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    Everything we reference publicly, in one place — the capability dictionary a PMO can use whatever tool it runs, and the evidence behind every commercial claim we make.

    71 capability definitions · 26 sourced claims · last reviewed August 2026

    Capability dictionary Source register

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    Capability matrix

    Every capability in the platform, the discipline it belongs to and the plan that entitles it.

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    Methodology library

    Waterfall, agile and hybrid delivery frameworks with stage gates, mandatory artefacts and terminology.

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    Security and trust

    Tenant isolation, RBAC, audit trail, data residency and the sovereign self-hosted option.

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    Developer documentation

    REST API, authentication, rate limits, webhooks and the OpenAPI specification.

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    PMO capability dictionary

    All 71 capabilities defined in plain language, grouped by discipline. Written to be useful whichever platform you run — if you are writing an RFP, this is the vocabulary to write it in.

    Portfolio Management12 definitions
    Strategy & OKR / goal alignmentFR-PF01Enterprise
    The ability to define strategic objectives, business goals or OKRs as first-class objects in the tool, and then link every investment, programme and project to the objective it serves.
    Without this link the portfolio is just a list of work.
    Demand & idea intakeFR-PF02Enterprise
    A structured front door where new work requests, ideas and business cases are captured, enriched, triaged and either approved into the portfolio or rejected - with the decision recorded.
    Uncontrolled intake is the single most common cause of portfolio overload.
    Portfolio prioritisation & scoringFR-PF03Enterprise
    Multi-criteria weighted scoring models that rank investments objectively against configurable criteria - strategic fit, financial return, risk, urgency, regulatory obligation - plus efficient-frontier or bubble-chart analysis.
    This is how you defend the portfolio decision in a steering committee.
    What-if / scenario planningFR-PF04Enterprise
    The ability to create sandboxed copies of the portfolio, apply changes - cut budget by 15%, delay a programme two quarters, remove a resource pool - and compare outcomes side by side before committing anything.
    Budget cuts and re-prioritisation are annual events.
    Top-down capacity planningFR-PF05Enterprise
    Planning by role, skill or team at an aggregate level - 'we need 12 embedded firmware engineers in Q3' - before individual named-resource assignment exists, and comparing that demand against supply.
    Capacity, not budget, is usually the real constraint on a portfolio.
    Multi-portfolio hierarchy modellingFR-PF10Enterprise
    Support for several portfolios simultaneously - by business unit, product line, geography, funding source - with an object appearing in more than one and roll-up at every level.
    An AMI portfolio spanning Water, Gas and Electricity products across Egypt, Africa and Europe cannot be modelled as one flat list.
    Portfolio-level risk managementFR-PF11Enterprise
    Aggregating risk from projects and programmes to a portfolio view, plus risks that only exist at portfolio level - supplier concentration, currency exposure, regulatory change - with heat maps and exposure quantification.
    Individual project risk registers hide correlated risk.
    Portfolio financials (CapEx / OpEx)FR-PF06Enterprise
    Multi-year budgeting, forecasting and actuals at portfolio level with the CapEx versus OpEx split, cost-centre allocation, currency handling and variance analysis against plan.
    For a manufacturing group this is the tab Finance actually cares about.
    Benefits realisation trackingFR-PF07Enterprise
    Defining the expected benefits in the business case - cost saving, revenue, capacity gain, compliance - and tracking them through delivery and beyond closure until they are proven realised or written off.
    This is what closes the loop on the PMO's own value argument.
    Roadmapping & timeline viewsFR-PF08Professional
    Executive-level visual timelines showing programmes and major initiatives across quarters or years, with dependencies, milestones and swim lanes by business unit, product or geography.
    This is the artefact executives actually look at.
    Executive KPI scorecardsFR-PF09Professional
    Configurable dashboards presenting portfolio health - RAG status, schedule and cost variance, capacity utilisation, risk exposure, benefits - tailored by audience and refreshed automatically.
    Manual status reporting consumes an enormous share of PMO effort and introduces lag and bias.
    AI-assisted portfolio insightFR-PF12Professional
    Machine-generated analysis over portfolio data - narrative status summaries, early warning on at-risk initiatives, forecast anomaly detection, natural-language querying, and agentic workflow actions.
