The pandemic has made clear that we need to rethink many aspects of the way we work. Whether it’s an increasing awareness of the necessity of risk management, a greater requirement for efficient collaboration tools while working from home or a general trend towards more agile technologies, one thing is clear; having the right software tools at our disposal is more important now than ever.
Business Insights estimate that a combined total of $1 million is wasted by enterprises every 2 seconds due to poor implementation of project management strategy, much of which may be overcome by having the right management tools. But how do you decide what the right tools are for you? Terms like Project Portfolio Management (PPM), Corporate Performance Management (CPM) and Business Intelligence (BI) are often circulated but there is rarely a discussion into the distinctions and overlaps between them, making it difficult to know what to look for.
Technical Definitions:
Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Software: describes the centralised management of the processes, methods, and technologies used by project managers to analyse and collectively manage current or proposed projects based on numerous key characteristics
Corporate Performance Management (CPM) Software: describes various processes and methodologies involved in aligning an organisation’s strategies and goals to its plans and executions in order to control the success of the company.
Business Intelligence (BI) Software: comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis of business information. BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations.
PPM compared to BI:
BI tools can be thought of as the backbone of PPM; they take large amounts of raw data, analyse it and convert it into useable information. PPM tools then allow you to take that information and use it to make well-informed, data-driven decisions for your projects. Because of this, BI and PPM functionalities may sometimes overlap. For example, predictive modelling is a BI tool that uses AI to combine data mining and probability information, and use it to predict specific business outcomes. This in turn is extremely useful for PPM functionalities such as resource management and risk management.
BI compared to CPM:
When it comes to the differences between BI and CPM tools, there is a lot of debate and misconception. Some people view CPM as a subcategory of BI, while others take the opposite view. But complications aside, BI tools add new functions to your system that are designed to analyse large bodies of information and identify patterns and trends. By contrast, CPM tools simply automate existing processes, predominantly financial, in order to monitor your progress. In this sense, much like with PPM, BI can be seen as the backbone of CPM and it is therefore not surprising that many overlapping features can be found between them. For example, the statistical analyses that BI tools provide can then allow you to use CPM tools to plan, measure and adjust aspects of your business to ensure activities are aligning with your goals.
The future is integration:
As we continue to see a rise in companies working from home, it is becoming more important than ever to have the right tools available for efficiently managing complex projects and collaborating on them. Having multiple confusing acronyms for different platforms may no longer be conducive to this; Predictive Analytics suggest that 67% of business users are still toggling between standalone spreadsheets and different software to get the information they need, resulting in more errors as well as time wastage.
While all three have different functionalities at their core, they all work by analysing data and reporting it back with real time updates, involving tools for collaboration and data visualisation so that complex data can be understood quickly and with ease. Used in unison, they can compliment each other to help you manage the day-to-day running of complex projects and business processes. The future therefore lies in the integration of these tools into one, easy-to-use platform; Execview is getting a head-start on this integration, already providing CPM and BI tools within a PPM platform.
Written by Alana Bowen-Burford
