The application portfolio management (APM) tool space can be a confusing one, as many software vendors offer their own take of what APM is. Enterprise architecture, application management and project portfolio management tools offer an APM use case, but these are often quite skewed the primary function of the tool.

KeyedIn released version 7.0 of its flagship product, KeyedIn Projects, featuring support for the transition to an increasingly Agile-focused IT shop. Work is assigned to Agile teams when the individual assignment is impractical.

To provide a single pane of glass for the work done across disparate teams, Planview announced a strategic partnership with Tasktop to expand its Agile Scaler offering. Now, organizations can aggregate the work of various teams into a portfolio and assess status and the financial impact to business objectives and analyze dependencies across different teams.

Earlier this year, Mavenlink announced a PSA-supporting function for targeting and tracking the ratio of billable vs. non-billable time. Consultants get a useful feature, but what about the garden-variety IT knowledge worker?

Wrike’s Laura Quiambao recently blogged about the dangers of employee burnout and highlighted how Wrike Resource can help. It’s tough to argue with her four proposed solutions, but a fifth component is absent from her analysis: engaged, responsible portfolio ownership.

Workfront recently announced its acquisition of Atiim, a leading OKR (Objectives and Key Results) vendor. It plans to offer an integrated tool set called Workfront Goals in the coming year, connecting the objectives tracking front end (OKR software) to its work management application (Workfront, formerly known as @Task).

Planview is marketing its automatic timesheet feature as something that enables capitalization of Agile investments and promotes the scale out of Agile itself. But the real question is: how does the software automatically produce timesheet data?

Clarizen launched Clarizen Go in the last quarter of 2019. Intended to assist the transition to agile workflows, Clarizen Go claims to make creating and moving tasks during a project easier, while also improving visibility into the portfolio with integration with Clarizen One.

While Mavenlink’s press release on its Future of Work survey doesn’t map the findings back to the software itself, we’ll fill in one of the gaps: Mavenlink can help with your work-life balance, assuming that your leadership decides to play along.

Clarizen and Procore announced a partnership in October that aims to “help construction companies improve agility.” The functional rationale makes sense, but what’s the vendors’ strategic business rationale? Relevance.

ALM Works Structure for Jira enables Atlassian customers to track and manage projects at scale.

Atlassian embraces the reality that roadmaps and plans are living, breathing, and continually changing.

Intake and backlog management are two of the top reasons for failed product and feature delivery. Skop.es brings the analytical and management practices to visualize, quantify, and verify and validate the delivery of the right requirements.

As enterprise IT organizations are trending towards resource management offices, they are signaling the need for improved resource management usefulness from top PPM vendors.

Workfront exemplifies the classical software paradigm of automating systematic, exacting tasks to free up users for creative work. Workfront is a resource management tool that gets integration right but underwhelms on collaborative value.

VirtoSoftware, a company that focuses on creating add-ons for SharePoint and Office 365, has introduced product that intends to bring simple resource management to your project portfolio within SharePoint. While the function looks simple on the surface, some of the pitfalls of larger portfolio suites are still a concern.

Atlassian is a top provider of software to support Agile development work management and portfolio management. Its impending acquisition of AgileCraft now provides the means to address the gap of aligning executive strategy with the delivery of Agile software solutions.

Stop thinking about backup and start thinking about data protection. Newer technologies are making it redundant.

Our project portfolio management research practice helps a lot of clients who haven’t succeeded with full-blown PPM suites like Project Server and Clarity. Meisterplan is a portfolio and resource management tool but not a full project management–time sheets–document management solution. We took it for a test drive because many of our customers are looking for this type of tool.

There is no archetypal portfolio mix that all project portfolios should strive toward.

In finance services, it can be a gut instinct to manage and track human resource time in the same manner that we manage money – track every single thing that happens. The problem occurs when we put large amounts of effort into collecting granular data that is not informing any business decision, and is not changing any functional behavior. In the financial services industry, we would call that wasteful spending.