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Project Objects Re-Confirmed as Visionary in Gartner’s 2018 PPM Magic Quadrant
Significant product enhancements & consistently innovative approach secured rating
Project Objects, the international provider of software, expertise, and best practices for Enterprise Project & Portfolio Intelligence Management (PPM), announced today that the Company has been re-confirmed as a Visionary in the Gartner 2018 Magic Quadrant.
Project Objects has consistently been recognised as a leading software vendor by Gartner since 2011. In addition, this latest accolade marks the third time Project Object’s continued growth and product roadmap development has been awarded a Visionary ranking by Gartner, following a rigorous competitive analysis of the entire PPM software marketplace.
PPM service providers designated as Visionary are classified as such because they consistently report increased market share, in terms of growth in customer count and average number of users per customer. In addition, visionaries must also demonstrate forward-thinking product features and developmental traits, such as a cloud-based architecture and agile application development cadence. ProjectObjects scored very highly on all these key measures.
“We are delighted to have been recognised once again for our innovative approach to PPM and consistently strong product portfolio. Gartner has recognised that as a Visionary company, we are fully focussed on developing and supporting leading PPM solutions, which in turn enable our customers to operate PPM as a business process and derive maximum return on investment,” says Gioacchino Gaudioso, CEO of Project Objects.
Product Features In Depth – Rationale behind the Visionary classification
Project Objects was awarded Gartner’s Visionary classification in part as a result of its strong project cost-tracking features for customers managing large Capital Projects. These allow users to track progress on a revenue-generating projects against costs incurred, taking into consideration hours worked in multiple currencies. In addition, the Company is regarded Visionary due to the large number of product enhancements included in the current version of ProjectObjects (Version 9.1), which is available as either a cloud based or ‘on-premise’ solution. Specific V9.1 product improvements praised by Gartner included:
- Best-in-class ‘Capital Project’ management and collaborative ‘Portfolio Planning and Control are key strengths of ProjectObjects solution;
- Customizable demand management can be designed with conditional workflow routings based on such variables as program value or project cost;
- 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.
- The demand management process is integrated with the project, portfolio and collaboration modules and supported via creation of collaborative objects like actions, documents, Kanban boards and risks.
- Strong Resource Management capability with resources assigned to collaboration items (e.g., 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, and to support filtering and selection resources are assigned such attributes as skill, title, seniority or others. A resource replacement function helps to automatically identify and avoid overloads;
- 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.
Gartner also recognised the significant enhancements that have been made to Needful, ProjectObjects’ Agile Task Management module that has been integrated to their PPM solution. This module is designed for organisations who wish to add alternative project execution methods including Agile and Scrum as part of their PPM solution. Needful is an add-on work and project collaboration product that supports to-do lists, task management, Kanban boards and timelines. Recent improvements made to Needful highlighted as significant by Gartner included:
- Enhancements to the UI;
- Ability to export any to-do lists and task boards to Microsoft Excel
- Task creation from a user's email application;
- Work log and subtask management options;
- Integration to the PPM solution giving Project Managers the ability to track tasks against key deliverables.
Understanding Gartner’s Visionary Classification
Vendors designated as Visionary in the Gartner PPM Magic Quadrant are classified as such due to their completeness of vision and best practice PPM functionality reflecting innovative approaches in areas such as collaboration, social networking and responsive customer care, mobile device support, interoperability with third-party data sources and group-specific collaboration with PMOs, steering committees, workgroups, project execution environments and teams.