Portfolios: planning for multiple teams

A portfolio is a slice of your workspace — a chosen set of projects, the people who work on them, and the planners who can see them. Portfolios let a larger organisation run several teams, departments, or clients side by side in one Mermix workspace, without everyone tripping over each other's plans.

If you're a single team, you may never need more than the one portfolio you start with. If you run several, this is how you keep them tidy.

What a portfolio contains

Each portfolio groups four things:

• Projects — which Jira projects belong to this team, and which of their issue types. One portfolio can handle a project's stories and tasks while another handles its bugs.
• Resources — the people who appear on this portfolio's calendar.
• Planners — who plans in this portfolio: they schedule its work, pull from and push to Jira, and run its reports. What a portfolio contains is set by an Admin.
• Budgets (optional) — a budgeted cost and sold value per project, which powers the profitability report.

A person or a project can belong to more than one portfolio. That's deliberate — it supports functional teams (the same project split into Frontend, Backend, and QA portfolios by issue type) as well as simple per-team or per-client splits.

Switching between portfolios

When you have more than one portfolio, a selector appears at the top of the calendar. Choose a portfolio to see just its people and work; choose All Portfolios (Admins) or All My Portfolios (Planners and Board) to see everything you have access to at once. Reports, the backlog, and the copilot all follow the portfolio you're viewing, so the numbers always match what's on screen.

The Portfolios page

Portfolios is the first tab, and where you land when you sign in. It answers two questions: how is each portfolio doing, and what needs you today?

• Needs your attention lists what to act on: overdue work, people over capacity in the next two weeks, tasks that start before the work they depend on, tasks planned during someone's leave, projects not pulled from Jira for a week, and budgets heading over. Each item has a button that takes you to the fix. Choose Hide to put an item away until something changes — except red items, which need acting on now. A section says how many items it hides; Show N hidden brings them back with Unhide. Hiding is remembered in this browser only.
• Open a portfolio to see its Overview, People, Projects, Money and Access. A Planner or Board member with one portfolio lands straight on its Overview; an Admin always starts on the list.
• All projects shows every Jira project in your workspace and which portfolio handles each of its issue types. Above it, Admins set which issue types are pulled from Jira. A project is only offered the issue types it has in Jira: if a project has no Bug, nobody needs to handle its bugs.
• All people (Admins) has two lists. People on the plan is everyone you schedule: the portfolios they are in, their login and role, and their default cost and billable rates. Add or import people, give someone a login, or redistribute their open tasks from the ⋯ menu on their row. Sign-in only is the logins that are not scheduled — the workspace owner, Board members, managers who plan but are not planned; they do not count towards your plan's people limit.

Admins also see Workspace setup: the next steps only an Admin can take, such as reconnecting Jira, giving a portfolio a Planner, or adding cost rates.

Right after you finish setting up Mermix you land on the calendar instead, so you can see your team's work straight away. Click the Portfolio label beside the selector on the calendar to open that portfolio's page.

How a status is decided

Every portfolio and project has one status — On track, At risk or Off track — and it is the same on the Portfolios page, in the Executive Report (and its PDF) and in Project Profitability.

It is the worse of what Mermix measures:

• Schedule — overdue work, tasks that should have started, time logged against the estimate, and tasks with no estimate.
• Money — the projected profit against what was sold, and spending against plan. A project with no sold value or spending to compare has no money measure.
• Delivery, for a whole portfolio — how much work is on time, effort against estimates, estimate coverage, and people over capacity.

A report shows its own measure beside the status, for example Overall: Off track · Schedule: At risk, so you can see what decided it.

Capacity across portfolios

Because someone can work across portfolios, Mermix keeps their capacity honest. If a person is booked in another portfolio, that time still counts against them here — shown as a thin purple stripe on their row (hover it to see the work) — so you won't accidentally double-book them. The copilot and the overallocation indicators account for this automatically.

On a portfolio's People section, Planned, next 4 weeks shows where each person's planned hours go: this portfolio's projects, and their work elsewhere. Work in a portfolio you also plan or view shows by project; work in portfolios you can't open shows as one figure, Other portfolios. Admins see all of it by project. The parts add up to the person's planned hours, worked out the same way as their load.

Setting up portfolios

Admins manage portfolios on the Portfolios tab:

1. Choose New portfolio and give it a name.
2. On its Projects section, choose Edit and add projects and the issue types this portfolio handles. If another portfolio already handles an issue type, choose Move here to bring it over; earlier reports stay with the old portfolio.
3. Add its people on People, and the Planners and Board members who can see it on Access.
4. Optionally add per-project budgets and portfolio-specific rates on Money.

Nothing changes until you choose Save. Planners and Board members see the same page but can't change how it is set up. A Planner can still move a person's open tasks to others with Redistribute (N)… on People.

To change a project's colour, archive it, reset it or stop syncing it, use All projects. Those changes apply in every portfolio that handles the project.

A portfolio's Manage section (Admins) renames it, resets it or deletes it:

• Reset clears the portfolio's tasks, backlog and logged time, and the leave of people who are in no other portfolio. Budgets and rates stay. The next Pull from Jira brings the work back. Mermix tells you what it removed.
• Delete removes the portfolio. Past reports keep their data. Move its projects to another portfolio first.

The first portfolio (your workspace's default home) already exists from onboarding, so new projects have somewhere to live from day one.

How many portfolios you get

As many as you need — portfolios are unlimited on every plan, including the trial.

Organise your workspace the way your teams actually work, not the way a plan limit makes you. If that means one portfolio, fine; if it means fifteen — one per department, per client, or per functional team — that's fine too, on any plan.

The only thing plans differ on is the number of resources you schedule. See the trial guide for the current plans.

When you don't need them

Portfolios are optional. A single team can run happily on the one default portfolio and never touch the selector. Reach for portfolios when different groups of people need to plan different projects without seeing each other's noise.