What is Cloud Project Portfolio Management?

Cloud Project Portfolio Management is a Software as a Service (SaaS) based cloud approach designed for organizations to align projects and programs across the portfolio with strategic business objectives.

Top 10 Cloud Project Portfolio Management Vendors are:

• Automatic Data Processing, Inc
• Broadcom Ltd
• Changepoint Corporation
• Clarizen
• Epicor Software Corporation
• F5 Networks
• HPE
• Infor Inc
• Inspirage
• Intuit Inc

Cloud Project Portfolio Management allows end-users to improve resource utilization, reduce resource gaps, increase project visibility, automate time and expense reporting, standardize project compliance with industry regulations, and facilitate real-time communication and decision-making. It enables organizations to identify potential risks associated with budgets, resources, tasks, timelines, and goals and use in-depth analysis to define what risks offer the most rewards. This helps organizations to proactively manage risks, allowing teams to persuasively estimate potential delays and put into place measures to prevent or mitigate those risks.

Visionary leaders are the leading market players in terms of new developments such as product launches, innovative technologies, and the adoption of growth strategies. These players have a broad product offering that caters to most of the regions globally. Visionary leaders primarily focus on acquiring the leading market position through their strong financial capabilities and their well-established brand equity.

Dynamic Differentiators are established players with very strong business strategies. However, they have a weaker product portfolio compared to the visionary leaders. They generally focus only on a specific type of technology related to the product.

Innovators in the competitive leadership mapping are vendors that have demonstrated substantial product innovations as compared to their competitors. The companies have focused on product portfolios. However, they do not have very strong growth strategies for their overall business, when compared with the visionary leaders.

Emerging companies have niche product and service offerings. Their business strategies are not as strong as that of the established vendors. The emerging vendors include the new entrants in the market, emerging in terms of product portfolio and geographic reach, and require time to gain significant traction in the market.

What drives the Cloud Project Portfolio Management market?

Increase in the use of BYOD and mobile devices

• The Cloud Project Portfolio Management solution offers more accessibility for the users through the mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops to their personal data from anywhere and anytime.
• This has created a challenge for the IT teams to offers new applications and secure access to disparate platforms and mobile handsets used by the project managers and team members across multiple locations
• Mobile teams keeps the team updated about the tasks and hence it considered as the one of the driving factors.

High adoption of cloud analytics

• Businesses are adopting cloud analytics in the project portfolio management solution, as it provides the ability to track, chart and review projects in real time.
• Cloud analytics also help project executives to focus on project reports, including financial information, track project health and project delivery.
• Furthermore, cloud analytics also helps to monitor projects and performance indicators and offers actionable insights in the project performance trend.

Increasing need for ROI in process manufacturing industries

• Asset intensive businesses require higher investments to maintain operations and business continuity.
• Cloud Project Portfolio Management solution helps asset intensive companies to have a healthy ROI by helping them to deliver project within deadlines and a prescribed budget.
• Cloud Project Portfolio Management also optimizes investments decisions and lowers operating costs to ensure a better ROI, which is the reason for this solution to being a driving force.

Major applications of the Cloud Project Portfolio Management solution

Project Management

• Project management process involves initiating, planning executing, controlling and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific business requirements.
• The application of cloud project portfolio management solution facilitates consistent project execution, automated compliance with the industry and employee regulations, enhanced productivity and operational effectiveness.

Portfolio Management

• Portfolio management in cloud refers to an organizations group of projects processes which are selected and managed to offers better returns on project investments.
• The use of cloud project portfolio management solution allows the project team to manage the overall risk of the portfolio while ensuring that the cash flow and other organizational requirements are achieved.

Demand Management

• Demand management centralizes strategic business and project requests, streamlines investment decision process for new products, services and enhancements.
• Cloud Project Portfolio Management solutions have the ability to assess, manage and accurately forecast the demand for products and services.

Resource Management

• Resource management deals with the efficient and effective allocation of enterprise resources based on the business needs.
• The resources mainly comprise of financial resources, inventory, employees, production resources or information technology.
• Cloud Project Portfolio Management solutions optimizes organization’s efficiency, minimizes idle time and improves project execution.
• It also ensures that the resources are provisioned with organizational needs and are in alignment with the overall business priorities.

Importance of Cloud Project Portfolio Management

Enhanced capacity planning and resource management

• Capacity planning and efficiently managing resources is mainly reliant on how well the PMO implements its strategy and associates the use of resources to organization’s goals.
• Misused resources is one of the major problems that companies encounter when it comes to scope creep.
• Cloud Project Portfolio Management reduces the probabilities of misused resources by confirming that the resources are assigned based on priority and are being efficiently sequenced and cleverly used to meet intended goals.

