In today's fast-paced business world, companies often find themselves juggling multiple different projects at the same time – each with its unique challenges and goals.
Whether it's marketing or sales, research or software development, businesses today need to handle multiple projects simultaneously, which can lead to confusion, misalignment, and ultimately bad business decisions.
The result is bad performance, unhappy employees, and ultimately a loss in revenue. In fact, a monday.com survey found that 54% of workers spend 5 or more hours per week on tedious tasks that require little or no creativity. For 16%, it’s 10 or more hours.
Project portfolio management (PPM) tools are proving invaluable for organizations looking to manage their projects effectively and keep businesses running smoothly.
What are PPM tools?
Project portfolio management (PPM) tools are software applications that help organisations select, prioritise, and manage their projects and programs.
They give you a centralised view of your project portfolios, making it easier to track progress, identify potential problems, and improve overall portfolio performance.This makes them especially useful for organisations that manage complex projects or programs, or that have a large portfolio of projects.
If you have multiple projects on the go, PPM tools can also help prioritize which ones to focus on based on factors like potential return on investment. They help manage resources effectively by determining which projects need what resources (people, equipment, budget) and avoiding situations where resources are stretched too thin.
For an organization managing a complex project, or if you are managing a portfolio of projects, a PPM tool can help you to improve your project performance and achieve your business goals.
Features of PPM tools
PPM tools come packed with features to streamline project portfolio management. Here are some of the key functionalities you can expect:
1. Real-time project tracking
PPM tools provide a central dashboard for monitoring progress, deadlines, and resource allocation across all projects in one place. This allows for quick identification of issues and helps ensure projects stay on track.
2. Project selection and pipeline management
Many PPM tools Facilitate the intake and assessment of new project ideas. This helsp prioritize projects based on strategic alignment, potential value, and resource availability.
3. Resource management
PPM tools help ensure you have the right people with the right skills assigned to the right projects. This avoids resource overload and optimizes team utilization.
4. Budget and financial management
Project portfolio management tools make it easy to track project costs, manage budgets, and identify potential financial risks. Some PPM tools can even integrate with accounting systems for seamless financial tracking.
5. Risk management
Thanks to the many insights they provide, PPM tools make it easier to odentify potential risks that could derail projects, assess their likelihood and impact, and develop mitigation plans.
6. Reporting and dashboards
Most PPM tools allow you to generate reports that provide insights into project performance, resource allocation, and overall portfolio health. These Visual dashboards offer a quick overview of key metrics for informed decision-making.
Task automation
One of the standout features of PPM tools is automation. You can automate repetitive tasks like sending notifications, assigning workflows, and generating reports, freeing rees up valuable time for project managers to focus on more strategic work.
Best PPM Tools for 2024
There are plenty of different PPM tools on the market today, each with its own set of functionalities, features and tools to help you stay on top of your projects.
But like everything in this world, not all of these tools are made the same. Choosing the best PPM tool for your business is crucial to making the most out of all of your projects and maximise your business potential.
In this list, we’re exploring ten of the top PPM tools on the market in 2023 to help you make informed decisions about which PPM tool best suits your organisation's needs.
Meisterplan
Meisterplan is a cloud-based PPM tool best known for its user-friendly interface and no-frills project management features. The Meisterplan platform makes managing resources a breeze, combining intuitive and visual capacity planning with powerful management features to ensure that the right employees are always working on the right topics at the right time. The Team Planner feature, for instance, provides a dedicated workspace for resource managers and team leads to see and manage your team's capacity. Meanwhile, the Project Scoring and Ranking feature automatically prioritises and ranks your projects based on project scores and customised criteria, allowing you to prioritise the tasks that matter with the resources you have.
Meisterplan makes it easy to design and scale a PPM solution that suits your business needs. With its built-in Portfolio Designer, you get a real-time overview of your project portfolio in an interactive view, allowing you to keep tabs on all of your projects in one place. And the platform’s board view makes it easy to keep tabs on the progress of every project, allowing you to collect and visualise new initiatives in a Kanban-style board to help you strategically manage every project.
