Australian project company named Gartner Cool Vendor

Global research firm Gartner has named Australian project company TOP, which stands for Totally Optimized Projects, in its Cool Vendor category, recognising its innovation, focus on value, and ability to change a market in a significant way.

Appearing alongside just three other organisations in the 2011 Cool Vendors in Program and Portfolio Management list, including change management leaders Prosci, ChangeDirector and Spider Strategies, TOP was cited by Gartner for its visible and positive impact in project delivery and portfolio management.

Gartner vice president of Research Donna Fitzgerald said that TOP had filled the strategy execution niche with its books and guides on how to achieve benefits.

“While strategy and change management are long-standing concepts in most organisations, most organisations don’t do them well. To refocus the organisation on actually executing against the strategy—rather than continuing to do business-as-usual—takes a conscious change effort, which most companies would be unable to do without either a framework or outside consulting help.”

She added that ensuring that projects actually deliver value was “an arcane art” and that TOP had taken material out of theory and into practice that “an average business leader could actually use”.

“The current market is dominated by consulting companies that will find it easier to do the work than to train the organisation to do it,” said Fitzgerald. “Two years later the organisation has gone back to having no reliable process to work with. TOP’s frameworks offer significant long-lasting value.”

TOP’s co-founders Jed Simms and Alexandra Chapman were delighted with Gartner’s citation. “This accolade acknowledges the groundbreaking product that we have developed and builds on previous recognition of our work by the Australian Information Industry Association as an Outstanding Australian Product Innovation,” said Simms.

He also mentioned that there were no competitors in the same niche. “No one has ever managed to do what we have successfully achieved—create a simple-to-use, end-to-end, top-to-bottom business led approach to totally optimising projects and delivering more benefits for less cost and in less time.”

For more on TOP, see www.totallyoptimizedprojects.com; for more on the Gartner Cool Vendor list, see www.gartner.com/technology/research/cool-vendors.