    The realistic 2026 value is time saved on status narrative and earlier detection of drift.
    Programme Management10 definitions
    Stage-gate / phase-gate governanceFR-PG03Enterprise
    Configurable lifecycle gates with defined entry and exit criteria, mandatory deliverables, approval routing, and enforcement that a project cannot progress until the gate is formally passed.
    This is the mechanism that makes an SLA-aligned process suite real rather than documented.
    Programme financials & EVM roll-upFR-PG09Enterprise
    Consolidating cost, effort and earned value from projects to programme level, producing programme CPI, SPI, estimate-at-completion and variance-at-completion.
    Programme-level EVM is the earliest reliable warning of trouble - it detects drift months before a milestone is formally missed, which is exactly when intervention is still cheap.
    Portfolio > programme > project hierarchyFR-PG01Professional
    A genuine multi-level object model where programmes are real entities with their own budget, schedule, risks, benefits and governance - not just a tag or folder applied to a group of projects.
    Programme management is where most work-management tools quietly fail.
    Cross-project dependency managementFR-PG02Professional
    Explicit, typed dependencies between deliverables in different projects - finish-to-start, resource-based, contractual - with automatic impact analysis when a predecessor slips.
    In an AMI rollout, meter firmware, head-end software, field installation and regulatory approval are separate projects with hard interlocks.
    Programme milestone roll-upFR-PG04Professional
    Automatic consolidation of project milestones into a programme-level milestone plan, with status, forecast dates, variance against baseline and trend.
    Programme milestones are the currency of steering-committee reporting.
    Programme RAID (risk, issue, decision, assumption)FR-PG05Professional
    A consolidated RAID log at programme level, aggregating from projects and holding programme-specific items, with owners, due dates, escalation paths and closure evidence.
    RAID is the working record of programme governance and the first thing an auditor or a new programme director asks for.
    Change control & baseline governanceFR-PG08Professional
    Formal change requests against an approved baseline, with impact assessment on scope, cost, schedule and benefits, approval routing, and a versioned history of every baseline.
    Baseline discipline is the difference between a governed programme and a moving target.
    Agile at scale (SAFe, ARTs, PI planning)FR-PG07Enterprise
    Native support for scaled agile constructs - agile release trains, program increments, PI planning boards, epics and features linked to team backlogs, and flow metrics.
    Relevant if part of the portfolio - typically the software organisation - runs SAFe or a similar framework while the rest runs waterfall.
    Automated programme status reportingFR-PG10Professional
    Generating steering-committee-ready status packs directly from live data on a schedule, rather than assembling them manually from project submissions.
    Status reporting is typically the largest single consumer of PMO effort.
    Benefits & value tracking at programme levelFR-PG06Enterprise
    Managing the benefits case at programme level where benefits usually actually land, with attribution across contributing projects and tracking through to realisation.
    Benefits rarely belong to one project.
    Project Management12 definitions
    Templates & methodology enforcementFR-PJ11Starter
    Reusable project templates carrying pre-built WBS, lifecycle gates, RAID starters, document requirements, roles and reporting - so every project of a given type starts governed.
    This is how a documented methodology becomes actual practice.
    Document management & version controlFR-PJ10Starter
    Storing project documents with version history, check-in and check-out, approval workflow, controlled distribution and retention.
    Directly relevant to the document-versioning and withdrawn-document governance problem in your own process suite.
    Project cost & budget trackingFR-PJ08Professional
    Budget, committed cost, actual cost and forecast at project and task level, covering labour, non-labour, capital and expense, with variance reporting.
    Committed cost is the field most tools omit and the one that matters most.
    Earned Value Management (EVM)FR-PJ05Enterprise
    Native calculation of planned value, earned value and actual cost, producing CPI, SPI, EAC, ETC, VAC and TCPI from the schedule and cost data.
    EVM is the objective performance measure, integrating scope, schedule and cost into one signal.
    Timesheets & effort captureFR-PJ07Professional
    Capturing actual effort against tasks, projects or cost codes, with submission, approval workflow, and feeding actual cost and progress calculations.
    Actual effort is the input to actual cost, to EVM and to future estimating accuracy.