Hive
Next up we have Hive, which is specially designed for hybrid working to help companies manage their workloads remotely and in the office. With flexible project layouts, native email, resourcing, group messaging, and file sharing, Hive connects all aspects of your workflow. You can weigh task and project importance, allocate resources and track team availability allowing you to streamline project progress through splints and agile scoring. You can also create separate projects for your initiatives, or one parent project with child projects underneath, giving you the flexibility to create individual tasks and subactions within each project.
What makes Hive unique is its emphasis on its own community and the people who use its platform. All new product features are built based on customer votes and feedback on our Forum, allowing it to constantly improve itself based on customer feedback and reflect on how you work on a day-to-day basis. Hive boasts an impressive portfolio of customers in its community tools, including the likes of Google, Toyota, Starbucks and Comcast.
Oracle Primavera
For over 30 years, organisations around the world have relied on Oracle Construction and Engineering to plan, build and operate successful projects. With Oracle Primavera, you can manage projects of any size in one single platform. From its scheduling to resource management, Primaveraprovides all the tools you need to plan, schedule, and control large-scale programs and individual projects as well as adaptable views and easy-to-use team member interfaces for gathering status updates.
Whether you want to secure multiuser access to schedules, coordinate costs or control large-scale programs, Oracle enables you to communicate resource requirements and decisions throughout the project lifecycle. It provides a graphical analysis of resources and role utilisation to help keep all projects on track, while also giving you a what-if analysis of projects to give you visibility into the potential impact of proposed changes on costs. You can also use past and current project data to inform and create more accurate forecasts, increasing confidence and reducing the need for contingency.
Microsoft Project & Portfolio Management
Backed by one of the biggest names in the tech world, Microsoft Project & Portfolio Management provides all the tools you need to effectively plan, prioritise, and manage project and portfolio investments. The platform makes it easy to drive portfolio optimisation, allowing you to model different portfolio scenarios to determine the best strategic path for your business in a single dashboard. You can also weigh project proposals against strategic business drivers and consider the cost and resource constraints all within the same dashboard, giving you the big picture across all programs and projects.
Microsoft’s host of PPM tools makes transforming project data into actionable insights a breeze. With its Roadmap tool, for instance, you can aggregate portfolios, programs, and projects across your organisation in a visual, interactive Roadmap for broader visibility. Meanwhile, the Native OData tool lets you share built-in reports, such as burndown or Power BI dashboards, so that everyone stays on the same page.
Quickbase
Quickbase is a leading PPM tool that brings all your data and teams together in one, centralised place. Connecting everything through a single source of truth, the platform helps you mitigate risk, reduce waste and cut down on unexpected costs by giving you end-to-end visibility into all of your projects and programs. And its powerful new features, such as the Quickbase AI streamlining the project management process, with automated workflows and granular permission so that the right people have access to the right information when they need it.
Not only does this increase productivity and improve operational efficiency, but also optimises business processes by orchestrating workflows, eliminating manual errors, and using automated tools for repetitive tasks. With Quickbase, you can create customised applications for complex projects and processes, allowing you to develop tailored solutions to handle specific tasks and goals. The platform also connects all your data from external systems with your applications, giving you real-time insight into all your projects and programs. This allows you to take of user management, application governance, and data integrity, while also enabling you to stay compliant with governance policies, maintain a secure environment, and provide a seamless user experience.
Scoro
Tired of dealing with disjoined systems, unpredictable workloads, or shrinking profit margins? Scoro is a powerful PPM tool specifically designed to streamline and optimise your entire workflow, providing a unified platform to manage all aspects of your operations – from quote to cash. By combining, time tracking, collaboration, invoicing, and reporting into a single solution, the platform eliminates the hassle of switching between different tools and brings coherence to the work process. It gives you complete control over all of your projects, allowing you to allocate resources where you need them, monitor progress in real-time and enhance productivity by ensuring that all your projects are delivered on time.
