The 2024 Trends in Project and Portfolio Management 

Project and portfolio management has not slowed down in 2024, and Gartner has released its 2024 strategic portfolio management framework, processes and tools roadmap. This is to help organisations determine where to invest for the most return in effectively managing their portfolios and projects.  

Sensei follows a best practice process when designing and implementing portfolio and project management solutions and is aligned to the Gartner approach. Here is our take on the trends we see emerging, which is informed in part by the Gartner analysis but also considers our recent market experience and where we see our clients are investing in their project management maturity journeys. 

We hope this helps you to form your roadmap for the next year and beyond.

Key Trends 

• Strategic portfolio management is the major trend that has been emerging for the last few years, and the focus continues to be on strategy, goals, priority and benefits, all of which are supported by enterprise level portfolio and project management platforms.  

• The above strategic portfolio management trend aligns with a more end to end technology focus, where standalone project management tools are not enough, and platforms must support the end-to-end lifecycle of projects, programs and portfolios. Enterprise level project and portfolio management tools need to support this lifecycle from ideation, evaluation and acceptance, through planning, execution, monitoring and control, to benefits management and closure, as well as enabling all the actions to support project and portfolio health. 

• The preferred approach to implementing enterprise-wide project management solutions has also evolved. Rather than the big bang, ‘do it all at once’ approach, more than two thirds of organisations are beginning with a smaller Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or pilot. This staged approach allows users to gradually adopt new ways of working while at an organisational level there is time to understand and prioritise the subsequent phases, based on working knowledge of the platform and organisational strategic priorities.  

• Work management over project management. Increasingly organisations are realising that it is not simply professional project managers that need support, but all those undertaking different types of planned and BAU work, therefore solutions need to be able to support all types of work and all levels of work and project management maturity. 

• Resource management has come into focus to accelerate the value of delivery in tight markets. Platforms need to provide full resource management functionality, including the ability to manage timesheets, further enhanced by the ability to bring resources in from external task tools to provide managers with an overall view of resourcing. 

• Agile support is increasing. As a true single source of truth, PPM platforms must be able to support and integrate the various project management approaches, including Agile tools, to provide organisations with a choice in how projects are delivered.  

• Artificial intelligence is gaining traction. Organisations are exploring how they can harness the power of AI to improve project and portfolio delivery, surface data and insights and streamline reporting and administration. 

Sensei is happy to discuss any of these trends with you, show how the Altus platform is designed to meet the needs of organisational portfolio and project management and can be scaled to meet your requirements. We are leading the way with research and practical solutions into how AI can support the PMO, project managers and work management and can share these developments with you. 

If you want to discuss any of these trends please get in touch.