GigaOm Radar for Agile Planning and Portfolio Management (PPM)v3.0

1. Executive Summary

In response to changing customer and employee needs, many companies escalated the adoption of agile processes. Agile planning and portfolio management (PPM) solutions help companies and teams organize and accelerate delivery of products and services. They help ensure that teams are collaborating and that project status is visible to all parties, including team members, leaders, and stakeholders. The ability to adapt to an ever-changing business environment more quickly and easily is a key driver for these solutions.

This market has matured significantly around the core table stakes functionality. Most tools today have robust collaboration capabilities, solid automation, and processes related to planning of iterations and releases, task and issue management, dashboard reporting, and KPI and OKR tracking. All the solutions we reviewed here have strong functionality across the core agile methodology.

Enterprise-focused vendors are also investing in functionality for financial management, including budgeting, forecasting, and actuals tracking. These functions are found at the feature level as well as at higher epic, portfolio, and enterprise levels and can tie the financials to the strategic business value, objectives, and key results that are linked to their delivery pipeline. These links at all levels help companies prioritize and focus on the highest-value work. They also assist the transition from traditional IT funding of projects to product-based agile funding.

There’s a strengthening focus on version management in these solutions, available through either functionality in the tool or integrations with third-party products. This represents the growing convergence of agile development with development operations (DevOps) solutions. The ability to take advantage of DevOps information within agile planning allows greater visibility into a product’s status and ongoing issues.

Also emerging in these solutions is a focus on using data for predictive analytics and predictive governance. Tools are beginning to enable increased automation for repetitive tasks as they are identified by historical data in the tool. Moreover, they are able to identify issues earlier in the process, which is key to solving them sooner. Value stream management (VSM), which identifies areas for workflow improvement with increased efficiency, elimination of redundant processes, and identification of backlogs, is becoming significant.

Based on their functionality, some of the solutions we reviewed demonstrate more of an engineering orientation, providing data to improve the life of the developer during the development process. Other solutions focus more on less technical aspects of agile delivery and leadership reporting. These solutions often add financial management to each level of the process to help ensure that what’s being delivered has actual business value.

The PPM market has evolved rapidly, with mergers and acquisitions enabling vendors to attain functionality that solutions were lacking previously. This trend is likely to continue.

The solutions we reviewed are available at varying price points: free versions; low-cost solutions priced per user, per month for core functionality; and costly platforms consisting of multiple integrated applications providing end-to-end functionality. The more complex solutions often require the assistance of professional services for implementation. Many have add-ons or marketplace options that further enhance the breadth and depth of the solution.

Most of these solutions are available as cloud-only software as a service (SaaS) models. Very few have on-premises or private cloud deployment options. The companies with on-premises and private cloud offerings tend to focus on highly regulated sectors such as government, medical devices, automotive, and aerospace.

Before selecting an agile PPM tool, organizations need to understand the complexity of their operations and product structure. Tools range from basic applications that support small teams to advanced platforms that bolster entire organizations and multiple enterprise-level initiatives, with varying areas of emphasis that may lean more toward planning and collaboration, engineering, or regulatory control. These are key factors that differentiate PPM solutions, and determining which approach suits your company’s strategic goals will help you make the best choice.

This is our third year evaluating the agile PPM space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 17 of the top agile PPM solutions in the market and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the category and its underlying technology, identify leading agile PPM offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

2. Market Categories and Deployment Types

To help prospective customers find the best fit for their use case and business requirements, we assess how well agile PPM solutions are designed to serve specific target markets and deployment models (Table 1).

For this report, we recognize the following market segments:

• Small-to-medium business (SMB): In this category, we assess solutions on their ability to meet the needs of organizations ranging from small businesses to medium-sized companies. Also assessed are departmental use cases in large enterprises, where ease of use and deployment are more important than extensive management functionality, data mobility, and feature set.
• Large enterprise: Offerings are assessed on their ability to support large and business-critical projects. Optimal solutions in this category have a strong focus on flexibility, performance, data services, and features to improve security and data protection. Scalability is another big differentiator, as is the ability to deploy the same service in different environments.

In addition, we recognize the following deployment models:

• SaaS: These are available only in the cloud. Often designed, deployed, and managed by the service provider, they are available only from that specific provider. The big advantages of this type of solution are the integration with other services offered by the cloud service provider (functions, for example) and its simplicity.
• Private cloud: These solutions are deployed in a private cloud model that is a proprietary environment for a company. This environment belongs to only one entity. These solutions deliver advantages similar to those of public cloud solutions but give a company more control over the environment. This model is often used by companies with specific regulatory needs for their line of business.
• On-premises: These solutions can be installed on self-managed servers secured within enterprise infrastructure. This approach offers more control over update releases, resource allocation, and customization. Data security is another common priority when selecting this option. Often these implementations are more costly to deploy and maintain as compared to SaaS. While more complex to deploy and manage, some companies want the ability to control all aspects of operating the solution. These solutions are more flexible, and the user usually has more control over the entire stack with regard to resource allocation and tuning.

Table 1. Vendor Positioning: Target Market and Deployment Model

Table 1 components are evaluated in a binary yes/no manner and do not factor into a vendor’s designation as a Leader, Challenger, or Entrant on the Radar chart (Figure 1).

“Target market” reflects which use cases each solution is recommended for, not simply whether that group can use it. For example, if an SMB could use a solution but doing so would be cost-prohibitive, that solution would be rated “no” for SMBs.

3. Decision Criteria Comparison

All solutions included in this Radar report meet the following table stakes—capabilities widely adopted and well implemented in the sector:

• Backlog management
• Iteration and release planning
• Task management
• Agile framework support
• Risk and issue management
• Reporting and dashboards
• Collaboration capabilities

Tables 2, 3, and 4 summarize how each vendor included in this research performs in the areas we consider differentiating and critical in this sector. The objective is to give the reader a snapshot of the technical capabilities of available solutions, define the perimeter of the relevant market space, and gauge the potential impact on the business.

• Key features differentiate solutions, highlighting the primary criteria to be considered when evaluating an agile PPM solution.
• Emerging features show how well each vendor is implementing capabilities that are not yet mainstream but are expected to become more widespread and compelling within the next 12 to 18 months.
• Business criteria provide insight into the nonfunctional requirements that factor into a purchase decision and determine a solution’s impact on an organization.

These decision criteria are summarized below. More detailed descriptions can be found in the corresponding report, “GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Agile PPM Solutions.”

Key Features

• Financial management: Financial management functionality ties business value, cost, and priorities together. Tools must manage product-level budgeting and forecasting, allowing for different resource rates, multiple currencies, and external vendor interactions.
• Version management: Agile delivery is all about managing change, which is facilitated by centralized repositories for keeping track of those changes. Solutions must be able to maintain repositories for code with version control, and they should foster collaboration to allow multiple team members to work on projects simultaneously.
• Integrations and add-ons: Organizations often have preferences for specific development and ancillary tools and may not want to switch. Agile PPM solutions should include add-ons and integrations with common third-party products.
• Product roadmapping: Agile PPM solutions generally use a roadmap to describe how a product will develop. Organizations adopting an agile mindset must be able to view and interact with such a roadmap, which details the evolution of a product over time.
• Regulatory compliance: Compliance is a key requirement for certain industries that are highly regulated, and agile PPM solutions should have the functionality to ensure adherence to necessary quality and security standards. The ability to track and report on how features are developed is important in these industries.

Table 2. Key Features Comparison

Emerging Features

• Value stream management (VSM): VSM focuses on software delivery processes, assessing and improving efficiency (saving money) and effectiveness (adding benefit). VSM tools work using best practices, offering real-time insights to help decision-makers prioritize development goals, identify improvement areas, and increase innovation speed. VSM enables organizations to identify and address bottlenecks. It can promote effectiveness by offering measures that link return on investment, customer satisfaction, and other business-facing criteria. VSM practices and tools help organizations scale their efforts and deliver software-based innovation faster.
• Objectives and key results (OKR) management: With limited resources and the need to deliver technology faster, ensuring work is aligned with corporate goals and objectives is critical. Using OKRs on a strategic level and regularly reviewing them helps teams focus on the top priorities in a timely manner. It also allows teams to adjust to emerging market trends or shifting business priorities.
• Predictive analytics and predictive governance: Tools should leverage AI/ML to evaluate past activities and use that data to predict future actions, tasks, or reporting. It can detect anomalies, improve processes, and automate predictive processes for planning and assessment functions. Solutions should be self-teaching, which can help teams identify areas needing improvement and reduce time to market. Agile PPM tools will continue to benefit from this technology as uses expand.

