Portfolio Planning Workspace
About 3% of the CIS-SPM exam — see all 10 domains.
The Portfolio Planning Workspace (and the broader Strategic Planning Workspace, SPW) is an intuitive workspace to prioritize, roadmap, and track work. It lets planners prioritize demands and projects, visualize them on a roadmap/timeline, run scenario planning ("what-if" funding/sequencing), and connect strategy to execution via goals, OKRs, and targets. It is the planning hub that ties Strategic Planning → Portfolio Planning → execution. Capacity planning benefits depend on this workspace being installed.
Sample questions from this domain
Three of the 9 in this domain, with the reasoning. The full set is in the question bank.
The Portfolio Planning Workspace primarily helps users:
- A. Confirm and allocate requested resource plans across resource groups
- B. Plan and prioritize portfolio investments and compare scenarios ✓
- C. Track the progress of a single project's tasks on a Gantt timeline
- D. Assess and score individual demands on risk, value, and size
Why: Portfolio Planning Workspace supports planning and prioritizing portfolio investments and comparing scenarios before approving one. Confirming and allocating resource plans is done by resource managers in Resource Management, tracking one project's tasks on a Gantt timeline is done in Project Workspace, and scoring individual demands on risk, value, and size is demand assessment in Demand Management.
Scenario Planning in the workspace allows planners to:
- A. Define the sprint cadence and capacity for each agile team assigned to the portfolio's projects
- B. Build the work breakdown structure, milestones, and task dependencies for each project in the portfolio
- C. Approve the time cards submitted against the portfolio's projects for each fiscal period
- D. Create alternative investment mixes and compare them against constraints like budget and capacity ✓
Why: A scenario is a simulated version of a plan: planners include or exclude planning items, adjust dates, and compare alternative investment mixes against budget and capacity constraints without affecting the live plan. Sprint cadence is configured for agile teams, the WBS and task dependencies are built on each project's planning page, and time cards are approved by time card approvers, so none of these is what scenario planning does.
When comparing scenarios, which factors are most relevant to selecting an optimal portfolio mix?
- A. Idea vote counts, idea submission dates, and the idea module of each item
- B. Sprint velocity, story point totals, and board column order for each team
- C. Total cost vs. budget, expected value/benefit, and resource capacity constraints ✓
- D. Time card approval status, task time constraints, and the WBS depth of each project
Why: Optimal mix selection weighs total cost against budget, expected value or benefit, and resource capacity constraints; the Compare scenarios page shows aspects such as Budget vs Target, Benefit, and budget distribution. Idea vote counts and modules, sprint velocity and board column order, and time card status or task time constraints describe intake, team delivery, and execution details, not the portfolio-level trade-offs used to pick a mix.