    WBS & task hierarchyFR-PJ01Starter
    A hierarchical work breakdown structure with unlimited levels, summary and detail tasks, WBS coding, and roll-up of effort, cost and progress from leaf tasks upward.
    The WBS is the structural backbone of a project plan and the basis for estimating, costing and progress measurement.
    Gantt / CPM schedulingFR-PJ02Professional
    A true critical-path-method scheduling engine - task dependencies with lead and lag, constraint types, calendars, and automatic forward and backward pass calculation.
    The distinction that matters: a Gantt chart is a picture, CPM is an engine.
    Baselines & variance analysisFR-PJ03Professional
    Capturing an approved snapshot of schedule, cost and scope, retaining multiple baselines over time, and reporting actual and forecast against the baseline.
    Without a baseline there is no such thing as a variance, and without variance there is no performance measurement.
    Critical path & float calculationFR-PJ04Professional
    Identifying the longest dependent path determining the finish date, and calculating total and free float for every activity.
    Float tells you where you can absorb delay for free and where you cannot.
    Resource assignment & levellingFR-PJ06Professional
    Assigning named people or generic roles to tasks with effort and availability, detecting over-allocation, and levelling or smoothing the schedule to resolve conflicts.
    Over-allocation is the silent killer of project plans.
    Risk & issue registerFR-PJ09Starter
    Structured risk and issue registers with probability, impact, scoring, mitigation and contingency actions, owners, due dates and escalation.
    The register is the working tool of project risk management and the primary audit artefact.
    Mobile applicationFR-PJ12Starter
    Native mobile apps allowing status update, timesheet entry, approval, document access and dashboard viewing away from a desk, ideally with offline capability.
    Essential where delivery happens in the field - meter installation crews, site engineers, regional managers.
    Operations Management10 definitions
    Multi-level approval workflowsFR-OP09Professional
    Configurable approval chains with sequential and parallel steps, conditional routing on value or type, delegation, and full approval audit trail.
    Approval is where governance is enforced or lost.
    Service / work request intakeFR-OP01Professional
    A single governed channel for operational work requests - support, maintenance, small changes - distinct from project demand, with categorisation, routing and prioritisation.
    Operational requests compete for the same people as project work.
    Workflow automation engineFR-OP02Professional
    A configurable rules engine - when this happens, do that - covering assignment, notification, status change, approval routing, escalation and integration calls.
    Automation is what removes the PMO's administrative burden.
    SLA management & escalationFR-OP03Enterprise
    Defining service-level targets against request types, measuring response and resolution against them with business-hours calendars, and escalating automatically on breach or approaching breach.
    Directly relevant to an SLA-aligned governance framework.
    ITSM / service deskFR-OP04Enterprise
    Full IT service management capability - incident, problem, change and request fulfilment aligned to ITIL - with a service catalogue and knowledge base.
    Matters only if the PMO platform is also intended to carry IT operations.
    Ticketing & incident managementFR-OP05Professional
    Capture, triage, assignment, tracking and closure of individual operational tickets, with queues, ownership and resolution recording.
    The granular layer beneath service management.
    Recurring / BAU work managementFR-OP06Professional
    Managing repeating operational work - preventive maintenance, monthly reporting cycles, periodic compliance activity - on schedules rather than as one-off tasks.
    BAU consumes real capacity that is invisible if only projects are tracked.
    Run-versus-change capacity splitFR-OP07Enterprise
    Explicitly categorising effort and cost as 'run' (keeping the lights on) versus 'change' (project and improvement work), and reporting the ratio over time.
    This ratio is a headline governance metric.
    Asset or CMDB linkageFR-OP08Enterprise
    Linking projects, requests and operational work to the assets, applications or configuration items they affect, with an impact view in both directions.
    For a metering business, connecting work to the affected product, firmware version or deployed asset base is what makes impact analysis possible before a change rather than after an incident.
    Operational KPI dashboardsFR-OP10Professional
    Dashboards covering operational performance - SLA compliance, throughput, backlog, ageing, resolution time, utilisation - distinct from project delivery reporting.
    Operations and delivery need different metrics.
    Platform & Security14 definitions
    SSO / SAML / SCIM provisioningFR-PL01Enterprise
