Planview Portfolios Reviews

Enterprise One is a centralized area to allow project portfolio and planning managers to track, schedule, organize, and begin the billing process for projects. That's it in a nutshell.

Our company as a whole is using both cloud and on-prem right now. For project management, we have business sponsors, we have businesses, and we have IT. IT has chargeable projects and we account for all of the application work that's happening and that's done on-prem. The business side has recently started moving over to Planview on the cloud. So currently we're on-prem. Potentially we could end up being on the cloud as well.

We have all the projects in Planview on-premise from an IT perspective. We know if we wanted to find out about a project, scheduling, or who was working on what, we'd be able to find that out with Planview. Planview highlights the human resource hierarchy within it in our on-prem solution so we know who's working on what projects.

Enterprise One provides a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people.

It also allows program managers to group work together and see the resource demands and cost at a consolidated level. I have five different projects and I can do that.

We use expenditures quite a bit. We put in forecast expenditures and then we actualize them below the line in the little box in the bottom tray. Being able to track the project with relevant milestones is also valuable. Milestones are valuable because it helps us to keep the project on track. The expenditures are valuable because we need to be able to understand expenses that are beyond the regular resources in the projects.

I don't believe we're using the resource capacity to the highest extent. The project managers and resource managers are managing that outside of the tool. There are a few select Planview experts areas that are utilizing resource management to its full extent, not in my company though. 

Its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects is good. Our solution on-premise is a bit hamstrung though because we don't have Power BI. It's on the Oracle platform right now. It's not at that level for some of the reporting, but the reporting that we do have is good. Even our Planview administrators can make new reports if required.

It feels like Planview is moving away from Oracle and guiding people towards SQL server. For us to do a migration like that, it's going to be very costly. I don't know if they'd be able to support their analytics solution through Oracle or not. We'd love if there was a way to do that.

We don't use the summary reports on-premise to go to upper management. At least in my case, there are some areas within the bank that are using it. I know that we've got the data flowing out of Planview on-premise into our own recording database and we're using Tableau to report up there. We've created the functionality that we didn't see in Planview on our own.

There's integration with Planview Enterprise. We've created an integration with all the data out of Planview and we pull all of our other project management tools into this database, as well as other relevant interfaces, such as HR. We're looking at getting JIRA in there as well.

To a certain extent, it does facilitate end-to-end management but we have to use multiple tools. We're using our MIS in-house tool along with Planview. That may not be a limitation of Planview. It's likely one of our company's needs.

I find it a little difficult to forecast the remaining effort but even though I've been using it for years I don't think that as a company we have been using it to its full extent. There is probably a little bit of process change that's required on our side, as well as understanding as to how Planview works with forecasting.

It's more internal for us to look at from a process point of view, to understand how the forecasting works. We're a bit unique because we're also using another tool called MIS along with this application and it's integrated with Planview Enterprise One. It gets a ton of the information from there and that's where we're actually relying on financial forecasts.

The integration was okay until Planview changed its integration software from Appian. They have Integration as a Service now and we're not using it. We're continuing to use Appian with our own licensing of the software for on-premise.

Being the IT development manager who implements the upgrades for Planview, I would love to see more thorough testing of expenditures and more thorough testing in general. When we do an upgrade, we have to do quite a bit of testing because we can affect the bottom line. We have to understand that Planview is upstream from our financial tool that derives the capitalization of applications. We have to do extensive testing and when we implement a release, we find numerous bugs and we have to have hot-fixes and patches put in on top of whatever we're testing at the time. Because it's such a huge amount of effort to upgrade the application we can't go to the next release, even if it has the next fixes on it because we're going to have to redo all the testing. We'll set the project back months, and then we find another bug. It's very difficult. If we can have better and higher quality testing coming from Planview software, then we'll have higher confidence in putting the software in and not testing the out-of-the-box functionality.

I have been using Enterprise Pro since 2012. 

The application has been around for a long time and there's some legacy framework that's still hanging around in the background that hinders them from moving forward. I think it actually hinders their stability at the same time. I know that Planview addresses it, but I think not addressing that legacy code framework is limiting and it is reflected in Planview's stability.

We have over 10,000 resources within Planview on-prem, so it seems pretty scalable. They used to enter times, so you could consider them users at one point. I think there were 10,000 to 12,000 users. There are around 1,200 project managers.

I have eight to ten people working for about four to five months to do an upgrade. After the upgrade, there are probably only a couple of people for maintenance but we have a full production support team that has a large budget on a yearly basis to support Planview. Not just Planview, but our whole project and portfolio-management system, from Planview all the way to our other integrated systems. It's mostly testers. We've got a lot of QA analysts, a QA lead, plus infrastructure technical leads, and then technical systems analysts.

From my experience, I think their overall tech support is good. They've got a Planview ticketing system. I don't know if it's us or what but it just seems like we do have to escalate sometimes unless they've heard of this issue before with other companies, whenever there's an issue. I think they're pretty good. From a development point of view, they're pretty good.

I've been dealing with them for so many years. Recently, their turnaround time and knowledge are good. If something new happens, then they have to get their legs right. I think part of their development was moved offshore at one point and we were right there at the beginning of it. It wasn't the best. Everybody individually was trying, but as a whole, they just had to figure out the process. Once they did, then they were able to work things very well. We had to have a little bit of patience.

I was around for the upgrade and it wasn't overly complex, but it's not an upgrade. It's an installation and a migration of the database, which is into itself complex. If you could just do a simple upgrade and not have to worry about that, that would be so much easier, which is my experience with other applications.

