portfolio is the top-level grouping for the work you want to govern together. In practice it usually maps to a funded program of work (e.g., "FY26 Digital Transformation"), a cost centre, or a business unit. Portfolios own:

• Strategic objectives that projects roll up to
• A consolidated EVM view (BAC, PV, EV, AC, CV, SV)
• A governance policy — which AI heads are auto-approved, which

require human review, which are off entirely

• A budget envelope that the financial engine reconciles against

A tenant can have many portfolios. Reporting and AI Brain recommendations operate at portfolio scope by default, with tenant-wide rollups available to the executive view.

Step 1 — Create the portfolio

From the home dashboard click New portfolio, give it a name, and select the cost centre it bills against. The cost centre choice matters because it determines which posting rules apply to project ledger entries — see Concepts → AI Brain for a deeper walk through.

Step 2 — Set strategic objectives

IntelliPPM treats strategic objectives as first-class entities, not free-text. Each objective gets:

• A short label (e.g., "Reduce time-to-quote by 30%")
• An owner
• A target metric and direction
• A target date

Projects later in the flow are scored against these objectives via the Prioritizer head. Without at least one objective the prioritizer falls back to even weighting — useful for a smoke test, not for real governance.

Step 3 — Import your first projects

The fastest path to "real data on screen" is usually to connect a source system rather than create projects manually. The platform supports two patterns:

1. Microsoft Pack — Project for the Web, Planner, Teams, and

SharePoint. See Integrations → Microsoft 365.

1. Jira — issues mapped to canonical work items. See the Jira

connector docs in the same track.

Both connectors land projects into IntelliPPM via the canonical event bus, with the Identity Graph maintaining the external_id ↔ canonical_id link so writes-back are routable.

Step 4 — Bring AI Brain online

By default the only AI head enabled on a fresh portfolio is the Status Summarizer, which is read-only. To enable Risk Predictor, Forecaster, or Resource Optimizer for this portfolio, open the governance settings panel and choose an autonomy level per head:

• auto — head executes without human review (only available for

read-only heads)

• recommend — head produces ranked suggestions in an inbox; a

human approves before any state changes

• require_human — head produces drafts only; every action goes

through review

The defaults are tuned for the cautious end of the spectrum. Reversibility windows still apply — see the AI Brain concept page.

You are done

The dashboard should now show a portfolio with at least one project rolled up, baseline EVM metrics computing as actuals arrive, and AI Brain recommendations queued in the inbox. From here, the most useful next reading is the Concepts track.