All of these great project management features are paired with Scoro’s powerful data-driven insights and analytics tools, which help you make informed decisions, identify pain points, and drive growth and profitability across your organisation. It also removes the hassle of switching between different tools and brings coherence to the work process, giving you all the tools you need to manage your projects effectively.
ClickUp
ClickUp is an all-in-one productivity platform that acts as a hub where everyone in your organisation, together to plan, organise, and collaborate on projects. ClickUp improves collaboration across your organisation, making it easy for your teams to work together more closely – even if they’re far apart. Your project-related communications are centralised in a single place, allowing your teams to brainstorm ideas with Whiteboards, or draft plans together with Docs. ClickUp also automates all the boring and repetitive stuff with automation that streamlines project management processes without breaking a sweat. From onboarding employees, handling IT requests, or managing reimbursements, you can automate it all with the platform’s powerful no-code automation.
With ClickUp, you can ditch pointless productivity meetings and repetitive IT updates. As a single source of truth for all ongoing projects across your entire organisation, the platforms give you a crystal-clear view of what's happening (or not), and who's responsible. And with its impressive customer base, including the likes of IBM, Fortinet, Spotify and Netflix the platform is also one of the most reliable and powerful PPM tools on the market – making it a safe choice for organisations of all sizes.
Celoxis
A leader in PPM solutions, Celoxis provides one of the most comprehensive enterprise project management platforms on the market. From project planning to task management and collaboration, the platform provides a centralised hub for everyone in your team to collaborate, track progress, and manage your projects and portfolio programs seamlessly. Its customisable and intuitive dashboards provide real-time insights into all of your ongoing projects, making it easy to monitor performance, identify bottlenecks, and make data-driven decisions.
Celoxis is one of the best PPM tools on this list for its emphasis on project collaboration. The platform provides discussion boards, file sharing, real-time updates, and email notifications to keep your team connected across your organisation. Team members can communicate and share project-related information and track resource availability at any point during a project, enabling anyone in your team to define and adhere to project budgets, track costs, manage expenses, and compare actual with planned spending. Celoxis also integrates with popular tools like Microsoft Project, Excel, Outlook, Salesforce, and JIRA. It also provides APIs for custom integrations and supports automation through workflow rules.
Proggio
Proggio prides itself in its holistic approach to project portfolio management. By bringing clarity and simplicity to project portfolio management, the platform provides you with all the tools you need to keep your managerial and team aligned while connecting delivery targets with project plans and execution. Its project map feature, for instance, maps out your projects with clarity, using real-time data to display your entire project portfolio all on one screen. Meanwhile, its Zoom In and Out feature allows you to visualise your portfolio on an annual basis, all the way down to the daily or task level.
As well as its powerful, data-driven PPM tools, Proggio provides a host of automation so that you don’t have to deal with granular, repetitive project management tasks. Its built-in, intuitive prioritisation means project priorities are automatically determined by your business drivers, making it easy to identify the most important projects for strategic growth. Staying compliant with Proggio is a breeze tool. The platform instantly and visually identifies risks to proactively plan and mitigate them, keeping your business safe from external and internal threats.
Smartsheet
There’s a reason Smartsheet is arguably the most popular and best-reviewed PPM tools available today. Pairing one of the best user experiences with process consistency and scale to drive alignment, the platform connects strategy to work by empowering anyone to build and scale projects efficiently. Using on-demand data analysis and automated reporting, you can plan, implement align and scale projects to suit your needs, allowing you to deliver portfolio value scale make smart decisions streamline your projects from start to finish. The platform also eliminates process inefficiencies and guesswork, providing real-time visibility and accurate reporting of all your projects and their progress.
What makes Smartsheet so great is that it strikes the right balance between top-down and bottom-up portfolio management approaches. The platform standardises and simplifies project portfolio execution, allowing you to achieve project consistency without sacrificing user experience or user-driven innovation. It also integrates and connects with many of the platforms you probably use on a daily basis, including Slack, Google Workspace, Jira, ServiceNow, and Microsoft 365. This makes it easy to bring all your information and context onto a single platform, ultimately improving collaboration and decision-making across your organisation.