Link: https://blog.planview.com/the-strategic-portfolio-management-bar-has-moved-heres-what-clears-it/
From Planview Blog
Most large organizations have a timing problem. Data and dashboards sprawl across the enterprise. But insight rarely arrives fast enough to change outcomes.
Forrester’s report, The Strategic Portfolio Management Tools Landscape, Q4 2025, spans more than 20 vendors and ten distinct use cases, reflecting just how complex the planning ecosystem has become. As organizations connect strategy, architecture, and execution across that sprawl, visibility breaks down.
By the time a portfolio review surfaces a misalignment, the window to course-correct has often already closed. The gap lives in the latency between signal and decision.
Forrester’s latest SPM Wave evaluation puts that gap in sharp relief. What it reveals to us is that the distance between the top platforms and the rest is widening. The real differentiator is how purposefully AI is embedded across the decisions that matter most.
The Shift From Reporting to Reasoning
Traditional SPM platforms were built to aggregate and present. They answered one question: what is happening? We believe the leading SPM platforms turn that data into decisions before the window closes.
That distinction hits hardest at the portfolio level, where a single misallocated investment can cascade into months of lost capacity, delayed product bets, and strategic drift. The platforms to focus on deliver both: the visibility to surface a problem and the intelligence to act on it, without switching tools or waiting for analysis.
Agentic AI is what makes acting on problems possible at scale. The platforms that are pulling ahead in the market are those where AI could take a strategic question like “what happens if we delay this initiative and redirect capacity here?” and return a meaningful, comparative answer using real portfolio data. The recommendation surfaces directly, with trade-offs visible, without an analyst in between. The choice on what action to take on that recommendation belongs to the humans, but it is now a much better-informed choice.
Why AI Scores Should Mean More to You Than They Used To
A few years ago, AI in SPM meant smarter filters and automated status updates. These capabilities are useful at the margins, but they stop well short of the decision layer. The 2026 evaluation reflects a meaningful step change: AI is now embedded across the full SPM lifecycle, from capacity planning and demand prioritization through investment forecasting and OKR alignment.
When evaluating how deeply AI is embedded in an SPM platform, focus on the criteria where AI determines the quality of the output:
- Strategic planning
- Scenario comparison and portfolio analysis
- Business architecture and capability-based planning
- Goal measurement and alignment
Planview received the highest possible scores across all four of these criteria. We believe those scores reflect what happens when AI is designed into the core of an SPM platform from the ground up.
The practical difference shows up in how leaders are enabled to make decisions. With agentic AI built into portfolio analysis, a CIO or EPMO leader can run scenario comparisons using natural language, evaluating the impact of a strategic shift across investments, teams, and timelines, without pulling in a data team or waiting for a weekly report. That speed is what closes the visibility gap.
The Other Signals That Matter
Forrester’s evaluation goes beyond AI. Two other elements of the Q2 2026 assessment are worth highlighting for any leader evaluating SPM tools.
The first is customer feedback. Analyst evaluations measure capability at a point in time. To us, customer feedback reflects whether the platform holds up under the pressure of real planning cycles, across real organizations.
In the Q2 2026 evaluation, Planview was recognized as a Leader and received above-average customer feedback.
The second is the strategy category, which covers Vision, Innovation, and Roadmap, among other criteria. For buyers making a multi-year platform decision, a vendor’s investment trajectory matters as much as its current capabilities. The platforms that are truly making their mark are the ones building toward where the decision environment is heading, consistently ahead of where their customers are today.
Read The Forrester Wave
: Strategic Portfolio Management Tools, Q2 2026
What to Look for If You’re Evaluating SPM Tools
The Forrester Wave gives buyers a structured way to compare vendors on the criteria that matter most for strategic portfolio management. For any organization evaluating options or questioning whether its current platform is keeping pace, the Q2 2026 evaluation is the most recent independent benchmark available.
The Forrester Wave: Strategic Portfolio Management Tools, Q2 2026, Forrester Research, Inc.
Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. This report is part of a broader collection of Forrester resources, including interactive models, frameworks, tools, data, and access to analyst guidance. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here .
