What it Means to Be a Visionary: Gartner Magic Quadrant Results Revealed

The world of work is changing.

At Workfront, we’ve been a part of that transition for years. Knowledge work is becoming less hierarchical, more democratic, more project-based than static team-based. Our CEO, Alex Shootman, likes to call it the “Hollywood model of work.”

For an in-depth example of how the world of work is changing, see our Hiefer Case Study where employees became project managers overnight.

Does that mean we all get multi-million dollar budgets, stunt doubles, and front-row seats at the Oscars? I wish. Here’s how Alex described it in a recent keynote address:

“You bring together really creative people who have the ability to self-organize. They come together for a period of time to do the work and then they disband and move on to the next project.”

These cross-functional teams are not permanent.  They don’t all report to the same person, and they don’t all rely on the same project manager. So who’s managing and organizing all the work and the deadlines? Everyone is.

It’s no longer good enough to have a single, professionally trained project manager administering the PPM software and keeping all of the work humming along.

These days, everyone at every level of the organization needs to have some project management skills—or better yet, the right software tools that enable them to coordinate, collaborate, and effectively manage their work.

This is especially important as knowledge workers are increasingly juggling tasks for a variety of different teams, departments, and stakeholders.

The Future is Automation

We at Workfront are uniquely positioned to address the needs of evolving enterprises today—including the automation of knowledge work and the continuing digitization revolution, where offline work more and more becomes online work.

We’ve seen our approach validated in the recently released Gartner PPM Magic Quadrant 2017 results, where Workfront’s top strengths were listed as:

• Being user-friendly and highly configurable for different sizes and types of work teams—including the custom object naming feature, which allows teams to use their own terminology.
• The ability to easily project the total cost of projects and tasks with an estimate-at-completion calculation.
• Workfront’s Agile-friendly tools (including the burndown chart, story board, and Agile project view).
• Advanced resource scheduling.
• A redesigned mobile application that improves the way users manage work, communicate with contacts, initiate new requests, update status, and receive notifications.

Each of these strengths puts the power of the Workfront tool in the hands of the average user, rather than being siloed into a single autonomous group.

Breaking with the Past

In 2017, Gartner departed from its past coverage of the PPM software market, effectively collapsing two categories into one and making it clear that this brand new quadrant cannot be compared to prior years.

Gartner’s new PPM category prioritizes top-down tools that include a high level of business manager participation.

We at Workfront approach the management of work a bit differently. We are providing tools that support the democratization of project management in the modern enterprise, putting it into the hands of knowledge workers.

We at Workfront are honored to have been named a Visionary in the Gartner PPM Magic Quadrant 2017, which further validates the versatility of the Workfront solution.

While our goal is to empower every individual knowledge worker with increased visibility, access, productivity, collaboration, automation, and more—we’re also pleased to be recognized for our software’s ability to serve a broad market. 

Whether you work in Hollywood or Hoboken, in a traditional hierarchical team or a more modern egalitarian workplace, isn’t it nice to know that there’s a work management solution available that can drastically improve the productivity of your team all across the enterprise?

Implementing a digital solution capable of automating your recurring tasks—so you can focus more of your time and talent on the job you were hired to do—can make a huge difference in the success of your business. With or without a stunt double.