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Bubble PPM

Score6.6 out of 10

18 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Bubble PPM?

Bubble PPM is a cloud-based Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) software solution from Bubble®. Founded in 1999, the company serves clients globally via offices in London, Cambridge, and Melbourne.

Its cloud-based solutions help customers improve the planning, governance, and delivery of Innovation, New Product Development, Engineering, IT, and other initiatives.

Their software supports Portfolio Planning, ongoing Project and Portfolio Management, and Resource management.

According to the vendor, the solution enables cross-functional teams to collaborate effectively on projects and provides a flexible platform for business leaders to consider investments, define priorities, and monitor overall progression. For project teams, it provides real-time views on project status and risk, streamlines reporting, facilitates the preparation for stage gate and other project reviews, and enables fact-based decision making.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

an example of the Portfolio Management Dashboards (Fully Configurable)
an example of the Project Management Dashboards (Fully Configurable)
the real-time metrics and automated project reporting, presented in editable dashboard tiles that display project status indicators, tabulated data, and summary overviews, as well as metric ratios, KPIs, and calculated metrics. The reporting module makes it possible to quickly share summaries for any number of selected projects and automation tools can facilitate the generation of reports that need to be shared at fixed intervals. And because the very latest information is always available, senior management can obtain a presentation-ready report at any time (without adding to the workload of your team)
the program and project management tools that allow portfolio managers to manage many processes or projects in tandem. Users can track delivery according to priorities, dependencies, or other drivers. This provides the ability to create and link parent and child projects provides an oversight of all project activity while, at the same time, focusing on higher-level program goals. Line extensions, annual updates, or other Projects can be duplicated in whole or in part and required elements are copied across, saving valuable time and effort. Process measurement tools allow users to spot, analyze, and continuously refine process blockers and bottlenecks.
where any number of project management processes can be added to the system and automated, meaning it's easy to accommodate all projects and project types (e.g. New Product Development (NPD), Innovation, Reserach, IT, Project Management Office (PMO) projects).
where users can get a view of organization wide, department, team, or person views, of resource allocation and total capacity. They can also assign time to projects by hours, days, percentage, etc. Assigned and required resources can be viewed together or separately. Assignment summaries can be used to see precisely who’s working on what, where the pressure points are, when there’s a risk of becoming overloaded. Where resource gaps could be filled is discovered by assigning underutilized capacity from elsewhere. Automatic charts that graphically flag where total available resources are overtaken by the number of projects required help to support long-term planning.

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Reviews

What users are saying about Bubble PPM.
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Bubble PPM is a robust system with personalized assistance that will get your teams organized for Product Development work.

Matt QuistView profile
National Director Agronomic Solutions in Product Management at Wilbur-Ellis (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Bubble PPM allows for a "single source of truth" for the progress and details of all projects. The very flexible system allows for customized forms and fields that provides a home for all the details of a project, from ideation to post-launch review.
  • Bubble PPM is particularly good for managing Product Development projects. The system is built with Product Development in mind, which is a unique offering where other project management tools have been deficient. The project templates are made for the specific demands of managing many ongoing products, with provisions for managing competing priorities.
  • Bubble is more than a software system, there is personal help with implementing a system of governing projects where there may have been gaps before. The company began as a process management consultancy, that saw the need for a system to manage the resulting processes they developed with clients. It is hard to overstate the value of this background of the company when adapting your existing processes to the Bubble PPM system, or creating processes for the first time.
  • If you want your team to be conspicuously well-organized, "doing the right work", with easy reports for progress updates, forecasting, and budgeting, this system will help you.

Cons

  • As with all software systems there are features that are occasionally changed to improve the function of the system. Some patience and curiosity is always rewarded with any software, and this is no different.

Return on Investment

  • Bubble PPM has has a very positive impact on the productivity and ROI for our product development work.
  • Bubble PPM has given us an unprecedented transparency to the future value of our products in development, as well as the progress of those products. The system overcomes what can be a 'black box' of progress that is hard to see in some product development environments. This has been very valuable to our teams that are doing the product development work, as well as the other workstreams that need updates on the work in progress.

Great project management tool - One point of truth!

Laura Sew HoyView profile
Innovation Project Manager in Product Management at Tate & Lyle Sugars (501-1000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Great at being able to manipulate projects and filter certain projects into a report. This is great for when we have different meetings for different channels e.g. food service vs speciality.
  • Easy to use - our cross-functional teams use this and they are able to find what they need without a lot of training.
  • The development team are understanding of our needs and happy to adapt the program for us.

