PPMLite

Like many ideas, PPMLite was born out of necessity.  While working in Big Company Land, we struggled with a broken and inefficient solution to managing and communicating our project portfolio:

• Weekly portfolio status involving 25-30 people and 150+ projects merged into one spreadsheet.  Good luck with that!
• Monthly portfolio reviews which included status and analysis merged into one spreadsheet.
• Responding to ad hoc questions like — How many cost savings projects did we do for Client X last year? — would trigger a flurry of emails, phone calls, and swags . . . literally adding up to thousands of dollars in time and opportunity costs.
• No standard project management tool used across the various departments and business units; and no willingness (and rightly so) to commit to a one-size-fits-all solution.

As it turns out, there’s a significant gap in the market to addressing these common needs:  Excel at one end and expensive and complex applications at the other end. And nothing in between. Excel isn’t really viable once you get beyond 2-3 users.  Meanwhile, high-end solutions require companies to commit to a single, proprietary tool that’s simply overkill, even for most IT depts, and un-learnable for everyone else.  And no other tools are designed for the majority of us who are visual thinkers.

PPMLite intends to fill that gap with an easy-to-use, affordable and effective tool to manage project portfolios across a range of functional areas, including marketing, operations, sales, IT, etc.