Table 3. Emerging Features Comparison

Business Criteria

• Flexibility: The flexibility of a tool reflects how well it can adapt to different use cases across the organization, allowing users to do things differently without modifying the core functionality, use the tools they prefer, and engage more easily with others.
• Scalability: Solutions should have the ability to support their expanded use by the overall organization and the increased complexity that comes with evolving environments. This may involve growing numbers of users, additional product streams and reporting layers, and so on, all of which must be managed without constraints or bottlenecks.
• Ease of use: No matter how good a tool is, it won’t be adopted unless it’s intuitive and easy to use. Only minimal time and training should be necessary to learn to use the tool. Setup should be simple and intuitive, as should the UI, making it easy for users to navigate to various features.
• Security and compliance: Agile PPM solutions must address security and compliance requirements to ensure that sensitive data and critical systems are adequately protected. This includes testing for vulnerabilities, applying data encryption and access controls, and complying with specific government and industry regulations.
• Cost: The cost of an agile PPM solution includes multiple factors, both direct and indirect, such as licensing, scaling, and integration costs. Moreover, the increasing complexity of the solutions can drive up costs related to implementation, operations, and training and professional services.

Table 4. Business Criteria Comparison

4. GigaOm Radar

The GigaOm Radar plots vendor solutions across a series of concentric rings with those set closer to the center judged to be of higher overall value. The chart characterizes each vendor on two axes—balancing Maturity versus Innovation and Feature Play versus Platform Play—while providing an arrowhead that projects each solution’s evolution over the coming 12 to 18 months.

Figure 1. GigaOm Radar for Agile PPM

As you can see in Figure 1, this is a very innovative space. In this chart, Maturity is defined as the stability of platforms that exhibit somewhat slower change. Innovation identifies solutions that may be well-established in this market but continue to grow and evolve their functionality rapidly through acquisition or organic growth. Many vendors in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant also offer emerging technologies.

Vendors in the Leaders circle within the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant focus more on feature breadth and innovation while blending agile solutions with goals and financial management features. These solutions also provide an established suite of agile management modules along with multilevel financial information, OKR reporting, and value stream management.

Leaders in the Maturity/Platform Play quadrant have built platforms that center on engineering. They provide agile planning functions along with developer-focused features that support DevOps and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.

Challengers continue to enhance their respective solutions in support of both agile and engineering objectives and are worth assessing. Sometimes they don’t offer emerging technology such as financial management, OKRs, or VSM functionality but are likely to add it in the future. In addition, those that offer core agile functionality are often excellent choices for less complex teams or SMBs. They also can act as an add-on to more complex solutions. They can be priced effectively and may be easier to implement.

This analysis shows that there’s robust tooling in this space for any size company to leverage at every stage of its agile journey. Prospective buyers have a wealth of options to review when choosing an agile PPM tool; IT decision-makers should consider their use case requirements and IT complexity when evaluating solutions to find the best fit for their needs.

In reviewing solutions, it’s important to keep in mind that there are no universal “best” or “worst” offerings; there are aspects of every solution that might make it a better or worse fit for specific customer requirements. Prospective customers should consider their current and future needs when comparing solutions and vendor roadmaps.

5. Solution Insights

Aha!: Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Develop

Solution Overview
Aha! has two core products focusing on agile processes for development:

• Aha! Roadmaps is built for strategic planning. Users can define business objectives and connect them to product decisions. Strategy can be set at both the portfolio and individual product level. Portfolio or program managers can link work to high-level strategy above the products being managed, such as the corporate strategy, and track progress in real time. Whiteboarding was recently added to this product so that teams can move from ideation to planning seamlessly.

• Aha! Develop, which is integrated with Aha! Roadmaps, provides the ability to link strategy to delivery. This creates a unified backlog and contains functions that allow users to plan and execute work, including the ability to coordinate and prioritize a backlog of items, plan sprints and iterations, and track work as it progresses. It supports both scrum and kanban workflows. The tool added incremental functionality focused on the scaled agile framework (SAFe) for companies that need it.

Strengths
Roadmapping is one of the strongest features of the Aha! product suite, and it received a high score on this key criterion. Roadmaps are easy to use and can visually pull together key information from Aha! software and other systems such as Jira, AzureDevOps, and GitHub so managers can see in one place the status and priorities as teams progress toward key goals.

The tools are easy to use and configure and have extension capabilities and customization options that can help organizations tailor the user interface (UI) to fit their needs. Aha! provides kanban-style workflow boards at the initiative, epic, feature, and user stories levels to support mapping and streamline value delivery.

The suite provides integrations to source code repositories and some CI/CD pipelines to provide version management capabilities. This end-to-end visibility is a growing requirement in the agile planning world. Overall, the solution has integrations to over 45 products in the end-to-end pipeline available.

The suite has basic capabilities for loading cost and value to the tool manually. The Aha! Roadmaps Enterprise+ plan has a custom worksheet that customers use to manage financial data. It supports real-time updates via APIs.

Customers can assess portfolio options based on relative value and effort with an initiative scorecard made up of metrics that represent different aspects of business strategy — such as economic impact, competitive differentiation, and implementation effort. Aha! Roadmaps also provides capacity planning functionality to estimate the cost and effort it will take to implement new functionality.

Aha! is delivered only as a SaaS solution. There’s no private cloud option; however, it is ISO 27001 certified, providing the highest level of information security.

Challenges
Aha! currently lacks out of the box integrations and functionality to tie financial information to planning and development products. This information is one of several components that’s key to prioritization of the correct features for development. Aha! believes strategic planning is also a major component in prioritization.

Purchase Considerations
The solution has tiered pricing that’s cost-effective for companies of all sizes. For larger enterprises, this tool is often used to define the company and product strategy that feeds agile toolsets.

Aha! Roadmaps has three tiers: premium, enterprise, and enterprise+. All three plans contain:

• Aha! Ideas Essentials (including the ability to collect customer and employee feedback and prioritize ideas).
• Aha! Whiteboards Essentials (the ability to create whiteboards for collaboration with templates and custom capabilities).
• Aha! Knowledge Essentials (content management with templates and custom documents and AI).

The premium and enterprise tiers include the same functionality, but the enterprise version includes unlimited viewer and reviewer seats at no additional cost. The enterprise+ plan includes sophisticated functionality such as team capacity planning, automation, custom tables, and custom worksheets—as well as concierge-level support.

In order to conduct project and portfolio management with the integration to Aha! Develop, the enterprise level is needed. Aha! Develop has two tiers: essentials and advanced. Advanced is needed to work with Aha! Roadmaps. Both monthly and annual plans are available.

While most teams quickly implement Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Develop with no additional support, Aha! has a team of experts available to facilitate rollout to larger enterprises with complex work streams. Aha!’s team works closely with user teams to configure and implement the solution in four to eight weeks, depending on the complexity of the implementation. Training services are also available.

The focus is on supporting all of the teams involved in the product development lifecycle to help companies deliver greater value, faster. Use cases for Aha! solutions include all types of teams such as IT, Marketing, UX, business operations, product management, engineering, and product operations. The solutions can work across all types of industries and provide functionality to manage each phase of product development.

Radar Chart Overview
Aha! concentrates mostly on core agile functionality and offers some key features. It lands as a Challenger in the Innovation/Feature Play quadrant and continues to expand its key functionality. This solution is priced effectively and easier to implement than most. Aha! servers are the core innovation infrastructure for both large scale enterprise deployments and SMBs.

Apptio: Targetprocess

Solution Overview
Apptio Targetprocess is a flexible agile PPM solution for enterprises. Two main tools comprise this platform:

• IBM Targetprocess is a comprehensive agile planning tool that empowers business people and IT teams to adopt agile methodology and scale it across the organization. This solution connects teams with business objectives to ensure alignment and focus on the highest-priority business goals.
• ApptioOne is a financial management solution that ties financial data to operational data. The tool leverages industry-standard cost categories that facilitate analysis and planning and integrates powerful views into planning, budgeting, and forecasting.

While these solutions can be used as stand alone products, the integration of IBM Targetprocess with ApptioOne provides a powerful end-to-end portfolio solution.

Strengths
Apptio Targetprocess differentiates itself in the market through the flexibility of its overall platform, and it received a high score for this business criterion. The platform provides many out-of-the-box templates and frameworks to speed time to market and enables more complex organizations to customize to meet their needs.

The financial management capabilities available via ApptioOne are a key differentiator, facilitating a company’s transition from traditional IT funding for projects to a product-based agile funding model.

Apptio Targetprocess received a high score on the product roadmapping key criterion. The functionality includes end-to-end visibility from idea through prioritization, execution, measurement, and analysis. The tool provides clear links between activities, OKRs, and strategic direction. Progress is measured and tracked at all levels along the way, allowing stakeholders to see budget and spending on different OKRs.

