Collaborative Work Management is a market term that represents a category of work platforms where teams, departments, and even entire businesses can manage their work in one place. The Collaborative Work Management market consists of vendors offering task-driven workspaces that support business users in work planning and execution.
Project and portfolio management (PPM) software manages project portfolios and the projects associated with each portfolio. PPM software is used to organize resources and activities across multiple project portfolios as well as maintain interdependencies between portfolios.
Collaborative Work Management sits in the sweet spot of workplace productivity between ad-hoc collaboration tools and more niche offerings like PPM. It can be thought of as the connective tissue that streamlines work happening in disparate tools like your Microsoft Office or Google suite and email & messaging apps, and it provides a single source of truth for internal and external teams to create, plan, manage, collaborate, and report on work and processes.
Portfolio and Project Management, on the other hand, represents a category of work platforms that are function-specific, and intended for planners to align programs and projects into portfolios. PPMs are designed primarily for project management offices (PMOs) with dedicated portfolio, program, or project managers, and they are much more cost-prohibitive.
Download The Forrester Wave™: Collaborative Work Management Tools, Q4 2022