ANALYST REVIEWS

Summary from Gartner Critical Capabilities for PPM, Worldwide Report

Project Objects was rated in the top quartile out of 21 other vendors offering specific Enterprise PPM solutions. The Company was also listed in the global top 10 of all PPM vendors for ProjectObject’s IT PPM and Reporting PPM capabilities.

Gartner’s recent review was conducted across 21 PPM software providers, with detailed findings published in its ‘Critical Capabilities for Project Portfolio Management, Worldwide’ Report, August 2018. 

Report Extract - Summary

In its report, Gartner highlighted the following key feature benefits of using ProjectObjects:

• When enterprises select ProjectObjects, their priorities tend to be capital project management and collaborative portfolio planning and control including IT PPM. 
• A portfolio management module integrates with program management and budgeting, and features scenario modelling with various visualization alternatives. An investment proposal may have alternative cost estimates to ease analysis and decision making, and different cost types can be managed at various levels. Optimization may incorporate a range of constraints, including time, budget, risk, ROI and more.
• Customizable demand management can be designed with conditional workflow routings based on such variables as program value or project cost. 
• The demand management process is integrated with the collaboration module and supported via creation of collaborative objects like actions, documents, Kanban boards and risks. A useful feature lets users put a project request in an “intermediate approval” status, so that exploratory work, resource assignments and cost tracking can begin. 
• Resources can be assigned to collaboration items (such as risks) to help track unplanned work, and resources can be pre-allocated to proposed projects as well as active ones, helping to identify shortfalls and overloads. A Resource Breakdown Structure provides a hierarchical view. To support filtering and selection, resources are assigned (such attributes as skill, title or seniority). A resource replacement function helps to automatically identify and avoid overloads.
• Project collaboration occurs in a shared project space and is supported visually via Kanban boards, to-do lists and dashboards, enabling teams to work in an agile/scrum environment, which can connect to the broader PPM solution. External project participants can have access to project dashboards. Tasks and other non-project work items may be created from emails sent to the Kanban boards. 
• When users want distributed task management, they can access Project Objects’ Needful tool (also available stand-alone). It lets users flexibly move project elements (represented as sticky notes), supports to-do lists as well as project timelines and features a Discussion module.
• Project Objects’ out-of-the-box reporting module features a native report writing capability that can export data as Excel files, in PDFs or for further analysis in external BI tools. It enables creation of standard reports at project, multi-project or portfolio aggregation levels. Dashboards can be configured to show project data according to user role, and analysts can report on individual resources to scrutinize assignments to multiple projects and other work. 
• Programs can be contextualized within portfolios and strategies, with summarization of the specific program-level data as well as data of the program’s constituent projects.