PMO Software: PMO Tools for Intake, Scoring and Capacity
One register for every initiative from intake to close, one scoring model the whole office applies the same way, and a capacity plan that says whether the work you just approved can actually be staffed. Built for the PMO that has outgrown the spreadsheet and does not want a twelve month platform rollout.
Plans from $24.50 a month billed yearly, or $49 monthly, priced per workspace rather than per seat. The demo opens on signup with a worked portfolio you can edit.
PMO software is the system a project management office uses to run the portfolio rather than the projects: which initiatives exist, which get funded, whether there are people to deliver them, and what was decided at each review. Task tools such as Jira, Asana or Microsoft Project manage the work inside a project and stay where they are. Portfolio Hub sits above them and holds only the fields a funding decision needs, which is why a PMO can be running on it the same afternoon instead of the same quarter.
Four files that disagree with each other, and a steering meeting on Thursday
Most PMOs do not lack data. They have too many copies of it. The intake list is a SharePoint form, the scoring lives in a workbook someone built three budget cycles ago, capacity is a separate sheet per department, and the steering pack is assembled by hand from all three the night before. The failure is not any single file. It is that nobody can say which version a decision was made on.
| What the PMO has to answer | Where it usually lives today | What goes wrong | Where it lives in the workspace |
|---|---|---|---|
| What is in the portfolio? | An intake form plus a tracker, kept in sync by hand | Requests that were approved in a meeting never make it onto the tracker | One register, every initiative, with its stage from intake to close |
| What should we fund next? | A scoring workbook, edited per meeting | Weights change to suit the project being argued for, and risk gets scored the wrong way round | A fixed weighted model, 0 to 100, with risk inverted and the rank calculated |
| Can we staff it? | A capacity sheet per department, if at all | Approval happens in one meeting and the capacity check never happens | Demand from approved work against FTE by role, month by month, with a funding line |
| What did the board see? | Whichever deck was attached to the invite | Three months later nobody can reconstruct why the money was released | A frozen stage gate pack per initiative per review |
| How healthy is delivery? | Status emails, collated manually | Amber turns red between reporting cycles and nobody sees it | On track, at risk or off track on every record, counted on the dashboard |
If the left two columns describe your office, the guide to setting up a PMO covers the operating side of fixing it. The rest of this page is about the tool.
Every initiative moves through the same six stages
A PMO register is only trusted when every request enters it the same way and leaves it the same way. The workspace uses six stages. Two of them, approved and in delivery, are the ones that consume capacity. Closed and stopped work drops out of the capacity plan automatically, so a project that was cancelled in June stops showing up as demand in July without anyone remembering to delete it.
Each record carries the fields a funding conversation actually uses: sponsor, business unit, the five scoring ratings, annual benefit and cost estimate (so the benefit to cost ratio is calculated rather than typed), the delivery role it draws on, its FTE demand, and start and end dates. Delivery status is on track, at risk or off track. That is deliberately short. A register with forty columns gets filled in once and then decays.
For the intake end of this, the project intake process guide describes the triage step that decides what gets onto the register at all.
| Stage | Counts against capacity | The decision it waits on |
|---|---|---|
| Intake | No | Is this worth assessing properly? |
| Business case | No | Do the benefits justify the cost? |
| Approved | Yes | Is the capacity there in the months it needs it? |
| In delivery | Yes | Would we still approve it today? |
| Closed | No | Did the benefits arrive? |
| Stopped | No | What was learned, and what is freed up? |
Six PMO tools in one workspace, working off the same record
The point is not the number of features. It is that the score, the capacity plan and the gate pack all read the same initiative, so changing a date in one place changes it everywhere it matters.
Portfolio register
Every initiative with its sponsor, business unit, stage, delivery status, benefit, cost, role, FTE and dates. Filtered and ranked, not a list you scroll.
Weighted scoring model
Strategic fit 30, value 30, urgency 15, confidence 15 and risk 10, each rated 1 to 5 and turned into a 0 to 100 score, with risk inverted so a riskier initiative scores lower.
Funding line
The ranked portfolio walked against the FTE you have. Everything above the line can be staffed, everything below it waits. The line moves when capacity or demand does.
Twelve month capacity plan
Demand from approved and in-delivery work against available FTE by role, month by month, with the shortfall flagged in every month it appears.
Stage gate packs
An Excel review pack per initiative per gate, frozen when it is built, carrying the score, the case figures and the capacity demand the board looked at.
Export to Excel or CSV
The ranked register with every field, on every paid plan, for the steering pack, the finance model, or a move to another system. Your data is never stuck.
From a spreadsheet to a working PMO tool in four steps
- Enter your delivery roles and the FTE each has. Developers, analysts, architects, whatever the scarce skills are in your portfolio. Net of leave and support work, not headcount. This is the capacity every approval gets checked against.
- Load the initiatives. Name, sponsor, stage, the five ratings, benefit and cost, the role it draws on, FTE and dates. Twenty initiatives take about an hour, most of it spent agreeing the ratings rather than typing them.
- Read the ranking and the funding line. The score orders the portfolio, and the line shows where capacity runs out. The conversation in the next steering meeting becomes which initiatives sit either side of that line, and why.
- Build a gate pack before each review and export the register after. The pack freezes what the board saw. The export feeds whatever the finance team or the executive dashboard already runs on.