Cons

  • Parent-child functionality. However we are currently working with Bubble to develop this and find a solution to our needs.
  • Limited timeline capability.
  • Sometimes the speed is slow - however I think this is related to our internet connection.

Return on Investment

  • With financials being included in each SKU, it has lead us to be more finance focused and aware of what projects are more profitable than others.
  • It has given us a better oversight of what everyone is working on and the SKUs in our portfolio - allowed us to allocate resources more efficiently.

Other Software Used

Microsoft Office 2016, SAP Cloud Platform

More than just software: a collaboration that streamlines productivity and alignment

Matt ParsonsView profile
Director of Portfolio and Stage Gate in Research & Development at J&J Medical Devices (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • I already mentioned the simple user interface for data upload, and the equally intuitive customized reporting. Leadership and "supporting" functions for product development get tremendous value from this because they don't need to hunt down answers anymore. Everything from pipeline planning to operational planning can be built on the same foundation of objective data, rather than many different sources interpreted through many different lenses.
  • But the greatest value I think Bubble Innovator delivers is not really the product itself. It's the sense of partnership and responsiveness from the Bubble Innovation team. The Bubble Innovation team becomes a part of your team. They are valued consultants with helpful input on best practices for stage gate management, portfolio analytics, and report visualization. I have continually been impressed with the responsiveness and effort that their team brings to the table. When we have challenges and need to customize our data or analytics or reporting, they are right there beside us, finding the best solution, sharing prototypes in a test environment, and implementing as fast as possible.

Cons

  • The biggest issue we've had in the past is customized reporting. But this has now been addressed with a new module dedicated to enabling any user to build the report to exactly meet their needs and address the questions being asked by their leaders. There is always room for improvement here, and the leadership demands for alternative views are frequently evolving, but with the customized reporting ability we can deal with this evolution far better than ever before, and beyond the capabilities of any competitive product I've seen.
  • Detailed resource & capacity planning is not the strength of this tool. Compiling and packaging data to drive highly constructive conversations during stage gate reviews, pipeline reviews, and portfolio optimization discussions is. With that said, the Bubble Innovation team rose to the challenge of creating a high-level resource & capacity planning tool that now gives us reasonable ability to plan for forward-looking functional resource gaps in the context of a prioritized project list. It won't address detailed capabilities/competencies at the individual employee level.
  • For senior level reporting, we tend to speak in PowerPoint. While it is pretty effortless to create Excel and pdf output from Bubble Innovator, it would be nice to be able to export reports/data/charts/content to PowerPoint.

Return on Investment

  • As noted previously, streamlined and efficient reporting means more time working productively and less time converting all your updates into the slide format-of-the-year/quarter/month.
  • Also mentioned previously, the transparency is an immediate benefit. Not just visibility to which projects have the greatest risk or value, but also which ones are at risk of missing milestones so you can proactively address them, and which ones simply don't have sufficient data entered/available to inform good decision making.
  • The stage gate management tools, which Bubble Innovation worked very closely with us to develop, have driven improved rigor, consistency, and constructive challenge into our project management. If there are highly critical strategic elements that need to be incorporated into all projects across the business (e.g., heightened awareness of profitability impact), then you can efficiently push that into every stage gate conversation across every platform by integrating that element into your stage gate requirements, without having any impact on design control or more stringently controlled procedures.

Usability

Just what you need, without a bunch of stuff that you don't

Todd RenderView profile
Director, Research in Research & Development at Johnson & Johnson (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • Bubble customize what data are required very quickly, so that we only look at what we need.
  • Extremely responsive! Issues or requests for changes are handled typically within a day.
  • Based on their experience from various industries, the Bubble team contribute valuable insights into what and how information gets reviewed.

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • Don't have numbers for this section, unfortunately.
  • Bubble Innovator have given our global company a web based tool that allows teams across remote locations to modify and review updates in real time.

Amazing Portfolio Management Tool - will make your job a lot easier!!!

Katherine UmbergerView profile
Group Manager - Trauma Project Management in Research & Development at Depuy Synthes (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • The team that implemented Bubble Innovator into our business was tremendous. They worked with us closely and listened to our needs in incorporating changes quickly. The support we received was professional, timely and throughout the years of implementation we built a great working relationship with the team. They spent the time to work with us and also trained our entire department/business on this new system.
  • Change Management/Support - Bubble Innovator support team is responsive when asking for updates/upgrades to any report or additions/deletions that are required.

Cons

  • One improvement is all the reports need to be able to be placed into a PowerPoint easily, currently you have to take a picture and add [it]. This system is amazing and has helped me with my position of reporting and managing over 50 new projects.

Return on Investment

  • Increased employee efficiency - one place for all information, one place to run consistent reports.

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