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What is FOLIO?

FOLIO is a project and portfolio management add-on, that is anchored in many PMI concepts. It is meant to be used to:

  • Keep track of financial aspects (budget and actual costs) of projects
  • Provide objective information on performance and progress of projects using the Earned-Value Management indices
  • Provide project forecasts about time and money
  • Get an overview of collection of projects, a.k.a portfolios
  • Provide as much insight as possible over collected information with highly customizable reports

Key concepts

Now let's explain the most important terms you will encounter using FOLIO.

Folio: FOLIO's project

At the center of FOLIO is... the Folio! A Folio is simply a Project, in the usual meaning of Project Management:

Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling resources to achieve specific goals. A project is a temporary endeavor with a defined beginning and end (usually time-constrained, and often constrained by funding or deliverables), undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value.

Source: Wikipedia

So a Folio is just that: a tool to manage funds invested to accomplish a goal (a set of issues) within a defined period of time, and to better predict how well the goals are to be met.

Then you might wonder: "why calling it a Folio and not a Project?" Simply because JIRA has its own definition of a project and already uses the term quite extensively. So to avoid confusion, we decided to simply name FOLIO's projects, Folios. You will see when creating a Folio that it can be associated with any number of JIRA projects.

See the documentation to learn how to create your first Folio.

Portfolio

Most organizations manage more than one projects and associate them with a number of portfolios (or programs). In FOLIO, a portfolio is simply a collection of Folios. It provides an overview on that collection of folios, like the overall budget, overall health and completion ratios, etc, allowing you to see the big picture, over any number of projects.

Earned Value

Earned Value is defined by the PMI as follows:

The budgeted cost of work that has actually been performed in carrying out a scheduled task during a specific time period.

Source: Wikipedia

In other terms, earned value is a portion of the budget that is "awarded" when a portion of the work has been completed. Thus in FOLIO, earned value is calculated as a proportion of the budget corresponding to the number of completed issues over all issues associated with the Folio. As an example: if a project (or Folio) has a budget of 100,000$ and contains 10 issues, one way to calculate the earned value is to count 10,000$ for each issue that is completed. Of course, Folio allows you to use any numeric fields of the issues instead of simply using the issue count. So the earned value could for instance be computed based on Estimates in hours, Story points, Business Value, etc.

Earned value, along with budget and actual costs information is used to calculate a series of indices (or metrics) that provide objective information on the general performance and progress of projects. These indices were defined as part of the Earned Value Management technique, a project management technique introduced by the US Department of Defense and that has since been incorporated in practices promoted by the PMI.

Expenditures, Expenses and Positions

Expenditures include all costs (planned or incurred) related to the accomplishment of a project's goals. In Folio, they are divided into Expenses and Positions. Expenses are all non human resource related costs, such as purchases of furniture, loan interests, rents, etc. Positions represent a specific team "slot", that are (or will be) filled by people, in this case JIRA users. Positions represent all human resource costs, more specifically salaries.

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