Hi there,

we are struggling a bit with Portfolio with managing external dependencies. Let me give you an example.

We have an Epic (e.g. New website), this includes a lot of tasks that are completely under our control (prepare texts, code HTML template) but also contains some tasks that are managed outside our team (e.g. check legal with lawyers, get design from external freelancer). 

The problem here is that we know how long this typically takes (e.g. lawyer check = 2-3 weeks, UX design 2-3 weeks), but we are struggling with modeling this in a Portfolio plan.

Here are some hacks we tried and got almost there.

1. Created an External team with Lawyer & Designer virtual team members.
2. Added 3 skills (Core, Legal, Design) with 100%, 0%, 0% default setup.
3. Setup our internal team for Core skill and External team (Laywer = Legal, Designer = Design)

This works pretty well.

1. Portfolio will not try to recalculate plan and assign tasks to External team if you dont explicitly estimate some work for Legal/Design skill.
2. You can make an upper limit capacity for your external suppliers (handy since you don't want to overload them when you need them on multiple projects simultaneously.

However. There is one minor glitch. If you actually don't care about capacity of the third party or you don't want to create a team member for every external supplier you are stuck.

Suggestion:

How about adding a special wait time estimate to tasks? You just say - this task will take about 20hours from an external source (skill) and i dont care about capacity planning. Everything else will just work as is.

Is there any other better way to model this in Portfolio?