ApptioOne has FedRAMP certification and Department of Defense (DoD) Impact Level 2 (IL2) certifications from the US government, a necessity for its public sector customers. This regulatory compliance feature is a key differentiator, and it received a high score on this key criterion. Targetprocess is not yet certified.

Apptio Targetprocess Value Stream Management supports VSM at any stage of implementation and can evolve alongside processes, approaches, and toolchains.

Challenges
While Targetprocess doesn’t have internal version management, integrations with other tools are available for version management and CI/CD pipeline functions. The tool, with its robust functions, is complex, and there is a learning curve. Some of the functionality requires developer skills to set up. In addition, some companies leverage professional services to facilitate the implementation, customization, and training of users. Training and familiarity with the UI are needed to make effective use of the product as soon as possible.

Purchase Considerations
Apptio Targetprocess is delivered only as a cloud-based, SaaS solution. The solution is licensed by user type, such as full user. There is a view-only license specifically for integrations. The company offers private cloud pricing as well. Professional services are not required but are highly recommended.

Apptio solutions are used across many industries from banking to manufacturing, including the US government agencies. The focus of the products is on joining IT and financial information to ensure project efforts are aligned with corporate goals and budget anomalies can be identified and reported. The use cases also include project and product management and strategic portfolio management.

Radar Chart Overview
Apptio focuses on blending agile solutions with goals and financial management features. It has a well-established suite of agile management modules along with financial information and OKR reporting. It is a strong Challenger in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant.

Asana

Solution Overview
Asana is a work management platform that supports agile planning, development, and collaboration across all levels of the enterprise including IT teams, executive management, and individual lines of business (LOBs). The solution is built on a proprietary data model called Asana’s Work Graph that supports all functions in the platform and was designed to optimize AI capabilities.

Strengths
Key features of this solution are collaboration and end-to-end roadmapping, with the aim of tying company goals and objectives to each layer of work. Extensive collaboration capabilities are built into the product, and there are integrations to tools such as email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, and Salesforce. The Work Graph data model leverages data relationships to provide users with information as they need it based on their role. The latest release includes enhancements to universal reporting, customizable reports, and dashboards, all of which leverage the extensive data in the Work Graph data model.

Asana workflow builder is a visual tool that facilitates the creation of workflows to better connect teams, organize work, and streamline projects.

Asana continues to invest in enterprise-grade enhancements around team alignment and coordination, visibility at all levels, and security and scalability.

Moreover, the tool is very intuitive and easier to use than others on the market, so it received a high score for the usability and ease of learning business criteria. Asana is accessible across a range of platforms, including web, desktop, and mobile.

Asana AI is embedded throughout the product, enabling the following functionality:

• Asana Smart status drafts status updates faster with GenAI that pulls from real-time work data to identify risks, roadblocks, and open questions.
• Smart summaries review action items and highlights from tasks and comments and can summarize tasks in Slack.
• Smart editor helps users write clearer, more compelling responses that strike the right tone and improve formatting.
• Smart fields automate the organization of projects to support collaboration with auto-generated custom fields.

Asana AI has numerous additional features planned throughout 2024.

Challenges
Areas for improvement include expanding the financial management functionality. There is budget-versus-actual reporting as part of universal reporting. However, bringing business value down to the feature level would help drive team alignment with company goals. While the tool has many integrations with key collaboration tools, improving bidirectional integrations to the CI/CD pipeline would position Asana better with the Leaders in this space. Resource management is fairly basic in this tool and Asana intends to invest in more advanced planning and forecasting.

Purchase Considerations
From a licensing perspective, Asana provides a tier-based set of plans. The starter level is focused on individuals and small teams and includes basic features to get started. The advanced level includes increased functionality, reporting, and security. The enterprise levels have extensive functionality with enhanced support and reporting. The enterprise level requires negotiations with sales and includes the advanced-level features with enhanced support and extensive security features.

Asana use cases focus on teams such as IT, HR, marketing, and senior management. It is used for goal management, organizational planning, resource tracking, idea intake, campaign management, and creative production.

Radar Chart Overview
Asana is working to expand its enterprise-level functionality. It concentrates mostly on core agile functionality and offers some key and emerging features including OKR capabilities. It’s positioned as a Challenger in the Innovation/Feature Play quadrant.

Atlassian: Jira, Jira Align, Confluence, Trello, and Bitbucket

Solution Overview
Atlassian offers an extensive suite of tools that covers planning, collaboration, operations support management, DevOps, and security. Our assessment focuses on the suite’s functionality for planning and collaboration. These tools can meet the needs of small companies as well as large enterprises:

• Jira Align for enterprise-wide planning
• Jira for team-level planning and delivery connecting projects and data to bring business and software teams together
• Confluence and Trello for collaboration and document management
• Bitbucket for version management

The three main products—Jira, Jira Align, and Confluence—together supply table stakes and key features, providing the enhanced capabilities of an enterprise solution. By itself, Jira provides table stakes-level functionality and can be useful for smaller, less complex companies. As of 2024, Jira Software and Jira Work Management have merged into a single product called Jira.

Trello, which can be used standalone or together with these products, is a visual, collaborative, and flexible work management solution that uses cards, boards, and lists to organize projects and teams. This versatile tool is easy to learn and use. Trello includes a bot that helps automate repetitive functions easily with minimal coding, which reduces the burden of repetitive tasks and makes it easier to enhance collaboration.

Strengths
These products allow flexible configuration and setup to meet the needs of many organizations, and they received a high score on this business criterion. However, taking advantage of this flexibility requires experience and training because the tools are not intuitive to configure and use.

Version management requires Atlassian’s Bitbucket, a Git-based source code management and CI/CD tool. Its deep integrations with Jira Software and Jira Service Management, Bitbucket enables teams to build end-to-end DevOps workflows on the Atlassian platform. Depending on your company’s toolset, it may be more advantageous to integrate a third-party solution for this function.

A key differentiator is Atlassian’s open toolchain approach. It has invested in a wide-ranging marketplace of apps and features that enhances its existing toolset. This includes extensive integrations to third-party products for DevOps, planning, testing, and support. These integrations allow an organization to plug Jira into its existing platform, and they contribute to Atlassian’s high score on the advanced integrations key criterion.

Challenges
Several tools are needed to complete the suite from an enterprise perspective, driving up complexity and cost. Jira is flexible but not intuitive to learn and configure, creating the need for administrators with previous knowledge of and experience with the suite.

Purchase Considerations
Most Atlassian products are priced in four tiers with increasing functionality. The first tier is free for up to 10 users. The standard, premium, and enterprise tiers each have a monthly or annual subscription option. Depending on the product/functionality mix, a company may be licensing multiple products. Jira Align is slightly different and is sold as a more traditional enterprise software experience that enterprise buyers will find familiar.

Atlassian also has a strong community of users that share ideas. In addition, Atlassian University is available for training.

Atlassian products support a number of key organizations such as IT, marketing, design, and operations. Jira Align allows organizations to align work across these functions to OKRs, including tracking and organizing the work, managing risks/dependencies, and optimizing investments.

Radar Chart Overview
Atlassian blends an established suite of agile management modules with goals and financial management features. It has strong scores across the decision criteria we evaluated and is positioned as a Leader in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant.

Broadcom: ValueOps

Solution Overview
ValueOps by Broadcom is an integrated agile PPM, VSM, and portfolio management solution that combines the Rally, Clarity, and ConnectALL platforms. It seeks to align business and IT processes and leaders, and these products integrate with the CI/CD pipelines for full end-to-end visibility and access to financial data. There are three main components to the solution:

• Clarity provides business-oriented investment-planning capabilities to organize and track work as defined by the organization, with customizable financial planning and investment objects, roadmap planning, and actionable insights generated from activities across the value stream.
• Rally supplies the agile project management capabilities to development and delivery teams with the capabilities they need to plan, track, and measure their work across multiple teams and programs with real-time visibility.
• ConnectALL integrates third-party tools in the software development and delivery value stream for seamless collaboration, bi-directional information capture and exchange, and automated event triggering.

Strengths
A key differentiator of Broadcom’s offering is that it lets users see the entire value stream, and it received a high score for including this emerging technology. The solution blends risks, OKRs, and status in dashboards to help pinpoint issues and drive efficiencies, and it allows users to identify risk dependencies and blocks. The information gathered from this data enables teams to learn from their processes and continuously improve them.

ValueOps provides ledger-grade transaction-based actuals capture combined with fiscal calendar-aware planning and budgeting at all investment levels. The solution’s financial management capabilities are used to manage long-term forecasts, short-term cost plans, and budgets and interface with legacy ERP systems and financial tools.

The data can be accessed via easy-to-use dashboards with automatic calculations of internal rate of return (IRR) and return on investment (ROI). The product tracks initiatives, value, and costs with a focus on strategy to ensure the right business goals are met. There’s visibility into teams and available resources, enabling more strategic assignment of the best resources for the work.

