PLM and Project Management Options

Few days ago, I run into Gartner Magic Quadrant about IT Project and Portfolio Management. You can get it by navigating to the following link (the link was live at the day I posted). Please take a read and make your opinion. Project and Portfolio management software is an interesting space, in my view. There are lots of vendors with very high level of diversification.

Customer Demands

This publication made me think about what are the customer options for PPM (Project and Portfolio Management). I think organizations are looking for this type of solutions today. The main reason is simple – it helps them to execute well. In product development, it becomes a very important tool to achieve their objectives.

PLM and Project Portfolio Management (PPM)

PLM PPM tools (sorry, I hate these TLAs) are becoming a normal part in a portfolio of PLM mind-share vendor. I’ve seen PLM vendors developed or acquired these functionality. You can find these products in the portfolio of ENOVIA (Program Central), TeamCenter (Program Portfolio Management), Windchill (ProjectLink) and in portfolios of other PLM and ERP vendors. I put examples of such applications in the following few videos.

TeamCenter

Aras Innovator

ENOVIA Program Central

Project and Portfolio Management Tools

The Project and Portfolio Management tools covered by Gartner in this Magic-Q is representing a diverse set of applications. It scales from small niche players towards big superstars like Microsoft, HP, Oracle and others. Generally speaking all these tools are focused on how to gather data about project portfolio planning activities and make it available to people involved into this project. Now what happens if you are in an engineer involved into a product development project? You need to link somehow your engineering activities with project management. There is a certain disadvantage of most of these vendors in the inability to have deeper integration between project tools and engineering tools. On the other side, these independent vendors have a significant advantage in focusing on pure PPM functions. Some of the players (like Clarizen) have built a loosely coupled integration between CAD systems and their project management tools. You can take a look on a very nice demo of Clarizen working with AutoCAD.

What is my conclusion? In my view, the customer challenge is to choose between Integrated Products and separate Project Management Tools. In case you will pick up PLM Project Portfolio Management Tools, you are at the risk to stack with corporate wide deployment of this tool. In case of just picking up one of the available project management tools, you have a potential to stack in data integration between PDM/PLM modules and Project Management Tools. The decision is yours and probably very individual. I’m interested to hear your opinion and please, share your experience.

Best, Oleg