Planview AdaptiveWork Reviews

Planview AdaptiveWork is a PPM tool for project management, timesheets, etc. It is different from other PPM tools. For example, In terms of finances, it allows you to create a rate card. Those rate cards can be specific to a business you need for other customers. You can create multiple rate cards against the job title to particular customers, currencies, etc. 

Also, those rate cards can be attached to a project. When doing your project plan, your financial forecast values and financial rate on the KPI are generated based on the rate card.

Planview AdaptiveWork has a portfolio, projects, resources management, timesheets, etc.

Compared to Broadcom Clarity, there was some flexibility with blueprints, etc. You can create a blueprint for different business groups or different customers. Planview AdaptiveWork doesn't have something like that.

If they can build up something like a view price. It's still a traditional way where you have to create different instances for different customers. The PPM solution uses queries if I'm rolling out for different divisions. In that case, I have to create different instances for each region because each division may have a different look and feel. But if I have a blueprint, then it's very convenient. I can create multiple interfaces for different processes. Broadcom Clarity has some access control on those viewpoints.

I have been using Planview AdaptiveWork for a year.

The product is stable.

I rate the solution’s stability a seven-point five out of ten.

The solution’s scalability is good. It can be used for medium and large businesses. We have 20,000+ users using this solution. It is a large implementation. Small businesses can also use it. They can use it with limited features like project management or timesheets. Scalability depends upon licensing and completion.

I rate the solution’s scalability a six-point five out of ten.

We have vendor support. We connect with them for any critical issues. We raise the incident with them, and then they do a one-team meeting to discuss it. They also have monthly meetings with all the customers to discuss all the new features they are building for any of their roadmaps. Support is very good.

The initial setup is convenient.

I rate the initial setup an eight out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy.

My recommendation depends on the business requirement. If the business is more towards a PPM solution and doesn’t have too much involvement in financials. They can use Broadcom Clarity. If they want to use financial and have rate cards and everything in the system, billing, and cost rates, they can use Planview AdaptiveWork. The rest of the modules are almost the same in both solutions.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

The tool helps to organize projects across multiple teams. It allows singular teams to view their projects individually while providing roll-up views for integration. Additionally, custom workflows can be created to assist with project maintenance efforts. 

The feature that has improved our project planning the most is the ability to create custom workflows, which allows us to automate manual tasks that project managers need to perform. The collaboration feature enhances our team's productivity by allowing individuals to see the impact of their decisions on projects owned and managed by other teams.

The solution supports our decision-making by providing various features that different teams can use. For example, we utilize the dashboard component to pull in key metrics or metadata presented visually and in table format. 

One specific area for improvement could be implementing a development environment to test workflows with live production data.

I have been using the product for two years. 

I'd rate it at a six or seven out of ten for stability. It seems to depend on the number of users engaging with it, and during peak hours, some slowdowns and hiccups need to be addressed.

For the designing part of the deployment, approximately half a dozen core people are involved, with an additional two dozen individuals consulted and discussed. This process serves a user base of almost a thousand or even more. The people involved in the core team maintain it. They are technical product managers. 

Planview AdaptiveWork's scalability is quite high if it is utilized and leveraged properly. 

The core team deals with support, and I don't deal with it directly. My interactions are primarily with the core team; if necessary, they escalate issues to Planview AdaptiveWork's tech support.

I used Asana before Planview AdaptiveWork. I didn't explore Asana deeply. Asana was used for basic task cards. Planview AdaptiveWork allows for more detailed projects with dependencies and metadata, making it more robust than Asana in my experience.

The initial setup can vary in complexity depending on how much the user wants to leverage the system. It can be straightforward for basic setups but more complex as you put more into it. 

The deployment time for Planview AdaptiveWork varies depending on the specific solution being deployed. For instance, some deployments can be completed in as little as two minutes, while others may take up to two days. It ultimately depends on the complexity of the solution and the speed at which the user works.

The tool's ROI depends on how well the tool is used. If utilized as intended, I believe the ROI can be quite high.

Integration with other tools can sometimes be a hiccup, but this isn't necessarily a limitation of Planview AdaptiveWork. It's more often a result of company policies regarding integration with other systems and tools. From what I've gathered from discussions on various platforms, it appears that AdaptiveWork does integrate well with other tools. However, our experience is limited due to company policy restrictions.  Some teams use it in agile settings. We follow the waterfall approach. I would recommend it, but users should ensure they strategically build out their workflows and logic. I rate the overall product an eight out of ten. 

I've been using their product for a while on different teams. Each team has a different use case. In my current role, we use Clarizen less for project management and more for deliverable tracking, which is to say our bill of materials. So we're using Clarizen basically to create the custom objects. We created a module to track our assets, deliverables, attributes, and metadata along with those assets that we're capturing. It's kind of like a repository or a content library, if you will.

