When analyzing a portfolio, there are many criteria that you can use—budget versus actual costs, spend per month, production rates, and capital returns. All these data points can be daunting, and sometimes you want to use a single metric that captures the overall health of your projects. Primavera provides just such a metric in the project score. This can be the best of all worlds; one score representing all the items of importance to your organization, and chosen by you.

What is this project score, and where does it come from? This number is something that you can define and control so that it meets your organization's specific requirements. The score is set in the project codes. Unlike all other codes, such as activity and resource codes, project codes can be weighted. Each project code can be assigned a weight, and each value of the project code can be assigned a weight. The weighted values are then aggregated to form a score between 0 and 100.

To edit the project codes, go to Administer | Enterprise Data | Project Codes:

You will see many different project codes available. However, not all of them are used in scoring. Only those that are assigned a weight are used. Note that the weight you assign can be any value. The program will then convert the weights into a percentage of the overall score.

Within each project code, you can assign weights to each value. Again, these do not need to add up to 100 percent but can instead represent values that are meaningful to you. The system will then normalize them to 100 percent.

Let's take a very simple example with only two codes feeding into the project score—Urgency, which can be High with a value of 100, and Low with a value of 0, and Importance, with a High value of 100, and a Low value of 0.

First we create the two new project codes, and give each two values—High and Low. Next we assign equal values of Maximum Code Value Weight. We set them to 100.0, but we could just as easily set them to 75 or some other value. As long as they are equal, the Weight Percent column will assign each 50%.

Next we assign each High value to 100, and each Low to 0. Again, the specific values do not matter. We could have assigned 25 and 0, and the project score results would have been the same.

Note also that we have modified the Project Codes screen so that it shows us the columns that we want to see first.

In general, the project score is the weighted sum of the normalized project code values. In our simplified previous case this becomes:

Score = (Importance Value + Urgency Value) / 2

As we only have two project codes with two values the results should be:

The following screenshot shows the actual results in P6:

Note that to show these values, we first created a portfolio with these six projects. Then we made a portfolio analysis scorecard showing the project score and the two project codes.

One critical thing to point out here is that we have four projects where we only assign one project code. For example, the Nesbid Building has only a high urgency, and no importance assigned. You might expect that the importance would be treated as 0 in this case. Instead, that value is not even considered in the score, and so the project gets 100. This can be misleading if you do not understand this fact. A good practice is to require that every project code that contributes to the project score be assigned a value.

Note the symbols shown in the Project Score. There are three symbols available, and these are set in Administer | My Preferences.

First note that you can check the checkbox Calculate Project Score based on selected Project Codes. This allows you to create the score based on whatever codes you like. Perhaps you want to use urgency, but not importance.

This should not be done lightly, you risk forgetting that the scores are calculated in a non-standard manner and analysis may be based on wrong calculations. Next you can choose which of the three symbols to use. Note that the low symbol will only be set for scores that are greater than zero, but not zero itself, which is not intuitive. In our example, the only possible values are 0, 50, and 100, so only the other two symbols are shown.