Service Portfolio Management Support

In PPM, Service Portfolio is used to track, categorize, and analyze business services and labor cost-related IT project initiatives and requests. A Service field may be added to a task in a Project Management work plan and may be a required field. There is no service-related field in Microsoft Project.

When you synchronize a Microsoft Project work plan to PPM or open a work plan from PPM, synchronization of the Service field depends upon the synchronization mode and the project settings for the field.

Project Management-Controlled

Because there is no service-related field in Microsoft Project, when you export a new PPM project work plan or synchronize updates to Microsoft Project, the Service fields and their values are not imported to Microsoft Project.

If you modify the service for an existing project in Project Management-controlled mode, the service is saved but is not synchronized to your Microsoft Project work plan. If you switch to Microsoft Project-controlled mode, update the Microsoft Project work plan actuals, and synchronize the updates of actuals information back to the PPM project work plan, the services for existing work plan tasks maintain the same values and new work plan tasks inherit their parent service.

Microsoft Project-Controlled and Shared Control

Service field synchronization behavior is described in Table 10-7. Service Synchronization Behavior for Microsoft Project-Controlled, defining what happens when the Service field is or is not required, if a default service is or is not defined, and if a service is or is not assigned to a parent task. During synchronization, when assigning a service to a new work plan subtask, the service assigned to a parent task takes precedence over the default service. A root task does not have a parent service.

Table 10-7. Service Synchronization Behavior for Microsoft Project-Controlled

	Service is Not Required	Service is Required
No Default Service	For existing work plan tasks in the PPM project, the Service field maintains the same values. For a new work plan task, the Service field is empty.	For existing work plan tasks in the PPM project, the Service field maintains the same values. For a new work plan task, synchronization fails. An error message opens indicating that the Service field is required and is not set on this project. Set a default service in the PPM project and send the Microsoft Project work plan again.
No Service Assigned to Parent Task (may be a root task)
No Default Service	For existing work plan tasks in the PPM project, the Service field maintains the same values. For a new work plan task, the Service field inherits the parent service.	For existing work plan tasks in the PPM project, the Service field maintains the same values. For a new work plan task, the Service field inherits the parent service.
Service Assigned to Parent Task
Default Service Specified	For existing work plan tasks in the PPM project, the Service field maintains the same values. For a new work plan task, the Service field inherits the default service.	For existing work plan tasks in the PPM project, the Service field maintains the same values. For a new work plan task, the Service field inherits the default service.
No Service Assigned to Parent Task (may be a root task)
Default Service Specified	For existing work plan tasks in the PPM project, the Service field maintains the same values. For a new work plan task, the Service field inherits the parent service.	For existing work plan tasks in the PPM project, the Service field maintains the same values. For a new work plan task, the Service field inherits the parent service.
Service Assigned to Parent Task

For more information about service inheritance behaviors, see the Project Management Configuration Guide.