Portfolio management software for organisations running many projects
When individual projects run but nobody can say whether the overall picture holds: WORKSPACE.PM condenses project data into portfolio metrics automatically — as SaaS, managed hosting or on-premises from Germany.
What is portfolio management software?
Portfolio management software does not steer the individual project but the entirety of an organisation's undertakings.
Where project management software organises tasks, dates and responsibilities within one project, portfolio management software — also called PPM software, for project portfolio management — answers the questions one level up: which undertakings contribute most to company goals? Where do projects compete for the same people? And which projects stop when the budget is cut?
The practical benefit only emerges when both levels are connected. If project and portfolio data are kept separately, the typical PMO situation arises: project managers maintain their tool, the PMO maintains a spreadsheet alongside it, and the two diverge within a fortnight. WORKSPACE.PM runs both levels on one data foundation — portfolio metrics derive from approved project data rather than from a downstream report.
Project management or portfolio management software?
The terms are often used interchangeably but describe different levels of control. Both questions should be answerable in the same system.
Project management software
- Tasks, dates and responsibilities
- Schedule with dependencies and critical path
- Progress and status report per project
- Team collaboration in day-to-day project work
- Question: is this project on plan?
Portfolio management software
- Prioritisation and selection of undertakings
- Budget and capacity distribution across projects
- Cross-project dependencies and risks
- Condensed metrics for management and board
- Question: are we working on the right projects?
In WORKSPACE.PM both levels are the same system. When a team member completes a task, project progress and the portfolio metric change immediately — no interim report, no second set of data to maintain.
What matters when choosing
Six criteria on which portfolio management software is decided in practice — regardless of which vendor you eventually pick.
One data foundation, not a chain of interfaces
Portfolio metrics should derive from project data, not from a nightly import. Check whether the project and portfolio levels really are the same system or two coupled products.
Capacity verifiable before budget
A portfolio only becomes steerable once you can see whether the scheduled undertakings are feasible with the people available. Look for a workload view across all projects, not just budget totals.
Play decisions through beforehand
Budget cuts and postponements should be testable in a copy of the portfolio before they take effect — with a visible delta against the baseline rather than as a calculation on paper.
Governance with evidence
Approvals need an owner, a deadline and an escalation when nothing happens. What matters is that every decision remains traceable afterwards, including for audit.
Method neutrality
A real portfolio runs classic, agile and regulated undertakings side by side. Software that enforces a single method merely shifts the problem into data maintenance.
Deployment model and data sovereignty
Portfolio data is strategy data. Clarify early whether the solution is cloud-only or can also run on-premises — and in which country the data resides.
The feature set at a glance
Four building blocks that work on the same data foundation in WORKSPACE.PM.
SaaS, managed hosting or on-premises
Portfolio data reveals an organisation's strategy. So you decide where it lives — the feature set is identical across all three models.
SaaS in the cloud
Operated in ISO 27001 certified data centres in Germany. From 99 € per month including five accounts, with no setup effort.
Managed hosting
Dedicated instance on infrastructure of your choice, operated and updated by us. From 499 € per month.
On-premises
Full installation in your own data centre on Linux or Windows servers. The data never leaves your infrastructure.
There are no editions and no features reserved for a particular deployment model.
Frequently asked questions about portfolio management software
Answers on scope, adoption and operation.
A reliable indicator is the effort behind the status report. As soon as several people regularly gather figures from different sources so that management gets an overview, the coordination effort exceeds the benefit of the individual tools. In practice this sets in from around fifteen to twenty projects running in parallel, but it depends more on interdependence than on sheer count: ten projects competing for the same specialists need a portfolio view sooner than fifty independent ones.
They are the same category. PPM stands for project portfolio management; German-speaking markets more often say portfolio management software or multi-project management software. All the terms mean software that steers several projects together rather than each one separately. Pay less attention to the label than to whether the project and portfolio levels are genuinely connected in the product or amount to two modules with an interface between them.
No. Portfolio metrics derive from data maintained in the project anyway: schedule, task progress, budget and approved status reports. A separate report to the PMO becomes unnecessary because aggregation happens in the system. Effort therefore shifts from reporting back into actual project work — usually the strongest argument towards project managers during rollout.
In stages. It has proven effective to build a partial portfolio with a few projects first and run it alongside the spreadsheet until the metrics agree. Existing project plans can be imported from MS Project, Excel and CSV. Only once the partial portfolio holds do the remaining undertakings follow. This takes longer than a cut-over date but avoids the state where nobody knows which version applies.
At portfolio level, budget consumption, schedule adherence, progress and risk exposure are available, each aggregated automatically across the hierarchy. Per project, earned value analysis provides the CPI and SPI indices. Risks can be assessed with a Monte Carlo simulation to estimate the range of possible impacts. In addition, the capacity view shows whether the scheduled undertakings are feasible with the people available.
Yes, entirely. Alongside SaaS operation from German data centres and managed hosting, an on-premises installation on your own Linux or Windows servers is available. The feature set is identical: portfolio hierarchy, scenarios, approval processes, reporting and all interfaces are available self-hosted too. For organisations whose portfolio data must not leave their own infrastructure this is often the decisive criterion.
Steer a portfolio instead of collecting projects
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