Coming of age

IT’S TIME TO
TAKE WEB-BASED
PROJECT
PORTFOLIO
MANAGEMENT
TOOLS
SERIOUSLY.

Convenience rules when it comes to managing project tasks. And in today's hyper-connected world, that typically means turning to the Web.

Venerable purveyors of desktop and server-based project tools—including Microsoft, Niku (now CA Clarity), Planview, Primavera and Welcom— made the leap to online interfaces years ago. Some other upstart companies wrote their project software in Web format right from the start and ran it entirely from their own sites. Most went down with the dot-com bust, but a few have prospered.

I tried out two leaders, @task Enterprise and Daptiv Project Portfolio Management. Both are riding a wave of interest in SaaS (software as a service) that allows users to avoid the hassle of maintaining the applications on their own computers.

DAPTIV PROJECT PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT

Daptiv's portfolio management heritage is older than that of @task—and it shows. The company's Project Portfolio Management software provides more in-depth reporting and a better ability to drill down to project details. That said, some of its forms and screens have a technical feel that could translate to a slightly longer learning curve.

Users can customize the dashboard by selecting from potential content, such as a task list or favorite daily report. Daptiv also has a very cool interactive Gantt chart that lets users drag resources onto it to see the effects.

All reports in Daptiv are exportable in PDF or Excel formats. Users can control who sees what information with highly granular permissions tools. I tried project manager, resource manager and executive views. When I switched to the latter, more portfolio-level financial content appeared on my dashboard, along with tabs for capacity planning and approvals.

Daptiv plays up the software's built-in document-management solution, complete with secure history logs and versioning tools aimed at helping with compliance processes, including those tied to Sarbanes-Oxley. The company also says its software has more interactivity among elements and offers better support for programming and customization than @task. But my tryout showed the Daptiv claims to be true only up to a point.

@task ENTERPRISE

AtTask admits to playing catch-up with Daptiv in an effort to incorporate portfolio tools. Ease of use has been the selling point of the company's @task since its debut six years ago. As is often the case, though, this is accomplished by conceding a little ground in feature richness.

But the company's upgrade issued in February marked a watershed, with new modules for business cases, demand management, capacity planning, portfolio optimization and scorecards.

The portfolio tools are nicely structured to align projects with business goals. For example, the default setting on my test “sandbox” required me to use a neat form to draft a business case before letting me into the project-request form.

A portfolio optimizer pulls information from business cases so users can play with portfolio variables, such as costs, risks and expected ROI. Projects can then be scored based on their alignment with goals. There are also other tools to facilitate post-mortem reviews.

The software is most often used for projects that share milestones, enforcing best practices by allowing teams to template successful projects.

The makers of @task tout the depth of its business intelligence features, especially its report builder, designed to make it easy to select, extract and neatly present all the data in every portfolio. My import of an old .MPP file was the cleanest I have ever seen. All my human resources and schedule items were reformatted in @task without error and my business cases easily converted to beautifully typeset PDFs that would make a good impression in any boardroom.

The next frontier? Work that doesn't fit neatly into projects. AtTask recognizes a big opportunity in using the software for collaboration and is working on an upgrade that facilitates unstructured work with new document-management and social networking tools. Also on tap: support for agile development methodologies.

THE VERDICT

I‘m impressed by how much @task and Daptiv have evolved from the rather simplistic versions I tried back in 2003.

They both now claim to handle portfolio management in addition to core project functions, automating true project portfolio management by populating financial tools with realtime project data. The interaction goes both ways, ensuring that projects meet broad organizational goals by providing both the project teams and the executives who oversee portfolios with accountability to each other.

I was surprised to find each solution only has a short list of direct integrations for third-party tools—Microsoft Project, Oracle and a few of the other usual suspects. But the option of custom integration tools, along with importing and exporting standard files, provide other ways to merge data.

Both have dashboards that give users at-a-glance summaries of project status and show the entire portfolio's impact on resources and the bottom line. Both come with serious capacity planning or resource-management modules to ensure these steps get proper consideration in the project portfolio management process and resources are optimally employed. Such features will be especially useful to project managers struggling with tight budgets.

Collaboration is another key feature of both tools. After all, building a business case and monitoring a portfolio's compliance with organizational goals requires effective communication across departments and hierarchies.

Picking a winner is hard. Neither beats the other by much in features or ease of use. Daptiv has a few more in-depth portfolio tools, while @task has a more elegant, comfortable user interface.

Overall, AtTask has done an impressive job of adding serious portfolio tools that compare favorably to Daptiv's. With project portfolio management becoming more of a company-wide collaboration than an academic task for specialists, the happy medium offered by @task ends up to be the better choice. PM

David E. Essex is a U.S.-based freelance journalist specializing in IT.