Planview PPM Pro Reviews

We're mainly using this solution for project management. We are customers of Plainview and I'm a project coordinator. 

The solution is valuable because it gives our executives a high level of understanding of what's going on. I like the portfolio aspect that shows all the projects and the budget and you can see the priorities and whether the project is on track or not. It has good visibility. 

We use the solution to help us run a project management office (PMO). 

Planview integrated well into our Agile framework and methodology by adding an Agile process and features. 

We use it primarily for the resource management function. From a use case point of view, we use it across all our initiatives, such as projects, agile teams, etc. We also use the portfolio management function to provide us with our top-down, bottom-up planning. 

On the resource management side, prior to Daptiv implementation, most of our projects were running late causing a issues with the delivery of our products due to the limited number of resources we had available at any given time.

It provides us the means to optimize our resources by role and match them to the appropriate piece of work at the right time, without the overcapacity for that individual.

The scenario planning option provides us with the means to be able to evaluate our work in a variety of different situations. 

The dashboard and analytics function helps our executives and our directors in understanding what's going on across the company from a portfolio management point of view.

We're using Daptiv for project portfolio management.

The company finally has software to track projects. We didn't have that before that. So now we're able to measure and track our projects at a portfolio level. It has substantially improved our ability to meet deadlines.

Right now, we use it mainly for project tracking to create our task list and go through the entire project life cycle to be able to provide dashboards and report in real-time to our senior leaders.

We also just started last month being able to submit project requests for the upcoming year. Those can go through the gating system in order to be approved and prioritized prior to starting any assignments on the projects.

The product is providing more visibility by providing real-time dashboards so that you're not seeing incorrect information. It's all live within the system and their ability to drill down and view real-time events on a project is great. The visibility really makes a difference.

It provides managers the insight they need to empower decision-making.

We have a multitude of divisions, big, small, and cross-functional. We have five different groups who use PPM Pro and they have their own instances. Within one, there are five or four different divisions and they all have different uses for utilizing PPM Pro. Some of them use it to manage staff, some use it for direct staffing and we have a process in place to segregate those processes or the approach they're using. It's huge. As technical support, I support all of those five instances with my team. There are two other members of our IT team. 

PPM Pro is cross-functional. When I started, one of the instances was a mess because people had a different approach or different mechanism in place. For example, they were just going ahead and creating available fields for projects without anyone's permission. We did an event where we established that only the admin should be able to create the available fields. For example, if you're creating a field under one division, the nomenclature should be BID completion methods. We established that process. After that was established, it took a while when we changed the whole approach, and now we are able to utilize it more effectively. Only the admins have the access to create the available fields. We also put the description and when it was created by the field so that we have clarity on those fields as to when they were created.

After we utilized that approach, we are in a much, much better position. Earlier, it was around 4,000 available fields that I could check. It was reduced after the cleanup by 20%. We are in a much better position right now than we were before.

PPM Pro absolutely provides managers the insight they need to empower decision-making. Especially with project managers, we focus a lot on the permissions. We don't give permission to everybody to edit anything on a project. Even if you know you're a project manager, only the project manager or the admin has all kinds of necessary access to the projects. Not everybody on the team or on the staffing can edit it. Once we established that approach, it has helped the project managers a lot in executing a successful project.

PPM Pro started out being just an IT application. Within the IT PMO, we needed a way to track our portfolio. We had spreadsheets with project data on them and it was cumbersome. Being able to get some portfolio analytics was important to us, and then our project managers were using all different kinds of tools. They were using MS Project, Excel, and all good stuff, but the templates and everything was all over the place. I liked PPM Pro because we could essentially build out the forms, the fields, and everything to mirror a project charter. The risk and issues log was already in there.

Instead of having to use a bunch of tools, we're able to do a whole lot of it, especially the budget management in PPM Pro. The biggest thing for us was the timesheets because we had a time tracking system that was terrible, it was expensive, and it didn't connect to anything else. Now we've got the time entries, the projects, the reports, and the portfolio all in one system and we liked it so much that the business side decided they wanted to participate as well so it's now the project tool for the entire organization.

We're new, so the goal is for standardization. We want Planview to help us be more consistent across the different themes. We've got several different project management teams embedded within certain parts of the business. By building out Planview, we've been able to standardize within the portfolio world, it's made my life a whole lot easier. I'm not backing everything on spreadsheets and running reports and things. It has reduced a lot of the administrative overhead for us because we do have these external contractors and by granting them access to Planview, they can now go in and do all the stuff themselves instead of having to rely on us. It's saving us a ton of money on licenses too. It's been good so far and I think it's going to get better.

PPM Pro has enabled us to track more in the system than the old system. Just by having Planview and making it so accessible to people in the organization, we're finding that more requests are being submitted and tracked versus people just doing it on their personal desktops and stuff. Previously, things weren't being tracked. 

We use PPM Pro for our PMO office for projects that are over a hundred hours externally, $20,000 external budget, or big projects like our SD-WAN rollout. I have a project plan that has 876 tasks.

PPM Pro is forcing us to put everything in one place because everything was SharePoint, Excel, Microsoft project. We have a Projectplace and we have LeanKit, so we're trying to set boundaries around what goes into LeanKit versus what goes into Planview. Projectplace was bought by our marketing department. I don't even know what they're doing with it, but at some point, it's going to force us to assess how they're using it. I don't want three tools. I either want an Agile tool or I want the full PPM Pro. It's forcing us to grow up.

We're getting to the point where it provides managers with the insight that they need to empower decision making. We have portfolios set up and we're recording our first executive report soon.

It has helped to reduce project delays because we had some issues at one of our rollouts and had to back out. I was able to because of the way I had my tasks set up and predecessors, I was able to easily move out the dates without having to do a lot of changes. It's been reduced project delays by at least 25%.