{"id":2116,"date":"2026-10-21T10:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-21T08:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.provalida.de\/?p=2116"},"modified":"2026-10-21T10:34:06","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T08:34:06","slug":"ppm-in-deutschland-fragmentierter-markt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.provalida.de\/en\/provalida\/ppm-in-deutschland-fragmentierter-markt\/","title":{"rendered":"PPM in Germany: a fragmented market and a gap"},"content":{"rendered":"

Part 1 of our series \u201cPPM in Germany: Why project portfolio management determines success\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Imagine your company is running 40, 60 or 100 IT and digitalisation projects at the same time. Each one of them may be well planned. But do you know which of them really contribute to your corporate strategy? Which ones are competing with each other for resources? Which ones you should actually stop, but let continue out of inertia?<\/p>\n

That is exactly the question that project portfolio management (PPM) answers. And although there is a whole range of providers in Germany who claim PPM as their speciality, a closer look shows that the market is highly fragmented, and real depth at the point that matters most for many companies is rarer than you might think.<\/p>\n

A market with many providers, but varying depth<\/h2>\n

Anyone looking for PPM consulting in Germany will quickly find a number of serious names: consultancies with a broad project management focus that offer PPM as one building block among several. SAP PPM specialists who concentrate on one particular tool ecosystem. Software vendors who deliver their own solutions including customising. Consultancies focusing on the public sector or on specific industries.<\/p>\n

So the offering is not thin, but it is fragmented. And this fragmentation is itself the real insight: many providers are either strong on methodology but not deeply at home in a particular enterprise tool. Or they are tool specialists who lack the strategic PPM methodology behind the software. Far fewer providers offer the combination of both, across complex, organically grown IT landscapes and in companies with several thousand people involved in projects.<\/p>\n

provalida operates precisely in this combination: with many years of experience, including as an OpenText Silver Partner, in consulting on and implementing PPM in companies with complex, organically grown IT landscapes and a high density of projects.<\/p>\n

Where the perception gap comes from<\/h2>\n

Several developments have contributed to PPM being less visible as a discipline in its own right today than actual demand would justify.<\/p>\n

Agility needs a framework that can be steered<\/h3>\n

Scrum, Kanban and SAFe solve operational issues at team and product level extremely well and transfer a large part of operational responsibility to the teams. However, they do not sufficiently answer the overarching management questions: Which of the 50 parallel initiatives have priority? Where are scarce resources deployed? Which budgets are available? Which dependencies exist, and how are costs, capacities and deadlines developing across the overall portfolio?<\/p>\n

This is exactly where project portfolio management comes in. PPM and agile methods are not opposites. They fulfil different tasks and complement each other. PPM creates the strategic and planning framework within which agile teams can work autonomously. It ensures that agile initiatives, too, remain transparent and manageable across the board in terms of priorities, resources, capacities, costs and time.<\/p>\n

\n

The decisive question is therefore not \u201cPPM or agile?\u201d but: how do we combine the flexibility of agile teams with the necessary steerability of the overall portfolio?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In practice, PPM was scaled back in many places as supposedly \u201ctoo cumbersome\u201d and replaced by purely agile structures. However, this often meant losing exactly the overarching transparency that management needs to steer investments, resources and strategic initiatives effectively across the company.<\/p>\n

Tool sprawl replaced steering with reporting<\/h3>\n

Many companies today have Excel lists, Jira or Kanban boards and individual project plans, but no system that actually supports portfolio decisions. Reporting is not the same as steering, even if both often run under the same label.<\/p>\n

The combination of methodology and tool depth has become rare<\/h3>\n

Enterprise-level PPM expertise requires a rare mix: technical understanding of PPM, methodological depth in portfolio steering and the ability to talk to CFOs just as well as to project managers. This mix is harder to find than pure methodology consulting or pure tool implementation.<\/p>\n

What is at stake<\/h2>\n

Missing or weak PPM rarely shows itself dramatically right away. It shows itself gradually: in projects that nobody stops any more even though they have lost their value. In resource conflicts or budget problems that only become visible at month-end close. In IT portfolios that have grown historically but have never been measured against the current corporate strategy.<\/p>\n

For companies with a high density of projects, whether in retail, the automotive industry or highly regulated sectors, this is not a sideshow but a direct question of competitiveness. If you do not know where your project resources are actually going, you cannot make sound strategic decisions either.<\/p>\n

What this series aims to deliver<\/h2>\n

Over the coming weeks, drawing on more than ten years of consulting practice, we will take a practical look at PPM: how it differs from classic project management, the concrete costs of poor portfolio steering, typical pitfalls during implementation, real customer cases and an outlook on how PPM is evolving through automation and AI.<\/p>\n

Our aim: no buzzword posts, but content that is directly usable both for project managers in their day-to-day work and for decision-makers at budget and strategy level.<\/p>\n

In the next part, we answer a question that many companies find surprisingly hard to answer clearly: what actually distinguishes PPM from classic project management, and why is this distinction more than semantics? To part 2<\/a><\/p>\n

Where does your portfolio stand?<\/h2>\n

For more than a decade, provalida has been advising on and implementing project portfolio management solutions for companies with complex IT and digitalisation portfolios. Find out more on our line Project Portfolio<\/a> and about OpenText PPM<\/a>. You can get an initial assessment in two minutes with our PPM Check<\/a>, anonymous and without sign-up. If you would like to talk about the status of your portfolio management, get in touch<\/a>. The initial consultation is free of charge.<\/p>\n

This article was first published on LinkedIn<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many providers, little depth: why project portfolio management is underestimated in Germany and what companies with a high density of projects are risking. Part 1 of our PPM series.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2117,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"page_builder":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-provalida"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.provalida.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.provalida.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.provalida.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.provalida.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.provalida.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2116"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.provalida.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2125,"href":"https:\/\/www.provalida.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2116\/revisions\/2125"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.provalida.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.provalida.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.provalida.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.provalida.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}