Gartner's 6/09 Magic Quadrant for IT Project & Portfolio Management

Source: Gartner (June 2009) .

Gartner have recently updated their "Magic Quadrant for IT Project and Portfolio Management".


As Gartner explains, "Project and portfolio management (PPM) applications can provide visibility into the current state of organizational initiatives, resources, and spending through the centralized collection of data from multiple sources and perspectives. Integration across multiple business and IT process domains through PPM system functions provides multidimensional views of this data for better visibility and understanding of resource supply versus project (and other work) demand in IT and other project environments.."

There seems to be some healthy competition among a group of strong leaders, visionaries, and challengers (including SAP, Innotas, and BMC), as detailed in this Gartner report. A related May, 2009 Gartner report (which unlike the aforementioned Magic Quadrant is not available to browse online for free) at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=986223 , entitled "Market Share: Project and Portfolio Management Software, Worldwide, 2008", summarizes as follows: "After a banner year in 2007 with 24% growth, the worldwide project and portfolio management software market growth slowed to 7.4% in 2008 for a total of $1.2 billion. Among PPM vendors, Primavera, Microsoft, CA, Oracle and Agresso hold the largest market share."

As per my recent post regarding the US Federal CIO office, it is nice to see that PPM and related tools can be used in the real world with significant impact - e.g. to decide which projects should be permitted to proceed, vs. which should be halted in case they are significantly overrunning costs without yielding expected business benefits.

However, it is probably worth noting that even the best PPM tools do not add any meaningful value, unless the key business stakeholders contribute to its success by keeping relevant information and metrics up to date. Which is just another way of saying that even though the expected value / ROI may be large for a PPM undertaking, one should consider the full investment / TCO required: Not just the hard costs for licensing the software and related deployment requirements, but the full organizational commitment, training, and change required to make effective use of the PPM system and methodology.