The Forrester Wave™: Project/Program Portfolio Management, Q4 2012
T h e need to support Lean and Agile processes makes today’s PPM tool choice more diffi cult. Above-the-line tools support strategic planning focused on value, risks, and benefi ts. Below-the-line tools focus on managing demand and day-to-day work. Several vendors have functionality that straddles the line, but few vendors are strong across the board.
Seek fl exible solutions that handle the day-to-day work for both waterfall and Agile projects (below the line) that also convey aggregated information to more strategic (abovethe-line) planning.
While waterfall remains a valid project management method for large projects (especially non-IT projects), it has serious flaws for many types of software development efforts. Writing most or all project requirements upfront when project sponsors and technical staff have very low levels of certainty about how things should be built wastes resources because business conditions (and therefore requirements) change over time
Integration with Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server allows development teams to collaborate with project managers on Agile, hybrid, and traditional projects.
I’ve been making this point at work this week in terms of why some PPM solutions are not suitable for project teams and project managers to work effectively.
@adoran2 have you looked into Kanban? It's pretty interesting, and we've used some of the ideas here at Readmill.
I’ve not run a project using Kanban but I’ve read a bit about it and appreciate the concept. We use Trello a little bit at work to organise things within our small team but we’re not doing software development. For the wider team who are, we have a decision coming up about what project portfolio management software to use. I have some strong views about the project managers being slaves to the technology—I want to make sure that they can still spend most of their time working with their teams and not having to fiddle with fixing detailed plans just to satisfy the tools we use.