From there, I'm able to generate different types of reporting. For example, we're auditing our asset library to determine how we can apply our current inventory to the marketing campaigns for the next fiscal year. Based on our campaign framework, our team is reviewing content, tracking notes, and using scoring to see if it's a fit or not for the next fiscal year's campaign. Then, I'll generate reports about exactly where it falls into that campaign framework and identify gaps that need to be filled.

Our team is not using to track a project from kickoff to completion so much anymore. When we first started using the product, it had this kind of use case. Our creative team was using Clarizen to kick off projects and track them through completion and delivery. They also used it to create templates and that sort of thing.

We're not using it to share and centralize resources either. Teams are using it like that, but not in our specific use case. We use Agile for resource planning and do our capacity planning in JIRA.

It shows Clarizen's flexibility that we can still use the tool even though its primary function is project workflow. We can get used to it as acting more like a content library. I feel like Clarizen is more customizable and configurable than some of the other marketing tools we've used within Dell. It's definitely what we use as our single source of truth in terms of what we want to track out of it. So I think it's very flexible in that regard.

Clarizen's reporting features have been critical. We have an assembly line made up of several teams managing content. It's similar content tied to different campaigns, but we bundle it together. At the same time, everyone can view the significant deliverables that they're responsible for. Clarizen ties it all together. That's where we're seeing some benefits from using this tool.

In Dell's marketing operations, we want to ensure we're not making too much content or too little. Clarizen lets us keep tabs on what we're creating. We can determine the different metadata and classify all the content created in the process with all the custom fields. That gives us some insight into what we're building and how it aligns with our campaign framework. We can also gauge if we're meeting stakeholder expectations in terms of what content is available. Every day, it helps us answer questions that we face as a global content creation team accountable to our customers and stakeholders within Dell.

This field's marketing team activates the assets that we create, so they're constantly asking what is available and when it's going to be ready. With Clarizen, we can answer those questions. If they need a specific type of content that addresses a niche audience, that's all being tracked in Clarizen.

Being able to coordinate with the creative team on deliverables has helped a lot. Content from our team gets sent to the creative team, which creates what we call "extensions" off that core content. They link another team's deliverables to ours, so we have visibility of all the key deliverables. And every quarter, we conduct life cycle management, where old content is retired and replaced. So Clarizen lets us quickly see where all those content bundles lie and deliverables produced from different teams are bundled together. They have their workspace. We have our workspace, but it's all bundled together.

We haven't put that much effort into tracking our production cycle time, but I would say that it is better than before we had a tool. Before we had Clarizen, people were using Excel for tracking. So I can say definitely that there was an improvement, but I can only guess how much. I would guess 15 to 20 percent.

Clarizen's strength is reporting. Aside from reporting, I also like the ability to create customized workflow and custom actions. The workflow rules are handy. For example, you can create custom fields and dependent picklists. It lets you create different views, which is helpful because we have multiple specialized teams and departments using Clarizen at Dell. All these factors work together well. But for my role, I deal primarily with the metrics and reporting. I keep track of just how much content we're making and how much is getting consumed. I spend a fair amount of time using the reporting module.

I think there's value to Clarizen's work configuration features as well. However, the team that I'm on right now doesn't necessarily need a tool to track the schedules of the projects we're kicking off. We're using Contently for some of those functions, like routing and reviewing. But that's because we tap into the resources on their side. Some of our content writers are on the receiving end, so it makes more sense, and we have a subscription to Contently. But it didn't make sense to us to use Clarizen for that. We're purely just looking for the finished product and tracking those assets and pieces of content that are completed. 

I felt like the slide publisher isn't that user-friendly. I think it wasn't that easy to use or to figure out because of formatting constraints, or maybe we need to get better at understanding some of its limitations. Slide publisher is something that we're definitely interested in, and it was great in theory, but when we put it to use, it didn't serve our needs. So we aren't using it currently.

For the most part, I think the workflow management capabilities are sufficient based on what I've seen in my role as the team admin on some of the earlier teams that I've been on. However, there was difficulty updating the schedules on the fly without relining all the data. At Dell, we're always trying to match the project schedules to reality. So many of the dates start shifting, and people are getting frustrated with managing the schedule because the dates keep changing, and we have to keep fixing them. 

And I think that there are maybe too many dependencies added to the schedules that they've created. Some of the dependencies are needed because they have to hit a specific delivery date. So, it's kind of like, "Okay, if you don't use that, then technically you can push past that delivery date." So, they constantly have to shorten certain parts of the schedule to keep the dates from shifting. I think that was the biggest complaint in terms of the workflow piece.

