Bubble PPM vs. Sciforma

No stage gate or portfolio reporting solution can overcome poor input data. The organization has to be willing to commit to consistent and rigorous updates of the information, or the reporting becomes useless. From what I've seen of competitive systems, Bubble Innovator is the easiest to use in this regard, so the excuse of not having good data because it's painful to upload or cumbersome to retrieve goes away. And the ease with which you can produce customized reports allows you to immediately find the gaps and weak points in your data, and take action to address them. That's not to say that every report and function in Bubble Innovator is perfect. But the close collaboration and responsiveness of the Bubble Innovation team has made it relatively easy to triage, prioritize, and implement improvements along the way.

Having a lot of different tasks to do each day, its project schedule tool allows me to quickly draw project structure, allocate tasks and resources and sync with my teams to stay on schedule. The software helps businesses prioritize projects and meet strategic objectives. It efficiently schedule projects and resources and keep track of different projects at the high level and detailed level. It utilizes full data intelligence and connect all decision makers and stake holders. For PMO, the platform can provide you a status portfolio overview that can quickly spot any issues and drill down to the details to identify the root cause to keep your project on track and on budget.

Incentivized

• The Bubble team is outstanding at providing technical support, query response times are often within an hour and resolutions (depending on the level of complexity of the query) follow very quickly after this. They provide a professional, reliable service.
• The software design is simple, intuitive and more accessible than many of the alternatives on the market. It does not require licenses, installations, internal servers, extensive training programs. It doesn't interface directly with 'business management' software which provides flexibility and development opportunities.
• The Bubble team have a depth of knowledge for new product development processes and relevant industries, and provide much more than just the software. The teams are actively involved in process design beyond the software, and their recommendations have been invaluable when establishing a new stage-gate process across our organisation.

• Flexible: I believe it is the best part. The software is completely and especially designed for our needs.
• Easy to use: any configuration can be done either by us or Sciforma. At first, we would only use the project extension. After a year, we decided to add more users and roll-out time tracking. We did the configuration by ourselves and didn’t need Sciforma’s help. It was pretty easy, even without having a dedicated developer.
• They have a lot of features: you can start as small as you want and always get more features . This was our case and we haven’t been limited so far.
• They are methodology agnostic: We use both Agile and Waterfall and it’s great to see it all rolls up to the portfolio level.

• Only thing I can think of is almost piddly, that is having to scroll on a screen within the web browser - so that you have to scroll the screen then scroll the browser screen to get to the bottom of a chart.

• This may not be suitable for organizations who are not mature in enough in project management or that have very basic needs.

Incentivized

The business has been extremely satisfied with Bubble Innovator and is in support of rolling this tool out to our other businesses within the overall franchise.

The user interface is highly visual and simple. Literally within 10-15 minutes of my introduction to the software, I was up and running. Of course, deeper capabilities become apparent after additional use, but the basic functionality is very simple to grasp. Where there are consistent challenges reported by multiple users, the Bubble Innovation team is quick to connect and put plans in place to address the challenges.

Outstanding response times, and solutions to issues requiring support are quickly implemented. For bigger issues or longer term developments, Bubble happily takes the time to meet in person and discuss requirements to drive detailed solutions.

This software allows project and portfolio managers to analyze and prioritize projects based on resource allocation and available effort. It helps you compare the sorecast effort with resource availability. You can email, call or tweet them if you have concerns.

Incentivized

The number of variables made this extremely challenging (org changes, stage gate harmonization, pipeline prioritization, and new governance model). I think the implementation was handled very well in spite of this, and managed to deliver on time and on budget.

Prior to Bubble PPM we attempted use of many of the well-known project management tools to manage our product development work. Those other project management tools were met with frustration in attempts to implement them because they are more focused with the timing and scheduling of individual projects rather than capturing the full portfolio of possible candidate projects and selecting the most strategic and valuable projects to move forward. Bubble PPM was the first system we found that was purpose-built for managing product development work, and its implementation was very successful from the beginning with the personal help given by the team at Bubble.

We were looking at vendors but they didn't meet our expectations and weren't flexible enough.

• Bubble Innovator helped us drive new product on time deliveries to 80% on-time product launches.
• Our corporate target was new product making up 20% of our annual revenues. Bubble Innovator helped us manage our resources to plan and exceed that goal.
• Bubble innovator allowed us to redeploy a full time team member that was managing spreadsheets of information for monthly updates. It also saved our project managers significant amounts of time that they could dedicate back to their projects.

• Before Sciforma we were running projects out of Excel and emails. Using a cloud based application means that everyone is viewing information in real time.
• Our executive leadership knows that they have one place to go for a real time status on all of our strategic projects.

Incentivized