Robust, lightweight, visual, and collaborative, ValueOps roadmaps include details where users have them (OKRs, business cases, projects, programs, applications, and so on) but also provide options to engage directly with a business or delivery stakeholder to capture their needs and initiatives with no more detail than what is required on a Post-It note.

Rally’s features allow users to leverage different agile methodologies across the organization in one tool, with visibility for leadership.

Broadcom received a high score on the advanced integration key criterion. Its ValueOps solution integrates with other planning products and with issue management and development CI/CD pipeline products, allowing it to be used with existing tools for enhanced data, scalability, and flexibility.

It provides end-to-end traceability from investment to delivery. In addition, the ValueOps solution leverages additional governance and compliance functionality, such as pattern identification via AI to identify issues and specific risk objects within the solution to help to identify, catalog, and track governance and compliance issues.

Challenges
The Broadcom solution is a broad, extensive solution with strong capabilities across agile and portfolio management and VSM. Users should be aware that the cultural side of agile transformation and value stream management can be difficult while the solution is being implemented.

Purchase Considerations
Licensing is provided for all products with the Broadcom PLA licensing model. This can be extended to include many other capabilities from the wider Broadcom software portfolio including robust tools for NetOps, Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), DevOps, security, virtualization, and mainframe. Many combinations of these capabilities are offered depending on customer requirements. Within this model, customers can implement the ValueOps solution as a whole or choose to switch around among the Rally, Clarity, and ConnectALL solutions at no extra cost and with no further procurement cycles.

After procurement, customers often use the partner community to aid with implementation, especially to facilitate the culture change more so than product adoption. Using professional services is not required; customers have been able to get ValueOps established on their own with the right amount of dedicated effort. Customers are afforded all capabilities within the solution and choose their own timing to roll out the various capabilities (roadmapping, backlog management, financials, and so on).

Key use cases for the ValueOps solution include VSM, digital product management, enterprise agile planning (EAP), PPM, strategic portfolio management (SPM), new product development, enterprise architecture (EA) management, and application portfolio management (APM).

Radar Chart Overview
Broadcom ValueOps solution set focuses more on feature breadth and innovation, while blending agile solutions with VSM, goals, and financial management features. As a Leader in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant, it provides an established suite of agile management modules along with multilevel financial information and OKR reporting.

Digital.ai Platform and Digital.ai Agility

Solution Overview
The Digital.ai AI-powered DevOps platform bundles a number of products, including Digital.ai Agility, Digital.ai Application Security, Digital.ai Continuous Testing, Digital.ai Release, Digital.ai Deploy, and Digital.ai Intelligence.

Digital.ai Agility is the agile PPM tool. This product enables organizations to scale agile processes consistently across the enterprise. It includes all the core table stakes functionality and many of the key features such as product roadmapping and integrations. AI-driven analytics are available throughout all platform components.

Strengths
The Digital.ai platform encompasses the core Digital.ai Agility functionality blended with DevOps functions like version management and release and deployment management; it scored well on the version management key criterion.

Agility Sync is out-of-the-box functionality of Agility Professional and Premium editions that enables enterprises to connect to many popular solutions in place at enterprises today.

It also leverages AI analytics for workstream management to drive improvements and efficiencies in the processes. The analytics capabilities facilitate data-driven decisions and help find and fix—and even prevent—issues across the environment. The platform can also tie automated testing and results into the main processes.

The enterprise agile planning capability includes portfolio, solution, product, and team-level planning in a single tool. The platform allows organizations to define value streams and many supporting entities, such as products, ideas, portfolios, strategic initiatives, OKRs, stream-aligned teams, and budgets. It can align strategy and execution with OKRs as a structured approach to setting goals to focus teams on the most valuable efforts.

Challenges
The main gap in the product suite involves financial management. Digital.ai is a competent solution but could enhance the financial side of the house. The solution could be improved by adding the ability to tie financials and objectives to the work being done, either through more integrations to IT financial tools or through native development.

Purchase Considerations
The solution is subscription-based. It has three levels of packaging: essentials, professional, and premium, which offer additional value at each tier. The company offers professional services or technical account managers depending on customer needs, and support level can also vary depending on a customer’s needs.

Digital.ai products are available either as SaaS solutions or as fully self-managed cloud and on-premises solutions. With the SaaS solution, all upgrades, infrastructure, and support are included. There’s an option for upgraded premium support as well. The on-premises version requires an internal team to manage the infrastructure and software, upgrades, and so forth.

Key use cases for Digital.ai Agility include the ability to drive efficiency, manage value flow, optimize program investments, prioritize high-value products to build a revenue-driven software portfolio at scale, enhance developer productivity, optimize pipeline management, maximize capacity to reduce operational costs, and align technology investments to business outcomes.

Radar Chart Overview
Digital.ai has built a platform that centers on engineering. It provides agile planning functions, VSM, and strong OKR capabilities along with developer-focused features that support DevOps and CI/CD pipelines. It is positioned as a Leader in the Maturity/Platform Play quadrant.

GitLab

Solution Overview
The developers of GitLab wanted the platform to include not just agile planning functions but engineering-level deployment management, operations, and security as well. GitLab, therefore, provides a single platform for all DevOps processes, from agile planning to continuous integration, deployment, monitoring, and security. The core product is based on open-source technology.

Strengths
GitLab’s strengths derive from the way it aligns planning and execution. Many tools in this space rely on integration with third-party tools to provide version management and CI/CD functions. With GitLab, the end-to-end functions are available in one tool, and it received a high score on the version management key criterion.

GitLab’s VSM is another key differentiator, and it received a high score for this emerging technology. It includes customizable value stream reports, distribution of work analytics, and identification of bottlenecks.

The GitLab UI has evolved into a more user-friendly experience over time. It has also improved collaboration capabilities and easy-to-use dashboards.

GitLab has a number of audit controls with which to manage regulatory compliance. In addition, it has ISO26262 certification focusing on the automotive industry. It has also added functionality for education, the public sector, and financial services.

GitLab is a complete open-core DevOps platform. It’s available as a self-managed solution, multitenant SaaS solution, or single-tenant SaaS solution (GitLab Dedicated). GitLab self-managed can be hosted on-premises, in a private cloud, or in a public cloud of the customer’s choice. GitLab Dedicated is a fully isolated tenant that is hosted and managed by GitLab in an AWS region of the customer’s choice, providing infrastructure-level isolation and data residency controls for organizations in highly regulated industries that have complex compliance and data residency requirements.

Challenges
GitLab has basic financial capabilities for assessing the financial health of products and projects, information that’s useful in assessing whether a product is aligning with company objectives and producing the expected results. GitLab should include financial information along with technical project information to ensure that the value of the work aligns with company objectives.

Purchase Considerations
GitLab has a tiered approach to licensing. The entry level is free and has limits on users, storage, transactions, and features. Premium is ideal for scaling and multiteam coordination. It includes more users, features, and storage than the free version. The ultimate tier is geared toward enterprise organizations, with enhanced security, VSM, and improved license utilization.

GitLab is a development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) platform with agile and VSM capabilities. It has a broad set of use cases supporting engineering development, security, and deployment. For agile PPM in particular, the use cases focus on integrated agile and portfolio planning, streamlining processes, optimizing workflows, traceability and visibility, and gaining insights.

Radar Chart Overview
As a strong Challenger, GitLab is focused on agile processing and development, offering financial management, VSM, and solid DevOps capabilities. It’s positioned in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant.

IBM: Engineering Lifecycle Management

Solution Overview
IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) is a comprehensive end-to-end engineering solution ranging from requirements to systems design, workflow, and test management, extending the functionality of application lifecycle management (ALM) tools for better complex-systems development. It provides an end-to-end overview of software development that integrates seamlessly with ELM to enhance functionality:

• IBM Engineering Workflow Management is a collaboration tool that integrates development steps with planning and change management, builds optimization, and provides defect management and reporting.
• IBM Engineering Requirements Management enables scalable communication and interactions to let users collaborate on and validate requirements.
• IBM Engineering Systems Design Rhapsody enables collaborative design and modeling capabilities across the development lifecycle.
• IBM Engineering Test Management enables end-to-end test planning and management.
• IBM Process Governance enables users to author, tailor, and enact compliance processes for organizational and industry standards.
• IBM Reporting and Insights allows users to consolidate, publish, analyze, and visualize data for software and systems engineering in one view to speed up decision-making.
• IBM Integration Hub extends ALM with integrations to third-party tools.

Strengths
The integrated suite’s strength is managing complex solutions with developer-supported features around code tracking, version control with automatic tracking and unlimited suspend and resume capabilities, testing, and modeling. Advanced software version control, workspace management, distributed source control, and parallel development support for individuals and teams improves productivity by automatically tracking changes to artifacts.