As far as automating life cycle service requests goes, we've done some configuration just in project intake. That was about as much automation as we've done. We've also used Clarizen to generate a schedule using certain templates on the due date and then backtrack. So yeah, we've done some automation on that. It wasn't easy to automate, though, because the project manager would still have to go in and do some updates and fixes every time, so it's never fully automated. I think it was always just semi-automated, and they still had to put in a decent amount of work to get the schedule correct.

I started using Clarizen before the Planview acquisition, so it's been about seven years.

Over the seven years, stability problems have been minimal. I don't think we've ever had any significant issues. And if there were, I think they would have been addressed pretty quickly within a 24 to 48-hour turnaround. Clarizen team is very responsive to any issues that we're noticing.

I think Clarizen is fairly scalable. Of those areas for improvement would be the ability to customize similar fields by labeling them on a more personal level based on profile or team. That would greatly increase scalability because Dell is such a large organization. There are some small nuances in the way things are named. The taxonomy differs depending on the team or group viewing the data.

Tech support is one of their strongest points. If you escalate any issues in terms of functionality or usability with the tool, they address the problem very quickly.

There was definitely a learning curve. Initially, it was the train-the-trainer method, and once a few of us were pretty well-equipped to be the admins for our team, it was pretty straightforward. After that, we worked to get adoption across the rest of the team. Some are power users, and others are the more touch-and-go type of users. So I think from there, you kind of build a more substantial knowledge base on the tool. And I think they do an excellent job with it putting up a lot of FAQ content on their website and just making a lot of the training material easy to find. So I think the enablement side is there. I think they do an excellent job with making knowledge of how to use Clarizen or examples of how it's typically used is valuable. I think they do a good job with that.

I haven't been tracking things from an ROI perspective. We're just asking ourselves: Is it helping us automate some of the processes that we have been doing manually or helping us answer some key questions that stakeholders ask faster? So we're seeing improvements in that. So I guess, from that perspective, there is an ROI.

Clarizen's price is very competitive. As we scaled, we were able to lock in very competitive rates, so we don't have any complaints about the user licensing fees that we're paying right now. I don't manage the financial side anymore, but I think Clarizen offers some additional premium services. For example, there is something called the Customer Success Plan, which is a higher level of customer service support. It also includes professional services hours if we need Clarizen consultants to help us with more advanced configurations of the tool.

I would rate Clarizen eight out of 10. They've been a key partner for us. It's a tool that we've used for several years, and our partnership with them has grown since it was introduced seven years ago to Dell. In the beginning, Clarizen was only used by 40 people on a creative design team, and now there are somewhere around 300 to 400 active users. We have two instances within Dell, and we're also talking about merging into a combined instance. So we're invested in Clarizen and still moving forward. It's a big part of our marketing plans. 

To anyone who is thinking about implementing this solution, I would suggest that you nail down what your expectations are and think long-term versus what your current pain points are. Everyone wants to fix everything as quickly as possible but look at the long-term. If you're planning two, three years down the line, are you going to have to reconfigure the tool every year? You need to set it up to have lots of flexibility when you're planning for each fiscal year. Is there going to be a taxonomy or a setup that is flexible enough where you can kind of shift everything to the next fiscal year, or do you have to undo and redo everything? Think that through.

One thing that I learned when trying to scale Clarizen is that it's good to be flexible, but at the same time, we still have to come to an agreement in terms of taxonomy. We want to customize it, but there's only so much configuration that you should be doing, and it's worthwhile. We need to understand that. We can use the tool in many different ways, but piling on additional workflow rules and configuration makes it more complicated. You don't have to keep on customizing just because you can. You have to question how much benefit you're getting from customization versus just using the tool out of the box. Maybe it's best to amend our processes so that they fit how the tool already works.

Cyberspace is evolving with so many different adversary tactics and techniques. Our primary use case for Clarizen is program and portfolio management for several projects we have in flight. We manage these projects as a group and as part of our portfolio. 

Clarizen's user interface helps us share centralized resources. This is very important to our organization because there are always going to be situations where we try to learn through user interactions and it allows us to solve issues.

Report customization is most valuable for us. The customized reports help us get an overview of how our portfolio is operating. We can customize a lot of the reports. 

Before we started using Clarizen, we didn't have a great overview because if you use visualizations with Power BI, for example, you have to take an extract from Clarizen, get that data into a format that Power BI would accept, and then put in that visualization. But I love the fact that Clarizen integrated this visualization within it.

With Clarizen Slide Publisher, we're able to extract PowerPoint presentations. We have a standard template that we share with our leadership team to give them an overview of the projects. This is very important for our organization and it saves us a lot of manual work.

