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At Your Service
Neil Stolovitsky (May 4, 2006)

Project portfolio management is helping to bridge the gap between project management and operations for professional services organizations. But their needs are not the same as an IT organization’s. Here’s a roundup of PPM solutions that recognize and address these significant differences.

In the last couple of years, the enterprise resource planning (ERP) industry has changed the landscape of the project portfolio management (PPM) marketplace. ERP vendors, such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft, have recognized the value of developing and delivering services to professional services organizations (PSO). Faced with this new reality, the best-of-breed vendors that once dominated the PPM marketplace must either shift their focus or defend their market share from the ERP giants now entering the market. As a result, the PPM industry is divided into two major camps: vendors servicing PSOs and vendors servicing internal IT departments. This article will examine PPM for PSOs and the vendors that service this market segment.

The PPM industry’s mixed messages are due in large part to the idiosyncrasies that separate PSOs from internal IT departments. Although most PPM vendors offer functionality for both types of organizations, most PPM solutions do not address both sets of needs in their entirety. Consequently, a number of vendors competent in portfolio management and project management have repackaged themselves for internal IT departments, while numerous vendors that originated in the billing and financials software market have focused their efforts on the billable services sector, where they can provide ERP functionality to meet the unique needs of PSOs.

PSOs want complete PPM solutions that address their business as a whole.

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