Find the best Project Portfolio Management (PPM) for your needs

As organizations fight tenaciously for every inch of market share, IT departments have had to deploy technology that assists these dynamic organizations to remain competitive. One of these technologies is project portfolio management (PPM).

Project portfolio management (PPM) is a business practice that helps organizations align their portfolios of projects with their business strategies. PPM organizes a series of projects into a single portfolio consisting of reports that capture project objectives, costs, timelines, accomplishments, resources, risks, and other critical factors. Executives can then regularly review entire portfolios, allocate resources appropriately, and adjust projects to produce the highest departmental returns. As its name implies, project portfolio management groups projects so they can be managed as a portfolio, much as an investor would manage stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.

The average small to medium business (SMB) has many of the same strategic needs as Fortune 500 organizations have for processing data into information. Consider an SMB's need to integrate technologies to support its manufacturing and supply chain issues, which affect the organization's ability to generate revenues. These SMBs may sell to larger organizations, which demands greater integration with these organizations' business processes and systems. The requirements have an impact on everything from product design to engineering, to sourcing and procurement, to sales and distribution, coupled with greater compliance issues and regulatory concerns.

The mid-market has limped along with rigid systems and processes that were developed on platforms and architecture now about 20 years old. As a result, organizations have had to create a variety of ad hoc reports by using spreadsheets, replete with the constraints of inaccurate and static data. When managing projects, spreadsheets are a poor way to track changes, as they leave no audit trails, and they are an inadequate medium for interpreting data.

• Deltek PPM and EVM Products by Deltek Systems
  
• Dynamics SL by Microsoft
  
• Easy Projects.NET by Logic Software
  
• Genius Project by Genius Inside
  
• Primavera by Primavera Systems
  
• Project Workforce Management by Tenrox
  
• ProSight Portfolios by ProSight
  
• PSNext by Sciforma Corporation
  
• TeamHeadquarters by Entry Software Corporation
  
• The Business Engine Network (BEN) by Business Engine
  
• TrackStudio enterprise by TrackStudio
  
• ]project-open[ by ]project-open[
  
• Deltek PPM and EVM Products by Deltek Systems
  
• Dynamics SL by Microsoft
  
• Epicor for Service Enterprises by Epicor
  
• JOVACO Project Suite by JOVACO Solutions Inc.
  
• NetSuite by NetSuite
  
• OpenAir Professional Services Automation (PSA) Solution by OpenAir
  
• TeamHeadquarters by Entry Software Corporation
  

To support a PPM system, organizations must have an internal process for each of the following:

1. Governance—the executive role in the decision-making process, usually conducted by a C-level executive who determines

• what projects to approve or reject, as priorities are determined

• when to activate projects, and establishes their completion dates

• what resources are required (both capital and human), and sets the project budget

2. Management—the process that monitors a project to ensure it is fulfilling its stated goals and that it is running on time and on budget. Such monitoring is usually the responsibility of the project manager (PM) and the project management office.
3. Administration—the management and updating of project portfolios according to their deliverables and resources (planned and used) in order to document the project status, note key milestones, and ensure adherence to the schedule for project deliverables. Usually the mandate of the PM.

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Established in 1993, Technology Evaluation Centers, Inc. (TEC) is the first web-native technology research enterprise. TEC provides decision support systems (DSS) that enable stakeholders to objectively identify the software products that best fit their company's unique business and systems requirements, and that contribute most effectively to superior business performance.