Focus on winning portfolios that bring innovation and competitive advantage

Agile Practices Move from Experiment to Necessity

“While waterfall remains a valid project management method for large projects... it has serious flaws for many types of software development efforts. Writing most or all project requirements upfront when project sponsors and technical staff have very low levels of certainty about how things should be built wastes resources because business conditions (and therefore requirements) change over time,” said the report.

“Application delivery professionals must become more nimble to survive,” said the report. “Big-bang projects that deliver working software on 18- to 24-month project cycles make it impossible for business leaders to pivot when business conditions change quarterly, monthly, and even daily due to new threats, competitors, and opportunities.”

The Faster Pace of Agile Development Exposes New Challenges for the Business

“Agile development disrupts operations and governance processes such as project/portfolio management (PPM). That disruption drives a bifurcation in the tools market - traditional PPM doesn’t suit the lighter-weight/Lean governance processes that Agile project require. Organizations that fail to adopt governance processes that span traditional waterfall and Agile will struggle,” said the report.

“Manual data entry and ponderously slow feedback loops from planning-as-usual don’t enable firms to pivot as business conditions change. Today’s organizations need to see and trust information as it develops to make decisions that will help them outpace the competition,” the report continued.

Top-down Planning Must Align with Bottom-up Project Management

“In the absence of PPM, top-down strategic planning often began life in standalone spreadsheets, limiting traceability and disconnecting business cases from business-value delivery. The multiple disconnects between demand and delivery occluded visibility into resource capacity and demand - the net result was that politics, rather than strategic needs, governed prioritization,” said the report.

“The need to support Lean and Agile processes makes today’s PPM tool choice more difficult. Above-the-line tools support strategic planning focused on values, risks, and benefits. Below-the-line tools focus on managing demand and day-to-day work,” said the report.

“Rally shines for managing Agile projects”

Forrester’s below-the-line segment evaluates how vendors break down the walls between strategic planning and execution. Rally was named a below-the-line leader. Forrester’s above-the-line segment evaluates how vendors support top-down strategic planning. Rally was named an above-the-line strong performer.

“Rally emphasizes project health but is strong on Lean portfolio management. Rally emphasizes progress and performance more than value. Rally does, however, capably manage demand for new work and prioritizes requests based upon Lean principles for allocation to project teams,” said the report.