    Single sign-on via SAML or OIDC against the corporate identity provider, plus SCIM automated user provisioning and de-provisioning driven by directory group membership.
    Manual user administration does not scale and creates a real security exposure - leavers retaining access.
    Granular role-based access controlFR-PL02Professional
    Permission control at object, field and record level, driven by role, group and relationship to the record - not just coarse tiers of read, write and admin.
    Portfolio financial data, salary-implied resource rates and commercially sensitive tender information all live in the same system as routine task data.
    Configuration without codeFR-PL13Enterprise
    The ability to change object models, fields, layouts, workflows, lifecycles, permissions and reports through administrative configuration rather than development or vendor services.
    This is the largest hidden cost differentiator in the whole comparison.
    ERP integration (SAP / Oracle)FR-PL09Enterprise
    Pre-built or supported integration with the corporate ERP for cost actuals, commitments, purchase orders, cost centres, vendors and employee master data.
    Manual re-keying of financial actuals is slow, error-prone and always late.
    MS Project / Primavera importFR-PL10Professional
    Import and where relevant round-trip of schedules from Microsoft Project (.mpp, XML) and Primavera (XER, P6 XML), preserving structure, dependencies and resource assignments.
    Contractors and suppliers submit schedules in these formats - universally so in construction and infrastructure.
    Native BI & analyticsFR-PL07Professional
    Built-in reporting and analytics - custom report building, cross-object queries, calculated fields, visualisation and scheduled distribution - without an external BI tool.
    Determines how much of your reporting need is met in-platform versus requiring an external tool, extra licences and a data pipeline to maintain.
    Power BI / Tableau connectorFR-PL08Enterprise
    A supported connector or data warehouse feed exposing the underlying data model to external BI tools.
    Enterprise reporting almost always ends up in Power BI.
    AI assistant or agentic featuresFR-PL11Professional
    Embedded AI - natural-language querying, generated status narrative, risk prediction, document summarisation - and agentic capability that takes actions rather than only producing text.
    The fastest-moving area in the 2026 market and the one where marketing most outruns capability.
    Audit trail & compliance loggingFR-PL03Free
    Immutable logging of every material action - who changed what, when, from what value to what value - retained per policy and exportable for audit.
    Non-negotiable for governance credibility.
    Open REST APIFR-PL06Professional
    A documented, versioned REST API covering read and write across the object model, with authentication, rate limits and webhooks for event-driven integration.
    The API determines whether the platform can integrate with your ERP, your existing PMO platform and your BI stack.
    Regional data residency optionsFR-PL04Sovereign
    The ability to specify where data is stored and processed, including which cloud regions are offered and where AI processing occurs.
    Relevant to Egyptian and EU data-handling obligations and to client contracts that specify data location.
    On-premise / private cloud optionFR-PL05Sovereign
    Availability of a self-hosted or private-cloud deployment rather than multi-tenant SaaS only.
    Matters where regulatory, client-contractual or sovereignty requirements preclude public cloud.
    Arabic UI / RTL supportFR-PL12Free
    Full Arabic interface localisation with proper right-to-left rendering, plus Arabic content entry, search, sorting and correct rendering in reports and exports.
    Directly relevant given Arabic is the working language for internal and technical documentation.
    Published implementation partner networkFR-PL14Starter
    The availability of certified implementation partners, and specifically whether any operate in or near your region with local-language capability.
    Implementation risk is where PPM programmes fail.
    AI in your PMO13 definitions
    AI investment prioritisation assistantFR-AI01Enterprise
    AI analysis that supports portfolio ranking decisions: proposing scores against defined criteria from the underlying business case and delivery data, explaining why one investment outranks another, and flagging investments whose declared scores are inconsistent with the evidence in their records.
    Scoring a portfolio of fifty investments against eight criteria is slow, and the scores are frequently supplied by the people who submitted the investments.
    AI scenario generation and optimisationFR-AI02Enterprise
    AI that proposes candidate portfolio scenarios against a stated constraint — a budget reduction, a capacity ceiling, a strategic reweighting — and explains the trade-off each scenario makes, feeding the deterministic scenario engine rather than replacing it.
    The hard part of scenario planning is not computing the impact; the engine does that.