Spreadsheet, work management suite, PMO workspace, or enterprise PPM
PMO software gets bought in four very different shapes, and the expensive mistake is buying the fourth when the office needs the third. This is an honest map, including where the other options are simply better.
| What you need | Spreadsheet and SharePoint | Work management suite (Asana, monday.com, Smartsheet) | Portfolio Hub workspace | Enterprise PPM (Planview, Clarity, Planisware) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Task and schedule management | No | Yes, their core strength | No. Keep your task tool | Yes, often with full scheduling |
| One portfolio register with stages | By hand | Possible, built as a custom board | Yes, out of the box | Yes, configurable |
| Weighted scoring and ranking | Formulas that drift | Custom fields, no ranking model | Fixed model, 0 to 100, ranked | Configurable models and scenarios |
| Capacity by role against demand | Separate sheet | Workload views by person, usually weeks ahead | By role, twelve months, with a funding line | By person and hour, with timesheets |
| Record of what a review saw | The attached file | Activity log on the item | Frozen gate pack per review | Versioned workflow with audit trail |
| Financials and timesheets | No | Limited | Benefit and cost per initiative, no timesheets | Yes, full financial management |
| Pricing model | Already paid for | Per user per month | Per workspace, from $24.50 a month billed yearly | Per seat, quoted, plus implementation |
| Time to first useful output | An afternoon | Days to weeks of board design | Under an hour | Three to twelve months |
| Right fit | Under 10 initiatives, one owner | Delivery teams that also want a portfolio view | A PMO with 10 to a few hundred initiatives deciding funding and capacity | Large enterprises needing timesheets, financials and configurable workflow |
If the right-hand column is where you belong, the comparison of PPM software and project portfolio tools and the enterprise PMO software guide cover that market properly, and the Planview alternatives page covers the most common platform switch. If your office is still assembling the steering pack by hand, a platform will not fix that faster than a register and a model that stay fixed.
The PMOs this tool fits, and the ones it does not
A new PMO in its first year
You need a register and a prioritization method the executives will accept before you need anything else. Standing both up in a workspace is faster than designing them in a workbook and then defending the formulas.
An IT PMO running the annual plan
Dozens of competing requests, a fixed pool of engineers and architects, and a budget cycle. The funding line against role capacity is the exact question the annual plan has to answer.
A transformation or change office
Initiatives that cross business units, sponsors who each believe theirs comes first, and a steering committee that needs to see the trade-off rather than a status list.
Not a fit: timesheet-driven offices
If you bill clients by the hour or charge back project time to cost centers, you need timesheets and financial management. That is an enterprise PPM or professional services platform, and we say so.
Questions people ask about PMO software
What is PMO software?
PMO software is the system a project management office uses to run the portfolio rather than individual projects: one register of every initiative, a consistent way to score and rank them, a view of capacity against demand, and a record of the funding decisions. Task tools manage the work inside a project; PMO software manages which projects get the money and the people.
What tools does a PMO use?
Most PMOs run on four things: a portfolio register, a prioritization or scoring model, a capacity plan, and a reporting pack for the steering committee. Delivery teams keep their own task tools such as Jira, Asana or Microsoft Project underneath. The PMO tool sits above them and only needs the fields a funding decision uses, not every task.
How much does PMO software cost?
It ranges from a spreadsheet to six figures a year. Work management suites price per user per month, and enterprise PPM platforms are quoted per seat, rarely published, and usually come with an implementation project. Portfolio Hub plans start at $24.50 a month billed yearly, priced per workspace rather than per seat, so adding reviewers does not change the bill.
What is the difference between PMO software and PPM software?
Mostly the buyer. PPM software is the category name analysts use for portfolio platforms, and PMO software is what the office running the portfolio searches for. The useful distinction is scope: enterprise PPM adds timesheets, financials and configurable workflow, while a PMO tool covers intake, scoring, capacity and governance and can be running in an afternoon.
Can a PMO run on Excel and SharePoint?
A small one can, and many start there. It stops working at around twenty active initiatives or a second reviewer, because weights get edited per meeting, capacity lives in a different file, and nobody can say which version the last decision used. That is the point to move the register and the model into a tool that keeps them fixed.
What should I look for in PMO software?
Five things decide it: a single register with stages from intake to close, a scoring model the whole office uses the same way, capacity by role against the demand of approved work, a record of what each gate or steering meeting actually saw, and export so the data is never trapped. Everything else is secondary for a PMO under about two hundred initiatives.
Pick the plan that matches the size of the portfolio
Starter
$24.50/mo
Billed $294 a year, or $49 monthly
- 20 initiatives
- 8 delivery roles
- 5 stage gate packs a month
- Excel and CSV export
Team
$74.50/mo
Billed $894 a year, or $149 monthly
- 100 initiatives
- 40 delivery roles
- 40 stage gate packs a month
- Excel and CSV export
Portfolio Office
$199.50/mo
Billed $2,394 a year, or $399 monthly
- Unlimited initiatives
- Unlimited delivery roles
- Unlimited stage gate packs
- Excel and CSV export
Take the next steering meeting off the spreadsheet
Create your account, load the roles and the twenty initiatives everyone is arguing about, and walk into the meeting with a ranking and a funding line instead of a status list.