Clarizen Slide Publisher has helped increase transparency and communication with project stakeholders for us. Before we started using it, we had to manually go into each of the projects and get some of those key metrics to see how we are doing. But with the Slide Publisher, we're able to get a single slide view of an entire project. We can pick and choose the elements that we need. In this way, we can identify which projects are on track and which are at risk. This gives us a sharper focus on the issues that we need to work on. Slide Publisher has been a lifesaver for us. It saves us five to 10 hours a week. 

Clarizen could be a little bit more visually appealing. A gap I've felt with Clarizen is that improvisation is necessary to get that aesthetic feel. I've also noticed that if we customize a report too much, going back and changing things adds a lot of overhead time.

We find Clarizen's reporting and analysis helpful, but there's always room for improvement, especially with the customization part of it. If I start customizing too many things, Clarizen tends to get slow in our environment and especially if I'm tunneled in an environment, like if I'm connected to my VPN.

Clarizen could also improve the way they handle licensing. For example, our company purchased a certain number of licenses; I don't remember if it's 50 or 100. But, if a user is someone wanting to get just a high-level overview of a project, they are considered a separate license, not just a view license. Clarizen should come up with a licensing structure that would allow some users to get an overall picture of the project without consuming a license. I would say that only active project managers or users actively looking at the Work Breakdown Structure elements should be counted as licenses. 

Also, workflow configuration is good with Clarizen, but it is lagging in maturity. The workflow features have not been effective for what we are trying to do. We use standalone tools for projects that we need the workflow functions for. We stopped using Clarizen for this because it did not serve a purpose for us. We use Asana and other such tools. 

Also, when you log in to Clarizen, it just shows you a pie chart. It would be great if we could choose these visualizations, like we can with Power BI. Instead of just a pie chart, I would like to see a donut or another visualization.

I have been using this solution for three years now I would say. 

I haven't faced any issues with stability. 

My impression of Clarizen's scalability is that it's good, but we have not had to scale it to a large number of users. We have a limited number of users right now. So I don't know what our experience would be like if we have 100 to 500 users.

However, I would say that Clarizen will continue to be the tool of choice for us in the future because changing to a different one would require a lot of learning time from everybody. I don't think we want to do that at the moment. We've already put in three years, so we're going to keep investing in it.

Right now, we have about a hundred users. Some of them are project managers. We also have the PMO team and they are mainly administrators. I would say Clarizen is used in our organization by a limited number of administrators and the rest are all users. Some are also business project managers, so business users.

I contacted customer support because I had some issues with the Slide Publisher. I contacted the community expert and they responded to some of the things that I had asked.

I would say that I had a good experience. They were to the point and answered my query. 

No, we did not previously use a different solution. 

I thought the initial setup was pretty straightforward because we didn't previously have a specific project management tool. This year, we integrated it with our Outlook, which was easy. 

I would say that the initial deployment took about three months. We were doing a proof of concept at that time with limited users and then we rolled it out to early adopters. We had to upload a lot of things from multiple sources, so that's the reason it took a little bit of time. But, once we streamlined it, it's been smooth.

We went straight through Clarizen. It was a great experience. They helped us set up the tool and our different licenses. So, overall, we've had a very pleasant experience with them.

Clarizen has enabled us to have that collaboration with both IT and business, but I don't think we can quantify that into dollars.

When it comes to pricing and licensing, I would say, have a good sourcing team to help negotiate during the process.

Yes, before choosing we looked at Asana. A small group of people within our organization also looked at monday.com. We liked Clarizen and we also got a good deal on it. We ultimately chose Clarizen because we wanted to have a centralized project management tool, something that can be used by both IT and our businesses. We also wanted it to be more user-friendly and not very IT-centric.

Clarizen is a great tool and you should give it a try.

I like the project management solution. It's really nice.

It could be more user-friendly. I think it is too overwhelming, initially, in terms of possibilities and so on. They should help more in providing a way of working so that you can gradually move up. For further integration with a SQL server, my feeling is that they lack skillsets for that here.

I have been working with Clarizen for about three years.

Clarizen is a stable solution.

Clarizen is scalable. 

The initial setup was complex. Initially, they promised to do it within four weeks. But I think it took at least two months.

I think Clarizen is a nice product if you're looking for a portfolio and project management solution outside of the IT space. But you need to be aware that they are a leader in this area, and you experience that in their support.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Clarizen a seven.

Provides visibility into employee utilization, progress on specific client projects and a portfolio view of all programs. Integration capabilities look valuable but not yet being used (Salesforce, Intacct)

Have struggled with reporting and user adoption. Not as graphical as I would like.