Questions to ask any PPM software vendor and why the right ones depend on who's asking
What to expect in this vendor-neutral guide
Guide provided by: Bubble PPM Software
A globally-operating leader in the field of
PPM Software
Questions to ask a PPM software vendor and why the right ones depend on who’s asking
A vendor-neutral guide from the team at Bubble PPM
Author disclosure:
Most of what follows has nothing to do with which PPM software platform you eventually choose – it’s about making sure the right people in your organization are asking the right questions before a vendor is selected.
Estimated read time: 7 minutes
- Introduction
- Why you shouldn’t stop at analyst reports and vendor grids
- The same software, but two very different conversations:
- Where Bubble PPM fits in
Introduction
Investing in project and portfolio management (PPM) software is rarely a decision one person makes alone. Ask a PMO Director, a Finance Director and a project manager what “good” looks like from the same platform, and you’ll get three different answers. The Finance Director wants a defensible three-year investment cost. The PMO Director wants governance and audit-readiness. The project manager just wants his or her Friday afternoon back from status-chasing.
Most PPM buying guides flatten all questions into one generic list “20 questions to ask a PPM software vendor before you buy their software”, as if a Chief Operating Officer and a project coordinator should walk into the same vendor call with the same script. In practice, the questions that actually expose whether a platform will work are different depending on who’s asking and what they stand to lose if it doesn’t.
This guide splits them accordingly, into questions for that senior leaders should ask and questions that project managers and their teams should consider.
If we’ve missed anything, or you think there’s better questions that can be asked email us HERE
Why you shouldn’t stop at analyst reports and vendor grids
It’s tempting to let a Gartner or Forrester report – or a G2 grid – do the shortlisting for you. They’re useful starting points, but treating them as the answer rather than an input causes two specific problems worth knowing about before you rely on them.
First, analyst quadrants score vendors against criteria the analyst firm sets, and those criteria tend to reward breadth: global support footprint, size of professional services organisation, depth of adjacent modules. That’s a reasonable proxy for “which vendor is safest for a 50,000-employee multinational,” but it says very little about fit for a mid-market PMO running a specific delivery methodology in a specific sector. A vendor can sit outside a “Leaders” quadrant simply because it chose not to compete for enterprise-scale accounts, not because its product is weaker for your use case.
Second, review-site grids like G2’s are built substantially from review volume and market presence, alongside satisfaction scores. Market presence correlates strongly with marketing budget and company size – a vendor with ten times the sales headcount will generally collect reviews faster than a smaller, more specialised one, regardless of how happy either set of customers actually is. A “top right” position tells you a vendor is well known and reasonably well liked. It doesn’t tell you whether it’s configurable enough to match how your organisation actually runs a gate review, or whether its pricing works for your headcount.
The practical takeaway: use analyst reports and review grids to build a longlist and sanity-check that a vendor is a stable, going concern – then set them aside and run your own evaluation using questions specific to your organisation. That’s what the rest of this guide is for.
One scoping note before we get into it: this guide deliberately stays broad and platform-agnostic. A handful of meatier, more specialised topics deserve their own dedicated treatment rather than a rushed paragraph here, so you won’t find them below – this is about the questions that hold up regardless of your sector, delivery methodology or deployment size.
The same software, two very different conversations
Before the question lists, it’s worth being explicit about why the split matters. The two groups aren’t just asking about different features, they’re protecting against different failure modes.
Table 1: The different mindset and concerns of each group
Keep that table in mind as you read the two sections below and, ideally, bring both groups into the room during vendor evaluation rather than letting one answer on behalf of the other.
Where Bubble PPM fits into this
We’d rather you use the questions above with any vendor than skip straight to a sales pitch – that’s genuinely the point of writing this. However, since we’re the ones publishing the advice, it’s fair to point you towards a few of our own resources.
If you’re a member of the leadership team:
More information is available in either of these third-party reviews of Bubble PPM. Note: Links to 3rd party websites open in new window.
You can also read more on our page for senior leaders.
If you’re a member of the project delivery team:
You can also read more on our dedicated page for project managers.
Conclusion
If the questions above feel like the right ones for your organisation, the most useful next step is simply to ask them – to us – or of anyone else on your shortlist. If you’d like to put them to us directly, you can submit a question or request a demo. Bring either or both your leadership team and your project managers to the conversation and we’ll go from there.
If you’ve had a look around our site and feel that Bubble PPM isn’t for you then accept our best wishes for the rest of your search.
As a final word – Remember, selecting a PPM solution partner is ALL about identifying the provider that fits your unique needs best. The road to finding that fit should be a journey and not a race.