Improved productivity

• Cloud Project Portfolio Management solutions help PMO in communicating to the project teams and other employees, about the importance of project tasks to achieve a higher degree of productivity.
• Employees who realize their role in reaching greater goals are more probable to work harder and pay attention to the quality of their deliverables.

Better ROI

• Cloud Project Portfolio Management helps in gaining clarity around wider company goals, enhance resource management, and improve the productivity and agility of an organization.
• It can also generate better wins and enhance the return on investment (ROI) of any project. With PPM, projects investment will more possibly to pay off and set companies on better stability for the future.

Real-time access

• Cloud project portfolio management software provides businesses with real-time access to get updates about the tasks that have been completed.
• The solutions provides users with the capability to generate timely reports and real-time analysis.
• A good quality Cloud project portfolio management software provides users with a functionality for upper managers, all of which add to getting a better handle on the project portfolios.

Decreases redundant projects

• An ideal cloud project portfolio management solution allows users to look at all potential project investments in a portfolio that help them in understanding the redundancy across the portfolio.
• It also helps users in considering critical factors, such as alignment with corporate goals or the need to bring a new technology or product to market, which in turn makes it easier to discontinue unnecessary projects.

Factors to consider while choosing the right Cloud Project Portfolio Management solution

• Price – Cloud Project Portfolio Management software is available at many price points. Hence, it would important to know if implementation, training and support services are included within the software price or need an additional expenditure.
• Scalability – It is critical to know if the cloud project portfolio management software that is to be chosen can scale up or down.
• Quickly deployable - It’s important to discover a solution that proficiently and reasonably supports short-term, ad-hoc projects and is deployed in lesser time to support that goal.
• Strategic Portfolio Management - When evaluating cloud project portfolio management solutions, the buyers should look for robust, strategic abilities that allow effective strategic portfolio management.
• Application Portfolio Management – A cloud project portfolio management platform should help decision makers in choosing the applications to enhance, update and leave. It should also find what software to run on premises and in the cloud.
• Unified Resource Management - An effective cloud project portfolio management solution must instantly find the right people to address the right issues at the right time. It should track availability of full-time employees and contractors by role, location and skill set and balance investment demands and resource capacity to effectively staff projects.

Features to be considered while evaluating a Cloud Project Portfolio Management solution

• Unlimited Custom Fields – An ideal cloud project portfolio management solution should provide users with the flexibility to make more complex calculated fields, measures, and SQL lookups.
• Portfolio Dashboards – Cloud Project Portfolio Management provides businesses with enhanced project intake, prioritization, selection, execution, visibility and accountability, not to mention improved resource management. The powerful, configurable dashboards offer visibility into the data required.
• Project Portfolio Classification, Listing and Arrangement - A good quality cloud project portfolio management solution helps users in classifying projects by several, independent taxonomies, which can be used for filtering, grouping and sorting.
• Project Portfolio Assessment – A cloud project portfolio management solution allows users to track the organizational units relevant to the project and identify how much each unit will benefit from the project.
• Reporting – It provides precise reports with the option to run in multiple formats (usually including PDF and Microsoft Excel formats).

Upcoming Cloud Project Portfolio Management Trends

Implementation of OpenStack technologies will trigger the deployment of on premise-on-the-cloud solutions

• Businesses are considering digital transformation not only as a revenue stream but also as a way of transforming their business functions.
• Open-source technologies such as OpenStack provide organizations with a lot of flexibility, control, and scalability.

Developing economies will trigger the next wave of the rise for cloud project portfolio management software

• The growing BYOD trend among businesses, growing business optimization needs, the leaning towards cloud-based software solutions, and increasing difficulties within projects are driving the Cloud PPM

Acceptance may still be a test that software companies will need to tackle

• Enterprises usually deal with large projects of greater complexity, making PPM a huge priority for them.
• Scale and complexity of projects triggers the need for PPM, and therefore enterprises have been the biggest buyers of Cloud PPM software.

The Rise of multipurpose PPM tools in SMBs

• Using the wrong project management tools is a barrier when it comes to removing RoI from project management investments.
• However, the trend is shifting and businesses are now moving to a more structured project management approach by investing in all-in-one PM tools.

Recent News

Planisware acquires NQI to offer a global PPM solution for medium and large companies. Through this acquisition Plansiware combines its position as the world leader in Cloud Project Portfolio Management (PPM) software.