Acuity PPM is a light-weight portfolio administration answer designed to help the choice, planning, and execution of a number of tasks concurrently. You need to use it to optimize and prioritize tasks primarily based on return on funding and simply handle your group’s challenge portfolio. Nonetheless, restricted role-based permissions and reporting capabilities imply different PPM options may very well be extra appropriate for some customers.

Acuity PPM brand logo for Crazy Egg Acuity PPM review

Acuity PPM In comparison with the Finest Challenge Portfolio Administration Software program

We’ve reviewed the best project portfolio management tools and located a number of high-quality alternate options to Acuity PPM. These Golden Eggs enable you get an in-depth image of particular person tasks whereas offering different distinctive or distinctive advantages.

Monday.com is a brilliant versatile and customizable device that permits you to juggle a number of tasks concurrently with out breaking a sweat. Get started on a 14-day free trial.

Hive affords a number of collaboration options that assist with communication and transparency amongst staff members who work on a number of tasks in several combos. Try Hive for free for 14 days.

Asana is essentially the most user-friendly PPM software program however boasts a number of superior options that simplify portfolio administration. Start a 30-day trial to experience the premium features.

Acuity PPM: The Good and the Unhealthy

We used Acuity PPM for over two weeks as part of our analysis to grasp its capabilities as a challenge portfolio administration device. This helped us achieve an in-depth understanding of each the nice and dangerous facets. Let’s take a fast take a look at the place Acuity PPM rises to the problem and falls quick.

What Acuity PPM Is Good At

Acuity PPM is extremely user-friendly challenge portfolio administration software program. It has an intuitive and easy-to-use interface designed to drive consumer adoption from their first login. Nonetheless, it’s additionally not missing in superior options for PM wants like reporting and useful resource administration.

Person-friendly: For many organizations, managing challenge portfolios with out software program could be problematic, however utilizing PPM software program appears too sophisticated. Acuity PPM offers an approachable, intuitive answer that’s straightforward for first-time customers. Sections are clearly marked in a clear, uncluttered interface that shows info in a well-known tab-and-pane design.

Acuity PPM demo portfolio

Actual-time challenge visibility: Acuity PPM not solely offers you a single system to handle all tasks throughout your portfolio, however you can even get an eagle-eye view of total progress and useful resource utilization. Use the software program to determine and handle potential bottlenecks and points sooner, serving to stop challenge delays and value overruns. 

Challenge scoring: Giant organizations will love Acuity’s enterprise-grade options, permitting the software program to deal with portfolio administration at an unbelievable scale. Prioritization can at all times be powerful the extra you’re juggling, however you may faucet into Acuity PPM’s challenge scoring mannequin to judge the chance and reward of pending and backlogged endeavors. Plus, make the most of the software program’s work consumption options to overview and approve challenge proposals and solely tackle the perfect tasks. 

Useful resource administration: One in every of Acuity PPM’s strongest virtues is its useful resource administration talents. With it, you may simply optimize the utilization and workloads of your individuals, tools, and supplies.

Acuity PPM demo portfolio showing monthly numbers

Lean on this platform’s complete useful resource planning and scheduling, together with leveling and allocation, to stability workloads, scale back useful resource conflicts, and stop over-allocation. Because of this, you’ll develop into extra environment friendly over time, resulting in higher revenue on every challenge you end.

Flexibility and scalability: One other important benefit of Acuity PPM is its customizability. Tailor the software program to fulfill your distinctive organizational, portfolio, or challenge wants. Acuity PPM helps a variety of challenge administration methodologies, together with hybrid, Agile, and waterfall. Plus, seamless integrations with common instruments like Microsoft Challenge and Google Sheets additional lengthen Acuity PPM‘s means to scale as much as meet broader wants.

Wealthy characteristic set: Don’t let the straightforward consumer interface idiot you; Acuity PPM offers enterprise-grade performance that considerably simplifies portfolio administration. For example, its roadmaps characteristic is helpful for visualizing challenge timing and sequencing from each a chicken’s eye and a granular degree. Use it to determine dependencies and keep away from potential conflicts.

The sturdy reporting and analytics capabilities of Acuity PPM additional permit you to observe KPIs and make extra knowledgeable selections. And the core options for portfolio monitoring allow you to centralize all standing stories in a single place, enhancing real-time reporting and visibility into your pipeline.

What Acuity PPM Is Missing 

Acuity PPM rises to the problem for organizations of all sizes. However like some other software program, it additionally has its personal set of disadvantages for some customers and one main barrier by way of its pricing. Let’s dive into what Acuity might enhance upon.

Time-consuming setup Regardless of Acuity PPM‘s easy and intuitive interface, getting all the pieces configured to work the way you need it to takes a while. Person setup is concerned, and the wealth of options means there’s numerous frontend work by way of configuring views, sources, stories, and extra. Be ready for prolonged onboarding in your staff members, too, as it could take time for them to rise up to hurry and use the platform successfully.