The focus is on end-to-end visibility of engineering data. IBM ELM addresses highly regulated environments and large-scale development efforts supporting hundreds to thousands of developers.

ELM has the ability to align portfolios to strategic themes. It provides business context for portfolio strategy and decision-making, representing aspects of the enterprise’s strategic intent through associations to related organizations via value streams, solution trains, or agile release trains and tracked objectives at various levels of the organization.

Organizations can adopt a financial governance approach that funds value streams instead of projects, accelerating value delivery and reducing the overhead and costs associated with traditional project cost accounting. In addition, users can view the total market opportunity as well as the budgeted and allocated investment (when specified) for each organization in the portfolio with details that include the budgeted and allocated capacity based on the investment and its alignment by strategic themes.

A key differentiator is the underlying use of IBM Watson throughout to add AI/ML capabilities to each application. These factors contribute to its high score on the version management key criterion.

These tools can be deployed on-premises and run by the customer. There are two levels of SaaS deployment options for smaller companies. IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management Extended SaaS is a special offering in a single-tenant virtual private cloud with an IPsec VPN tunnel.

Challenges
IBM ELM is a comprehensive solution focused on engineering and complex development. It is geared to regulated industries, so it might not be a good fit for non-technical users in less regulated industries.

Purchase Considerations
While each product can be bought separately, they can also be purchased together as a single suite. The purchase can include a flexible token pricing mechanism that lets any user spend tokens for any of the products in the suite when needed; tokens are returned to the pool when not in use. This helps to reduce the cost and lessens the amount of unused software. This solution is more suited to large enterprises than SMBs, but they do have pricing for smaller organizations.

IBM’s ELM solution targets regulated industries such as aerospace and defense, automotive, medical devices, public infrastructure, and financial services. It includes full end-to-end traceability from idea to operation and design capabilities beyond standard agile PPM solutions.

Radar Chart Overview
IBM ELM is a Leader in the Maturity/Platform Play quadrant. It has built a platform that centers on engineering and provides agile planning functions along with developer-focused features that support DevOps and CI/CD pipelines. It also has extensive functionality for regulated industries.

Microsoft: Azure DevOps Services and Azure DevOps Server

Solution Overview
The Microsoft product suite includes Azure DevOps Services (including Azure Boards) and Azure DevOps Server.

• Azure DevOps Services provides integrated access to Azure Boards, Azure Repos, Azure Pipelines, and Azure Artifacts. The enhanced version has access to Azure testing tools.
  • Azure Boards contains core table stakes functionality including backlog management, multiple types of agile planning boards, roadmapping tools, sprint planning, teamwork management, and reporting.
  • Azure Pipelines helps build, test, and deploy with CI/CD that works with any language, platform, and cloud. Users can connect to GitHub or any other Git provider and deploy continuously.
  • Azure Repos allows users to get unlimited, cloud-hosted private Git repos and collaborate to build better code with pull requests and advanced file management.
  • Azure Test Plans help users test and ship with confidence using manual and exploratory testing tools.
  • Azure Artifacts allow users to create, host, and share packages with the team and add artifacts to the CI/CD pipelines with a single click.
• GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps enables users to develop securely from inception to deployment.
• Azure Marketplace gives access to more than 1,000 apps and services built by the community.

Azure DevOps Server provides similar functionality in an on-premises solution.

Each of these Microsoft solutions can be used by themselves or as a part of a bundled solution. They are fully integrated. The tools also integrate with collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams and Slack, as well as with numerous CI/CD pipeline products such as GitHub.

Strengths
These solutions have extensive integrations with other open-source products and tools at every step in the software lifecycle. This includes planning, testing, CI/CD pipeline integrations, and release management. The solution works well with the Microsoft platform but is also open and independent of Microsoft, which enables it to work with non-Microsoft platforms. The open platform allows a company to leverage current tools while adopting the Azure DevOps Services suite.

Azure Boards allows teams to track work with configurable Kanban boards, interactive backlogs, and planning tools. It has drag-and-drop sprint planning, flexible work item tracking, end-to-end traceability, and reporting.

Teams can protect their workloads quickly with built-in controls and services in Azure across identity, data, networking, and apps. GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps is an application security testing service that is native to the developer workflow. It empowers DevSecOps teams to prioritize innovation and enhance developer security without sacrificing productivity.

Microsoft includes extensive offerings in regulatory compliance areas for many services; however, documentation on how these might apply to Azure DevOps Services and Azure DevOps Server was not found.

Challenges
Financial management is missing from the Azure DevOps solutions. We were unable to find documentation on extensions or integrations for this functionality. Financial management is a key component of modern portfolio management tools, which should include the ability to track budgets, actuals, and forecasts for projects and teams. The ability to tie project costs to objectives and key results is missing as well. Microsoft indicates that this solution is focused more on the engineering aspects of delivery.

Purchase Considerations
Microsoft offers cloud and on-premises versions. Azure DevOps Services is a cloud-based solution that ranges from free to a monthly charge for scaled services. Documentation was not found regarding any private cloud offering for Azure DevOps Services. Azure DevOps Server provides a secure on-premises solution containing the same functionality as Azure DevOps Services. A team can get started for free, and a flexible monthly subscription is then available. After 12 months, more free services are bundled with the subscription. Each of the modules can be added separately or bundled together.

Azure DevOps is an engineering-focused suite of modules that can provide idea tracking, planning, development, deployment, and maintenance capabilities for companies in many different industries. The solutions allow teams to break down silos and collaborate across teams. They can help focus teams on continuous learning and enable change through technology.

Radar Chart Overview
Microsoft continues to enhance its solution in support of both agile and engineering objectives. It has strong DevOps capabilities but doesn’t currently offer financial management or VSM functionality; however, is likely to add it in the future. It lands as a Challenger in the Maturity/Platform Play quadrant.

monday.com

Solution Overview
monday.com is a work operating system (Work OS) with customizable products where organizations of any size can manage every aspect of their work . Organizations can use the platform to manage everything from software development to marketing and sales. The solution has two modules that enable it to meet the features of this report:

• monday work management allows teams to focus on executing tasks, projects, and processes efficiently and achieve shared goals at scale.
• monday dev helps teams manage development from product strategy to launch.

Strengths
monday.com has a visually engaging and intuitive UI. The product is highly adaptable to suit an organization’s agile journey. It provides templates and workflows to get users started. This monday.com platform covers all of the core planning and execution functions of product and project management. The table stake features are included in the solution in an easy-to-understand manner.

The platform uses intuitive table-like board views as the stepping stone by which users can customize and visualize their data and build flexible workflows to suit their needs. Workflows are intuitive to construct and can leverage existing templates or use custom creations. These factors contribute to a high score on the usability and ease of learning business criterion.

The solution has a robust collection of workflows, templates, and boards and includes reporting, automation, and integration features. This functionality encourages teams, SMBs, and enterprises to make it their end-to-end solution for management and visibility. monday.com has open APIs that allow developers to create integrations to other solutions to augment the end-to-end lifecycle around the current platform.

The monday.com PMO work management ensures all tasks and initiatives align with high-level goals and OKRs.

The solution has integrations to many applications and tools that help with project management, collaboration, and bug tracking. In addition, the company has an apps marketplace with applications that can augment the solution for specific needs. They have continued to expand the CI/CD pipeline integrations since our last report and now support tools such as GitHub, GitLab, and Azure DevOps.

Challenges
monday.com should continue to expand its out-of-the-box support of integrations to the most commonly used tools in the financial management area. For complete end-to-end project visibility, at a minimum, integrations to key financial solutions would be beneficial, especially for the enterprise-level solution.

Purchase Considerations
monday.com is delivered as a cloud-based SaaS solution only. It has cost-effective tiered pricing, starting with a free version and scaling to an enterprise-level solution. At each level, enhanced functionality is added. SMBs that are less complex can take advantage of the solution’s lower-priced tiers with some of the best pricing for these products. Most complex organizations will need the enterprise version.

monday.com supports a variety of industries. The focus is on gaining greater visibility and transparency over the work being done with robust dashboards and project overviews of where initiatives stand, setting goals and objectives to ensure everyone is moving in the same direction with purpose–while staying connected to wider company goals–and providing an intuitive, unified, and easy to adopt solution that empowers small and big teams to manage tasks and projects in one collaborative space.

Radar Chart Overview
In the Innovation/Feature Play quadrant, monday.com is a Challenger as it expands its enterprise-level functionality. It concentrates mostly on core agile functionality and offers some key and emerging features.

