I have been assigned the task of conducting a Project Portfolio Software offerings research. The need for a project portfolio at our company stems from:
- Managing our annual planning process via excel spread sheet
- Lack of a corporate portfolio management system
- Time consuming data collection from different resources
- Lack of centralized resource tracking
I wanted to touch base with you to see if anyone has already conducted some research on the vendors in this area and also on the SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis for these vendors. If so, are you willing to share OR provide me some direction in terms of the vendors, reference materials…etc?
Thanks for your help and it’s much appreciated
Saving Changes...
We've been developing Project Portfolio Software for three years now, borne out of frustration that a quick and robust solution didn't exist.
Please refer to http://www.copperproject.com when conducting your research, in particular our testimonials page. We're proud of our product and would invite the gantthead faithful to help us make it better ;)
If you have any questions about the product let me know.
Interested to read your post. My view is that in order to choose the right package you need to know what problem you are trying to solve and then be VERY skeptical about vendors claims. Some of the problems people are trying to solve with these tools are very complex yet they barely understand that you cant just solve the problem by throwing technlogy at it (ie you have to understand the issue, decide how to solve, it get the right tool and use the tool to support new/changed processes or to drive the organisational change - software implementation can be a great shaper of, and catalyst for change). A good example of the type of thing I mean is the resource management problem. Many people have the "portfilio" problem. That is they are trying to share a finite pool of resources across a large portfolio of projects. This can be a difficult problem to solve with several possible solutions only 1 of which may be suitable for your organisation. eg for a discusion on this particular issue see Geoff Reiss's paper at:
Thank you Eric, I too am researching possible software solutions for the company, and find it increasingly frustrating when companies refuse to supply simple answers to straightforward questions in an attempt to promote their product - therefore I am taking your advice and being completely skeptical! AND if they don't answer the questions I'll assume that the answer is no, their product cannot support the Japanese language and they don't store data from each project for use in future quotations...! [/rant] - Thank you! :) Saving Changes...
Mark Price PerryBusiness Driven PMO Evangelist| BOT InternationalOrlando, Fl, United States
Dear Shyam, by way of reference material, though a bit dated, the Microsoft Office EPM Solution Customer Research Report, "Microsoft Leadership in
Enterprise Project Management" provides a concise, 16 page, overview of enterprise project management along with the Gartner Group PPM magic quadrant graphical representation of the market space. You can access this report from the Microsoft website download area or via the following link. http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/c...0Management.pdf The needs that you have described that are driving you to a project portfolio management software solution are very much what Microsoft EPM addresses. Good luck..! -- Mark Perry, VP of Customer Care, BOT International Saving Changes...
Prabhas SinhaDirector - Product Management| CAHyderabad, India
Shyam/Natalie,
Not sure if many people on this list are aware of it or not -- it might be worth while to call up any Gartner/IDC analysts. They can give you a good handle on this.
As Eric pointed out, you have let us know what exactly are your pain points and depending upon that this forum can answer your questions. Nevertheless here are a few vendors:
For Portfolio Management:
1)Primavera
2)PlanView
3)Niku
For Portfolio Management and SoftwareLifeCycle Management:
4)Digite
5)Rational Portfolio Manager
For Software Development:
6) Rally Software
7) SpeeDev
I have researched on some of these companies and can share some of my findings. You can write to me at [email protected]
Your choice of tools should be guided by what you want to do and how you currently manage projects. The Gartner "Magic Quadrant" is a good place to start to see the strengths and weaknesses of the "big iron" vendors however, these solutions may be overkill if your company is small or does not have a developed project management culture.
Your choice of tool should be guided by what is most important to you. We have looked at a number of vendors and they each have a differing focus:
Sopheon Accolade (www.sopheon.com) - expressly designed around the Stage:Gate (TM) process and tightly integrated with MS Office and Sharepoint.
iLign (www.ilign.com) - designed from the top down to expressly link projects and portfolios to strategy and provide executive dahsboards.
iTools (www.itools.co.nz) - very good on risk and issue tracking and management.
As you can see you need to decide what is most important to you and let that guide your investigations. Hope this helps, grant. Saving Changes...
Anonymous
We looked at: Digite (www.digite.com) that offers a good combination of Project Management, Portfolio Mgmt, s/w LifeCycle Mgmt and related business processes, designed around the Tollgate process and tightly integrated with MS Office and AutoPLAN (its alternative to MSP) designed from the top down to link projects and portfolios and provide executive dahsboards.
An impressive support to SDLC and a very powerful framework to model almost every methodologies one works with on a day to day basis. Saving Changes...
Anonymous
Check out www.interneer.com. Their Intellect product is designed to be fully configurable by the business user without programming so that it can adapt fully to the company's business processes. Sounds like you have existing spreadsheets and a methodology you might want the system to fit rather than have to change your entire culture to fit the tool. It may be exactly what you are looking for. Saving Changes...
We have looked at many packages. As a new PMO, we're looking in the "middle tier"... Something with a good feature set but not as robust as some of the enterprise packages.
We like eProject the best so far.
Jerry Saving Changes...
