Is it possible to Upgrade Components version directly in Production by updating the Project Settings?

Yes, you can make changes in the Project Settings dialogue in production, and any changes you make there will be made to production immediately. Apptio (at least, in R12) will prompt you with a warning that you are making a change directly to production, and you will need to confirm your changes again. I would advise against this, though, as making changes directly to production does not allow you to test the changes and make sure they haven't affected anything within the project. I suggest you make your changes in development, perform regression testing, and then check in (for auto-promotion to staging) and promote to production when you're sure the changes didn't compromise your project's integrity.

Some changes you need to make directly to production (e.g., default time period), but even with these changes, I would suggest making them in development first, testing them, and only then making the same change in production.

Thanks for a very helpful and to the point answer. We have actually made the Component version upgrade in development and staging, but the same kind of action did not seem to take effect in production. It was like it was accepted but ignored. I did not get any error message or anything telling me that I was unauthorized to do that.

Which version are you on? R11 or R12?

I agree with Jonathan. In this case, I would suggest you open a support ticket with Apptio and see what they have to say. The changes you made in those 2 instances should have been promoted to production.

Hey @Gunnar Durén if your question has been answered be sure sure to mark a comment as correct. This will help other users that might have the same question.

Thank you Lauren, yes, I was considering marking it as correct, but in fact I do have R12 and I did not get the expected error/warning message. Also, at this point in time I am not authorized to issue a ticket, so I will have to wait until the one who has is back from his holidays. So, is " probably correct" the same as "correct"? :-)

Haha  I would suggest waiting until you have the answer from the ticket and then coming back here putting that answer in a comment and marking it as correct. That way we can all see the outcome.