OpenText: Agile PPM and ValueEdge

Solution Overview
OpenText provides two solutions for planning and portfolio management: Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) and ValueEdge. OpenText PPM drives business value through comprehensive portfolio optimization and management, which ensures projects are on time, on budget, and achieve stated goals. Organizations can maximize the use of resources, track costs, and gain insights to handle complex efforts to achieve corporate goals.

ValueEdge is a modular end-to-end SaaS solution that encompasses strategy through delivery. The core of the solution is powered by ALM Octane, a unified platform designed to help teams prioritize, align, and focus their project activities. It enables easy collaboration for managing product delivery, quality, process auditability, and change impact visualization. ValueEdge focuses on improved production efficiency and mitigation of risk.

Strengths
Integrations are a key differentiator for these products. Both OpenText PPM and ValueEdge have extensive out-of-the-box integrations and connectors with other OpenText products and many top products for CI/CD pipelines, testing and planning tools, security, source code management, and other solutions that are part of the delivery lifecycle.

Regulatory compliance is another key differentiator for OpenText. The solution contains capabilities and prebuilt templates for several highly regulated industries that require end-to-end traceability, change management, and auditability. The platform is designed to provide full history tracking and audit trail capabilities that capture every change made by users or administrators. Add-ons to the platform for regulated industries include variant management and detailed requirements management functionality.

The solution has direct integration with financial and resource management modules. It integrates directly with key modules–such as financial management, resource management, and time management—allowing users to comprehensively manage projects.

OpenText has a newly released What-If-Analysis scenario planning, which helps organizations to reduce business uncertainties and make informed decisions that optimize investments that drive better business value. It allows users to see real-time change impact insights and to analyze the impact different scenarios have on business goals, timelines, strategic alignment, and cost and resource constraints and values. In addition, with one click users can apply the best scenario and make adjustments to the affected content for execution.

Another key strength is that AI-powered analytics provide insight into root cause analysis, predictability of delivery, development velocity, project duration, quality levels, and improvement recommendations throughout the entire software lifecycle. OpenText plans to continue its investment in VSM, optimization, and AI-based predictive analytics.

The ValueEdge strategic planning module is a modern, lightweight turnkey solution focusing on digital product use cases. Users can choose this platform or fully integrate the more robust OpenText PPM platform into ValueEdge.

Both products are now FedRAMP and CSA L2 certified. FedRAMP empowers agencies to use modern cloud technologies with an emphasis on the security and protection of federal information.

Challenges
OpenText continues to enhance the new ValueEdge platform to encompass broader use cases across agile PPM and VSM. Users should be aware that the cultural side of agile transformation and value stream management can be difficult to navigate as the solution is implemented.

Purchase Considerations
A variety of licensing options are available for OpenText PPM and ValueEdge.

For OpenText PPM the options include:

• Perpetual and subscription licenses for off-cloud customers
• Comprehensive (license and service) offering on cloud
• Flex on-cloud (includes flex consumption of multiple products)–customers can adapt their usage to their evolving needs
• Named and concurrent licenses
• Flexible pricing models designed to match specific customer needs and functional requirements
• Enterprise Suite license for both power and casual users that includes all modules
• Fine-grained license by module–mostly in renewals
• FedRAMP licenses
• License swap/conversion available via ZeroDollarOrder

For ValueEdge:

• Bundle license includes entitlement to ValueEdge Strategy, Agile, Quality (read-only), and Insights for a comprehensive view of the portfolio work from planning into execution
• Named and concurrent licenses
• Aviator (AI) edition licenses

OpenText ValueEdge is a cloud-based agile PPM, VSM, and DevOps platform. Users can adopt modules at their own pace to perform activities from planning to building, testing, delivering, and running applications.

Radar Chart Overview
OpenText continues to focus on expanding its feature breadth and innovation while blending agile solutions with goals and financial management features. Landing as a Leader in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant, it continues to enhance an established suite of agile management modules along with VSM, multilevel financial information, and OKR reporting.

Planisware

Solution Overview
Planisware Enterprise is a single source code software product that covers all SPM, EA, and PPM capabilities out of the box. It is a single software product on its own private cloud. Planisware is an enterprise-grade software vendor that can support, in one single software product, both strategy and delivery, for both agile and waterfall development lifecycles.

Strengths
Planisware is a methodology-agnostic solution that can support all major agile frameworks including kanban, scrum, lean, and SAFe, in addition to waterfall frameworks. Different teams may leverage different methodologies within the same instance, and this all rolls up to a consolidated agile portfolio. Configurable boards and workflows exist for the major agile methodologies including portfolio epic boards, program increment (PI) planning boards, kanban boards, scrum sprint boards, and team boards.

The solution includes roadmapping capabilities at the product and portfolio levels, allowing end users to tie live data and dates into a single view for leadership. This includes being able to tie key strategy data points like OKRs to the execution of the work being done.

Planisware comes with several prebuilt integrations like Jira and Azure DevOps while providing a no-code mapping update allowing admins to configure what is interfaced. It also supports the Open Data Protocol (OData) framework allowing easy interfacing with any additional tools not included out of the box.

It supports value stream management at the strategy level, allowing for mapping and budgeting by value stream. At the execution level, Planisware tracks key flow metrics to ensure a consistent flow of value throughout the development process.

Challenges
Planisware customers have typically interfaced with industry-standard code version management systems to manage their code repositories. Planisware is a robust solution with many different components that require configuration and learning. The solution can take time to learn and become an accomplished user of.

Purchase Considerations
The Planisware solution is licensed on a per role, per seat basis. It comes with six different license types: TimeCard, Team Member, Essential, Premier, Portfolio Manager, and Configuration Studio. Discounts are applied based on the use case and total user count (volume discount). Ultimately, the price per user depends on the total number of licenses purchased. While it does not have a free or community version, it offers options to minimize risk exposure from new customers while demonstrating value (through configurability and scalability) of solutions.

Due to the high level of configurability in the system (which is a differentiator), the implementation of Planisware always requires some level of professional services. These options are generally available to not only configure the solution but also help customers adopt portfolio management best practices.

The main use cases include product development, digitalization and IT, software development, capital planning and engineering, and professional services support. The solution focuses on PPM, SPM, PSA, EA, EAP, and collaborative work management (CWM).

Radar Chart Overview
Planisware is a Leader in the Maturity/Platform Play quadrant. It has built a platform that centers on hybrid planning functions and a variety of agile planning methods. It also provides strong VSM and OKR capabilities.

Planview: Enterprise Agile Planning

Solution Overview
Planview’s Enterprise Agile Planning solution provides a scalable enterprise-level lean portfolio management (LPM), agile program management, and agile delivery platform that supports organizations from strategy to delivery, no matter where they are on their transformation journey. The solution helps to improve time to market, do more with existing teams, and confidently invest in the right priorities to deliver the value that matters most to the business and customers.

Strengths
The platform is agile framework agnostic, providing customers across all agile maturity levels with adoption options. It supports a more traditional project management approach, a hybrid mix of work styles, or support for pure agile work all in one platform. The solution provides “single pane of glass” visibility from strategy, planning, funding, and delivery to outcomes. This includes the support for and visualization of financials, planning and funding, scenario planning and trade-off analysis, integrated OKRs, interactive roadmaps, and a persona-based user experience augmented by unique AI capabilities (such as an integrated AI assistant, sentiment analysis, and embedded in-app help).

Enterprise Agile Planning connects to external solutions regardless of agile tool or methodology by leveraging over 60 prebuilt, no-code integrations. These integrations are a differentiating element that helps extend visibility into delivery and execution tools outside of Planview and serves as the foundation of Planview’s VSM solution.

Enhanced agile interactive roadmaps that range across products, teams, and all types of work with dependencies are a key differentiator. The solution received a high score on the product roadmapping key criterion. The roadmaps promote collaboration, guide execution, and connect strategy, investments, resources, and projects to ensure an organization is delivering products of value in a timely manner. Planview continues to enhance the ease of use of interactive roadmaps for everyone from teams to executives.

Planview also scored well on the financial management key criterion. LPM provides the links between team planning and execution and the funding and forecasting of the efforts in flow. This solution helps users prioritize work based on value and cost, and it includes workstream mapping functions to help identify inefficiencies so teams can take action to continuously improve.

Planview Copilot is a new generative AI-powered, conversational interface that provides domain augmenting capabilities to executives and leaders. It answers questions using a combination of historical patterns, data models, and textual inputs that are derived from resource, budget, and scheduling data. The initial release is intended for digital business leaders to understand trends and quickly identify ways to improve productivity.

Challenges
Planview has a comprehensive product supporting agile PPM. It should focus on enhancing the ease of use of the product. This will reduce the training needs and time required for different roles to adopt the product.

Purchase Considerations
Products in the Planview solutions suite are available as SaaS solutions for both public and private clouds. In addition, companies may choose to install some portions of the application on-premises.