Insufficient role-based permissions: Whereas it could actually accommodate giant organizations, Acuity PPM ought to work on making its consumer permission and position settings extra sturdy. It ought to permit challenge homeowners and managers to limit permissions at each challenge section as wanted, so solely the appropriate units of eyes can see personal particulars associated to a challenge, corresponding to financials. That is significantly essential for organizations coping with extremely delicate or categorised tasks or extremely regulated industries.

Dashboard customization: Presently, Acuity PPM doesn’t have a really customizable dashboard. This isn’t a critical drawback, because the default design is considerate and information-rich. However if you wish to preserve observe of particular KPIs or metrics, you might discover it inconvenient. Additionally, the truth that different challenge portfolio administration software program affords customizable dashboards doesn’t work in Acuity PPM’s favor.

Excessive price ticket: Acuity PPM principally has Fortune 500 firms as its customers, and its costly pricing serves as additional proof. We’ll get into pricing specifics in a bit, however along with a fairly excessive base worth, you’ll need to buy add-ons and different extra modules if you wish to customise the software program to fulfill actually particular necessities. That is additionally unique of the price of coaching and help, which is why organizations with restricted budgets might not have the ability to absolutely benefit from Acuity PPM’s capabilities.

Acuity PPM Choices and Pricing

Other than its light-weight PPM software program, Acuity PPM additionally affords a PPM Maturity Calculator. Let’s dive into what the principle software program prices and the way a lot you’ll must pay to make use of the calculator.

Acuity PPM

Acuity PPM software interface with headline that says "This is What Beautiful PPM Software Looks Like"

Acuity PPM’s portfolio and challenge administration software program might offer you some sticker shock at first. Pricing begins at $599 monthly for the PPM Starter plan, however that’s a company-wide price. You’re not paying per consumer, so in the event you run a big staff, this month-to-month price could also be similar to (or maybe higher than) paying for 50 or extra seats on an alternate platform.

The Starter plan bundles collectively important portfolio monitoring, challenge and portfolio timelines, standing stories, challenge logs, threat logs, and useful resource planning capabilities. 

Subsequent up is Acuity PPM Necessities, which is $999 monthly. This plan provides challenge scoring, work consumption administration, and risk-versus-value evaluation. For those who want useful resource capability and staff utilization options, you’ll wish to step as much as Acuity PPM Plus, beginning at $1,300 monthly.

There’s additionally a custom-priced Enterprise tier that unlocks higher safety, bespoke coaching, and software program integrations. 

It’s value noting two huge issues that may have an effect on your pricing and possibly result in you paying lower than the costs listed above. First, Acuity will work along with your staff to construct a plan primarily based on solely the characteristic modules you want to use. That may permit you to combine and match from among the packages we simply mentioned and never need to pay the total plan worth.

Acuity additionally has a tiered low cost system for firms that decide to a 12-month, 24-month, or 36-month settlement. These agreements present a further 10%, 15%, and 20% low cost. That may go a good distance on the higher-priced plans which are upwards of $1,000 monthly. 

Acuity PPM Portfolio Administration Maturity Evaluation Calculator

Example of Acuity PPM maturity assessment summary results

Use Acuity PPM’s portfolio administration maturity evaluation calculator to judge your staff’s present degree of maturity in the important thing areas of portfolio administration. 

Based mostly in your enter, it assigns you a rating calculated utilizing six sub-categories: 

  • Portfolio governance
  • Portfolio definition
  • Portfolio optimization
  • Challenge and portfolio efficiency administration
  • Useful resource administration
  • Portfolio knowledge and evaluation. 

You need to use this rating to raised perceive the varied facets of portfolio administration. The particular elements inside every sub-category will enable you determine every challenge’s strengths and weaknesses. The corresponding drop-down with maturity standards is nice for assessing staff efficiency in opposition to business requirements. 

You may develop an enchancment plan and observe progress over time utilizing these insights.

Whereas you will get your portfolio administration maturity evaluation rating totally free, Acuity PPM additionally offers a {custom} report for $99. This report will embrace extra detailed info and a PowerPoint model of the model’s maturity mannequin, which could be helpful for monitoring your present PPM maturity.

Acuity PPM in Abstract

Acuity PPM is designed to help the choice, planning, and execution of many tasks directly. Sporting a user-friendly and intuitive interface whereas giving enterprise-grade management over tasks, it’s an awesome device for stopping challenge delays and value overruns at scale. 

Acuity PPM’s versatile, scalable, and sturdy useful resource administration talents are commendable. Nonetheless, its costly price ticket and some different limitations might make different PPM software program options a greater match primarily based in your wants. Monday.com and Asana, for instance, are equally user-friendly at a significantly better worth level for small groups, whereas Hive is exceptionally suited to managing a dispersed staff of distant challenge staff.

Or, simply be taught extra about all the class at giant and all of the software program choices in it. Study extra to make an knowledgeable resolution by studying our submit itemizing our top picks for project portfolio management.


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