    AI demand triage and duplicate detectionFR-AI03Enterprise
    AI that reads incoming demand, proposes classification and routing, extracts business-case fields from attached documents, and detects that a new request duplicates or overlaps one already in the portfolio.
    Duplicate demand is endemic in large organisations — the same need arrives three times from three departments in three vocabularies.
    AI capacity and demand forecastingFR-AI04Enterprise
    Forecasting of future resource demand from portfolio pipeline, historical delivery patterns and seasonality, producing a probable demand curve by role that extends beyond the explicitly planned horizon.
    Explicit capacity planning covers what has been planned.
    AI predictive delivery risk scoringFR-AI05Enterprise
    Continuous scoring of every project and programme for probability of schedule or cost failure, derived from leading indicators — schedule volatility, float erosion, EVM index trend, RAID velocity, approval latency, resource churn — with the contributing factors named.
    Status reporting is lagging and self-reported, and both properties bias it optimistic.
    AI dependency and slip early warningFR-AI06Enterprise
    Detection of dependency risk before it materialises: predecessors trending toward a slip that has not yet been reported, undeclared dependencies inferred from resource and deliverable overlap, and cascade exposure where one task's slip would propagate widely.
    Cross-project dependency failure is the commonest cause of programme delay, and the damage is done in the gap between a predecessor beginning to slip and anyone declaring it.
    AI RAID triage and correlationFR-AI07Professional
    AI that classifies incoming RAID items, proposes probability and impact scores against the tenant's matrix, detects that the same underlying risk appears across multiple projects, and identifies registers going stale.
    RAID registers decay.
    AI status narrative generationFR-AI08Professional
    Generation of written status commentary for projects, programmes and portfolios from the underlying delivery, financial and RAID data — the prose that accompanies the numbers in a steering pack.
    Status narrative is the single largest consumer of PMO writing time and the most reliably optimistic part of any report, because it is written by the person being reported on.
    AI schedule quality analysisFR-AI09Professional
    Automated assessment of schedule health against recognised quality checks — missing logic, negative lag, constraint abuse, excessive float, dangling activities, unrealistic durations, resource-free tasks — with plain-language explanation of why each finding matters and how to fix it.
    Most schedules in most organisations are structurally unsound, and the problem is invisible until the schedule is asked to do something.
    AI estimation assistance from historical actualsFR-AI10Professional
    Duration and effort estimates for new work proposed from actuals on comparable completed work, with the comparable set shown, the variance range stated, and the basis of comparison explained.
    Estimates are habitually optimistic and habitually undocumented.
    AI EVM variance explanationFR-AI11Enterprise
    Plain-language explanation of why earned value indices moved — attributing a CPI or SPI change to the specific activities, cost lines and events that caused it, and describing what the trend implies if it continues.
    EVM is objective and widely misread.
    AI document and meeting extractionFR-AI12Professional
    Extraction of structured work items — actions, decisions, risks, issues, dependencies — from unstructured sources such as meeting notes, minutes, emails and uploaded documents, proposed for confirmation into the appropriate register.
    Governance information is created in meetings and lost in documents.
    AI governance, grounding and evaluation frameworkFR-AI13Free
    The foundational infrastructure every AI feature runs on: retrieval under user permissions, grounding and citation, prompt and model version registry, immutable run logging, per-tenant and per-feature enable and disable, evaluation harness measuring prediction accuracy against outcomes, and cost control.
    Without this, each AI feature reimplements its own guardrails and they will differ, which means the weakest one sets the platform's actual security and reliability posture.

    Source register

    Every competitor figure this site publishes, with a link to the vendor's own page and the date we read it. 26 rows, last reviewed August 2026.

    Figures are public list prices in USD per user per month on annual billing unless stated otherwise, read from each vendor's own pricing page on the date shown. Vendors change prices without notice — follow the source link for the current rate.

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    Use the dictionary, buy whatever you like

    If it helps you write a better RFP and you still pick someone else, the reference did its job.

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