The solution is licensed by subscription roles: Team Members, Full Users, and Administrators. The solution can be licensed into tiers based on customer user cases. There are separate tiers for team-level kanban or scrum, team-of-teams product planning, and full LPM/SAFe. A free trial is available for basic use cases. Professional services are not required to implement the basic solution; however, more advanced use cases require an implementation package.

Planview supports numerous use cases across different industries including LPM, agile program management, agile team delivery, project and program portfolio management, digital product management, SAFe and other agile frameworks, hybrid portfolios and programs, scrum teams, kanban/Lean teams, VSM, and flow methodology.

Radar Chart Overview
Planview solutions have a strong focus on feature breadth and innovation, while blending agile solutions with VSM, goals, and financial management features. With a well-established suite of agile management modules along with multilevel financial information, extensive VSM tools, and OKR reporting, it is a Leader in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant.

ServiceNow: Strategic Portfolio Management

Solution Overview
ServiceNow’s focus is to provide enterprise visibility, enhanced usability, and effective prioritization. The Strategic Portfolio Management solution aligns strategy with work effort. This coordination enables planning, tracking, and delivery of value across the organization. The solution leverages the ServiceNow Now Platform, which provides visibility at every step, from idea to operations.

Strengths
ServiceNow has simplified the solution into two levels of bundled functionality that provide scaled capabilities to organizations at different levels, with the ability to scale to a more complex portfolio management plan when necessary. The products have the ability to run a hybrid agile environment that includes scrum, a scaled agile framework, and waterfall, if needed. These factors contribute to a high score on the scalability business criterion. This alignment streamlines deployments into one package and supports it with simplified pricing. More advanced functionality, such as goals and OKRs, value streams, and predictive intelligence is available only in the professional package.

The standard package is best suited for traditional planning, basic project portfolio management, and basic out-of-the-box functionality. The professional package focuses on agile or hybrid planning, strategic portfolio planning, and increased flexibility and configuration.

ServiceNow also received a high score on the product roadmapping key criterion; roadmapping is a key component of the solution package. The roadmaps are visual and flexible and allow visibility throughout the pipeline. These roadmaps align business strategy with delivery.

A key differentiator of this solution is its performance analytics module, which is included in the Strategic Portfolio Management professional package. The tool leverages the data in the platform to analyze KPIs, identify thresholds for analysis, and provide visibility into results that drive forecasting and predictions to facilitate decision-making. The product provides more than 600 out-of-the-box KPIs and users can also customize their own. The dashboards are intuitive and user-friendly.

The Strategic Portfolio Management solution ties together the demands and costs of projects and portfolios for enhanced decision-making and allocation of funding across the enterprise. The scenario planning component has visibility into investments for prioritization. It allows users to project several potential scenarios, then select the best solution to implement. Strategic Portfolio Management is fiscally calendar-enabled, with multiple currency capabilities as well. Some users find the integration of all the modules in the Strategic Portfolio Management solution complex to learn. As the functionality grows, so does the learning curve.

The integration with key DevOps tools and operations lifecycle is a significant enabler of faster delivery.

Challenges
ServiceNow is focused on the continued enhancement and alignment of the UX to provide a consistent experience across the solution. Additional out-of-the-box configuration capabilities would enhance the usability of the solution.

Purchase Considerations
ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management offers two packages and is sold per user. The standard package includes core agile planning, resource management, and core portfolio planning focused on single teams and small groups of teams. The professional package includes all features of the standard package with added functionality like strategic portfolio planning, a scaled agile framework, and predictive analytics focused on customers with multiple teams managing complex dependencies.

Various licensing models are used across the ServiceNow Now Platform. ServiceNow also offers custom services with the Impact solution offering to accelerate time to value for customers.

ServiceNow is a SaaS cloud-based platform. It has its own data centers and customer data remains on-platform. Certain customers operate on-premises, self-hosted instances. ServiceNow uses zero-trust access, cloud encryption, platform encryption, and column level encryption enterprise (CLEE) with a ServiceNow Vault architecture. Additionally, the ServiceNow Government Community Cloud provides IL4 and IL5 services.

The solution supports multiple industries and personas for the agile PPM solution across the ServiceNow Now Platform. ServiceNow SPM, including EAP, is being used by customers globally across industries and services.

Radar Chart Overview
ServiceNow is a Leader in the Maturity/Platform Play quadrant. It is centered on engineering and provides agile strategy and planning functions along with developer-focused features that support DevOps and CI/CD pipelines.

Smartsheet

Solution Overview
Smartsheet is a project management and work management platform based on a spreadsheet approach. As a collaboration tool with a familiar spreadsheet-like interface, the solution helps teams plan, track, and manage projects in real time.

Strengths
Smartsheet for PPM is a flexible, collaborative platform that allows operational leaders to create replicable project management frameworks while empowering project teams to be more nimble, creative, and efficient.

The solution covers all of the table stakes in this report from backlog and task management to iteration and release planning. One of the benefits Smartsheet offers is its ability to share sheets with internal or external team members. Even if some users don’t hold a license, they can still collaborate. This is a cost-effective approach when users have multiple projects simultaneously with many stakeholders that need access.

The solution supports many different agile frameworks, including SAFe (enterprise version), kanban, and waterfall. In addition, the solution provides standard project management templates as a streamlined way for organizations to track and approve new projects while seeing key metrics across all projects in real time.

The solution integrates out-of-the-box with Slack, Google Workspace, Jira, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Teams to bring all its information and context onto a single platform.

Challenges
Smartsheet lacks some of the key features provided by other solutions in this market such as version management and roadmapping. It also lacks value stream management or predictive analytics, both of which are key to managing and improving delivery for larger organizations.

Purchase Considerations
Smartsheet has four tiers of pricing for licensing on a monthly cost-per-user basis. It starts with a free option to learn about the product. It progresses to the pro version for up to 10 editors. The recommended solution is the business level for unlimited editors. The enterprise version has the most comprehensive functionality and requires involvement with sales for pricing. There are additional costs for add-ons such as control center, resource management, connectors, and data mesh. Standard support is an add-on for all plans, except enterprise. Professional support is also an add-on across all pricing tiers.

Smartsheet is a project management software that offers a range of benefits for retail, education organizations, and finance companies, as well as IT PMO departments that continually need to manage multiple projects. It is used across a variety of industries. Many of the organizations are small to midsize and vary in complexity.

Radar Chart Overview
Smartsheet solutions concentrate on core project functionality. It has lower scores across the decision criteria we evaluated and doesn’t offer some key features. As such, it is positioned in the Entrant circle of the Innovation/Feature Play quadrant. It’s worth noting that the solution is priced effectively and easier to implement. Smartsheet mainly supplies core agile functionality for a team or SMB or acts as an add-on to more complex solutions.

Wrike

Solution Overview
Wrike is a modernized platform for work management. The solution aligns strategy, planning, and execution along with team communication and collaboration. It connects multiple teams, processes, and tools in one platform, enabling organizations to break down silos and align toward shared strategies and objectives. It provides full visibility and traceability of effort and outcomes as work flows through an organization.

Strengths
The dashboards and screens can be customized according to business needs and the way each team works. The tool focuses on the automation of repeatable, mundane tasks to increase efficiency.

Wrike leverages AI processes for predictive risk identification. In addition, it enables the creation of predictive tasks that send alerts and information to users as data is analyzed. These alerts help minimize time spent analyzing data and pinpointing areas for action. In addition, Wrike leverages AI to provide productivity benefits, with features such as offering an automatic summarization on long threads of comments.

Wrike provides core financial management with rate cards for the organization. The reporting software uses this information for project forecasting, comparing forecasts to actuals. This functionality provides visibility into the financial situation of initiatives, including whether they’re on budget.

Wrike provides over 400 integrations and connectivity to other solutions. Wrike’s enterprise-grade security provides administrative and cloud data controls. Wrike Lock adds encryption keys and prevents bleed-over between projects. Advanced features include user authentication, role-based access control (RBAC), and 99.9% uptime.

Cross functional workflows, such as agile portfolio management, are a focus of Wrike’s recent roadmap efforts–for example, adding flexible templates and blueprints specifically for roadmapping and product delivery.

Challenges
Wrike has focused on building a strong work management platform that is easy to use and is integrated with other best-of-breed tools found across many organizations. It should focus on adding key and emerging features to support more enterprise organizations focused on continuous improvement.

Purchase Considerations
Wrike is available as a SaaS solution. There are several editions (free, team, business, enterprise, pinnacle) with increasing functionality and cost. This tiered pricing model provides a cost-effective way for a smaller, less-complex organization to start using Wrike. With experience, a company can move to a more advanced level of service with greater functionality. All paid plans include standard support globally. Wrike also has several add-on modules for integration, project syncs, and marketing that are available for users on their business, enterprise, and pinnacle plans.

