Project Management Software Business Requirements

This is a ready-to-use requirements checklist for evaluating project and portfolio management (PPM) software — functional capabilities, non-functional criteria, and a vendor scoring matrix in one Excel workbook.

Most requirements lists stop at the features every PM vendor puts on its homepage — Gantt charts, Kanban boards, dashboards. They miss what actually breaks a rollout: whether the tool can detect that one engineer is booked at 150% capacity across four concurrent projects, or whether it only ever sees overallocation one project at a time. They also skip earned value metrics (CPI, SPI) that PMOs need for portfolio governance reporting, and cross-project dependency tracking — essential when a milestone in Project B is blocked by a deliverable in Project A. Miss these and your team ends up rebuilding the "real" portfolio view in a shadow spreadsheet within a year.

What's Inside

• Functional Requirements — organized by planning & scheduling, resource & capacity management, portfolio reporting & governance, collaboration & task management, budgeting/EVM, and integrations.
• 100+ Non-Functional Requirements — performance, security, scalability across large portfolios, integration, and compliance.
• Evaluation Template — an Excel scoring workbook with weighted criteria and side-by-side vendor comparison.

How Teams Use It

• Attach to an RFP sent to shortlisted vendors and score responses against identical weighted criteria.
• Use the resource-leveling and EVM requirement rows to test whether a vendor's "portfolio view" is real or a marketing slide.
• Align PMO, IT, and finance internally on requirements before demos, so vendors get scored on your criteria — not whoever presents best.

Who It's For

PMO leaders, business analysts, and IT/procurement teams evaluating project or portfolio management software for organizations running multiple concurrent projects.