Wrike supports use cases across departments such as IT, marketing, PMO, product development, and professional services. The solution can provide project management, process optimization, special industry-based solutions, and department-focused solutions.

Radar Chart Overview
Wrike focuses more on feature breadth and innovation while blending work management agile solutions with goals and financial management features. As such, it lands as a Challenger in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant.

Zoho: Zoho Projects, Zoho Sprints

Solution Overview
Zoho is a cloud-based software suite that offers business and productivity tools. It offers project management tools for both waterfall and agile projects. The offerings provide extensive planning and reporting, project budgeting, built-in collaboration, issue tracking, and more. Zoho’s project management solutions are offered as single products, multiple integrated products, and as a part of the larger Zoho One platform. It uses internal networks and data centers to deliver cloud services globally.

Strengths
Both Zoho Projects and Zoho Sprints are integrated with other Zoho services and the tool integrates with popular third-party tools such as Jenkins, GitHub, Bitbucket, Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, and Zendesk, making integration capabilities extensive and robust.

Zoho provides generative AI through an integration between Zia and Open AI. This functionality enables users to create status and forum posts and add project descriptions.

The tool offers a wide range of universally used prebuilt reports focusing on key agile metrics: velocity, burndown, burnup, cumulative, latency, sprint process time, and item process time. Completed sprints and canceled sprints are a few of the prebuilt sprint reports that are provided. Additionally, users can access burnup, burndown, and progress reports for epics, releases, and timesheets.

From a security and compliance perspective, Zoho owns the entire data stack. Customer data and backups are both encrypted using the 256-bit advanced encryption standard. Zoho has a strong privacy commitment not to sell customer data to anyone else for any reason. Along with being HIPAA and GDPR compliant, it does not allow third-party cookies on the sites even though that comes at the expense of valuable Google Analytics data. It has numerous compliance certifications such as GDPR, ISO 9001, SOC 2, and HIPAA.

The tool has a minimal learning curve and is built to easily onboard users who migrate from basic tools like Excel. Users can get started with work in just a few days to a week at most. There is little to no training needed. The tool settings are straightforward and easy to configure. Zoho assists with implementation and offers support through the entire onboarding process.

Challenges
The solutions cover the table stakes and many of the key features of this report. As the solutions mature, it would benefit the users to get the additional key features such as product roadmapping capabilities and OKR management.

Purchase Considerations
Zoho offers tiered pricing for each of its project management solutions. Both start with a free tier for up to three users to get started. Zoho Projects also has a premium plan and an enterprise plan. Each tier has increased functionality.

Zoho Sprints also has a starter plan (12 users by default) and an elite plan (up to 100 users). The top plan is the premier plan. Zoho also provides free implementation support and offers premium support at a nominal fee.

Zoho offers online solutions with both free and paid plans and caters to various verticals including IT, financial services, and manufacturing and construction. It supports use cases around planning projects over Gantt, project planning with backlog, iteration and release planning, agile reporting, managing resources, visualizing and tracking projects, collaboration across dispersed teams, agile framework support, tracking time and budget, hybrid project management, issue management, and portfolio management.

Radar Chart Overview
Zoho solutions concentrate on waterfall and core agile functionality. It has average scores for many of the decision criteria we evaluated and doesn’t offer all of the key features, so it lands as a Challenger in the Innovation/Feature Play quadrant. It’s worth noting that the solution is priced effectively and easier to implement. It mainly supplies core agile functionality for a team or SMB, or acts as an add-on to more complex solutions.

6. Analyst’s Outlook

The solutions in this Radar reflect a broad spectrum of options for consumers. All vendors in this market are maturing and adding features on a regular basis—whether they’re positioned in the Maturity or Innovation halves on the Radar chart. In particular, agile PPM solutions are increasingly adding functionality to their products for financial management and DevOps, either through direct features or via integrations with other tools that specialize in these areas. Several vendors are exploring emerging technologies such as VSM, predictive analytics, and data governance. Many are also exploring the best ways to leverage generative AI in their solutions.

There are solutions that are user friendly and intuitive and cover the core table stakes functionality—the basics for an agile PPM solution. They make it easy to begin or advance agile ways of working and are often free for the most basic versions, with the ability to eventually scale and pay for more advanced features. While these vendors may not have scored as high as the more comprehensive solutions, they are still solid solutions for less complex organizations–they just have fewer of the bells and whistles–and they can also be more cost-effective.

Some vendors that provide core table stakes features are expanding into the enterprise platform arena with a more holistic platform for their users, adding features or integrating with modules such as financial management and DevOps pipelines. In addition, many are focusing on regulatory compliance and security across various industries to expand their customer base.

Tying in financial management with the ability to forecast and roll up data across a portfolio and/or the enterprise is critical for more complex IT organizations that need to ensure teams are focused on the top-value priorities and that spending is on track.

For 2024 and beyond, the ongoing blending of VSM and DevOps functionality and visibility with agile will be the key to driving increased value to a wide range of businesses. In addition, predictive analytics and predictive governance powered by AI/ML are growing areas of interest, which we expect to see reflected in agile PPM tools and related integrations in the near future. Generative AI is also beginning to have an impact on helping to reduce workloads and augment analysis and descriptions.

Purchase decisions concerning PPM tools should focus on the complexity of a company’s IT organization and its maturity in the agile space. Newer, less complex organizations can easily benefit from very cost-effective tools without all the extra features. More complex organizations need to take a hard look at the requirements and difficulty related to implementing the functionality and/or integrations with DevOps pipelines and existing financial management.

How easily this agile PPM functionality can be used to bring visibility into processes for teams and leaders is important for large, changing, complex, and agile-mature organizations. Moreover, companies for which regulatory compliance and security are important should seek solutions that can satisfy those requirements. Most solutions offer a cloud-only option. Those focused on regulatory compliance often offer an on-premises or a private cloud solution as well.

To learn about related topics in this space, check out the following GigaOm Radar reports:

• GigaOm Radar for Value Stream Management (VSM)
• GigaOm Radar for Enterprise Process Automation (EPA)

7. Methodology

*Vendors marked with an asterisk did not participate in our research process for the Radar report, and their capsules and scoring were compiled via desk research.

For more information about our research process for Key Criteria and Radar reports, please visit our Methodology.

8. About Dana Hernandez

Dana Hernandez is a dynamic, accomplished technology leader focused on the application of technology to business strategy and function. Over the last three decades, she had extensive experience with design and implementation of IT solutions in the areas of Finance, Sales, Marketing, Social Platforms, Revenue Management, Accounting, and all aspects of Airline Cargo, including Warehouse Operations. Most recently, she spearheaded technical teams responsible for implementing and supporting all applications for Global Sales for a major airline, owning the technical and business relationship to help drive strategy to meet business needs.

She has led numerous large, complex transformation efforts, including key system merger efforts consolidating companies onto one platform to benefit both companies, and she’s modernized multiple systems onto large ERP platforms to reduce costs, enhance sustainability, and provide more modern functionality to end users.

Throughout her career, Dana leveraged strong analytical and planning skills, combined with the ability to influence others with the common goal of meeting organizational and business objectives. She focused on being a leader in vendor relationships, contract negotiation and management, and resource optimization.

She is also a champion of agile, leading agile transformation efforts across many diverse organizations. This includes heading up major organizational transformations to product taxonomy to better align business with enterprise technology. She is energized by driving organizational culture shifts that include adopting new mindsets and delivery methodologies.

9. About GigaOm

GigaOm provides technical, operational, and business advice for IT’s strategic digital enterprise and business initiatives. Enterprise business leaders, CIOs, and technology organizations partner with GigaOm for practical, actionable, strategic, and visionary advice for modernizing and transforming their business. GigaOm’s advice empowers enterprises to successfully compete in an increasingly complicated business atmosphere that requires a solid understanding of constantly changing customer demands.

GigaOm works directly with enterprises both inside and outside of the IT organization to apply proven research and methodologies designed to avoid pitfalls and roadblocks while balancing risk and innovation. Research methodologies include but are not limited to adoption and benchmarking surveys, use cases, interviews, ROI/TCO, market landscapes, strategic trends, and technical benchmarks. Our analysts possess 20+ years of experience advising a spectrum of clients from early adopters to mainstream enterprises.

GigaOm’s perspective is that of the unbiased enterprise practitioner. Through this perspective, GigaOm connects with engaged and loyal subscribers on a deep and meaningful level.

10. Copyright

© Knowingly, Inc. 2024 "GigaOm Radar for Agile Planning and Portfolio Management (PPM)" is a trademark of Knowingly, Inc. For permission to reproduce this report, please contact sales@gigaom.com.