A typical upgrade takes four to six months and costs half a million dollars. 

In terms of strategy, we have to use swing equipment and we set up a parallel environment all the way from pre-production into production. Once we are confident in each environment level, then we can move on from dev to QA. Then once we're happy with QA, we've done our full functional system testing, integration testing, and all-inclusive regression testing, then we can promote it to production. There's so much configuration that's done after and because there's so much configuration done after you install, that's what makes it complex. Planview does a configuration upgrade because all of their configuration is captured in the database. They'll take an extract of that and then they'll work on it and provide it back to us so that we can apply it into our environment. It's not the easiest thing to do.

Every time we do an upgrade, we have to have Planview heavily involved. We end up spending quite a bit of money on just the Planview consultants to do the upgrade which is on top of the half a million.

We do have to be on top of them. If we're not on top of them, then they're not there, but it takes two to tango so if we end up getting caught up busy working on our environment, and we don't go and talk to Planview, then all of a sudden they're not available anymore. But when we do need them, sometimes we do have to escalate to get their availability.

I would rate Enterprise One a seven out of ten. I give it this rating because of the quality when I do the upgrades. There are just so many things and I feel like it's a commercial off-the-shelf piece of software. I feel like I shouldn't have to have my team testing out-of-the-box functionality.

Our primary use cases are for using the requests, the work and resource planning, and the financials.

We are hoping to add a planning module strategy so that we can better track our program, work, resource capacity planning, and have a better handle on our financial forecasting.

Enterprise One allows us to provide a single-source view of our IT portfolio, how it aligns with the strategy of IT, and shows us the big picture of our workforce and where we're investing. 

It has also helped us with prioritization of projects, through alignment with strategic objectives. Our business areas are not using Planview, and it's difficult for us to align with the prioritization, but it shows a picture of how we believe we're aligning with their strategy.

This allows us to work with the business to help us find the priority of work, the work that we should be doing to move the business forward, as opposed to, "Here's the list of the things we want done." We can focus on the things that are needed now, as opposed to just a big list of work.

Having Enterprise One has increased our on-time completion rate by 40%. 

The work and resource planning are the most valuable features. We are able to track our IT portfolio of approved work and assign named resources to the work level, have a better handle of our resource capacity, and the ability to take on additional work. The financial planning helps us with making sure our investments in IT are aligned with the strategy of the company.

Enterprise One provides a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people. It's very easy and straightforward to configure these assignments. Planview allows us to see the entire workforce. We can see where our skill sets of people are, what they're working on, and allows us to make informed business decisions based on priority. 

We don't use the full project management piece at this time, but we're working towards that and becoming a more agile workforce. We are working towards tracking our work better. We're just getting started on that piece of really understanding the phases of our work and conjunction with our spend.

Its view into resource capacity and availability helps us to manage work by entering our resources into the work and assignments to understand where our resources are working and looking at the skill sets, aligning them to our priority work. Some of our higher paid resources are working on our new development and understanding how to align our resources better through the financials and the skills that we have attached to those resources.

Enterprise One does a very good job of allowing us to create views across different projects of our resources who are working on multiple projects to understand the capacity of our resources. This feature affects our ability to share the big picture with management. We are able to show our management our extended views, our forecasted views of our approved work, and help make suggestions on where we could better align our investments and our resources.

It also provides end-to-end work management but we are using it with a combination of another tool, JIRA, to get that full picture. It gives them a better insight into the projects that are going on when they're scheduled and the available resources they have for the work and their budgets. 

The resource area needs improvement. The improvements that have been made recently in the later versions have been good improvements, but I think there are some more improvements needed there.

I would like to see where we could add a few of our own fields and be able to track some additional information such as release information attached to the pieces of work so we can tie our accounting codes into the work and the release at the resource level.

I don't think there's been a lot of investment in the request area. That's our intake and it seems to have remained the same over many years. I feel there's a disconnect from when we enter a new request, and if we approve it and dispatch work, the request and the work are then disconnected.

We've been using Enterprise One since 2012. 

It's very stable. We've had very few incidents.

Scalability is very good. It's very scalable for our organizations. We're a small implementation, we have 140 users. There are resource managers and application managers. We have senior staff who are mostly reporting, admins, and some architects.

For maintenance, we have two admins and two owners. One is a business owner and one is a technology owner who oversees what's going on. The admins are technical people from the development staff and the business owner would be like myself, who is more process-oriented around how we use the tool and what type of reports are needed.

Within the IT division, we have a 100% adoption rate. We have plans to increase usage. We're working with two other areas now to see if they will adapt it.

Their support is good but not as good as it was a couple of years ago. Since it's moved out internally from Planview to being outsourced, it has not been as responsive. It's still very good. We get where we need to be but it takes longer for us to get to support at times.

Before Enterprise One we were using Excel. We switched to have a more robust centralized system that we could do more for reporting. We wanted to have a centralized area for everything in a dependable system that we could do better reporting.

We've used PeopleSoft which is an Oracle product and Microsoft Projects.

The initial setup was complex. I think it was because of the consultants that were sent out to help us. They didn't understand our model and I think they were a little junior. They sent us a brand new person. We were his first assignment and he wasn't sure of how to set it up properly so we went through several consultants and rework those over about a six month period. Our deployment took six months. 

In 2012 our implementation was the basic Planview which we used the request to intake the work projects, to capture our approved book of work for portfolios work and resources to understand the capacity of our workforce.

We have seen ROI in the sense that we have fewer people involved in tracking work and resources than we did in the past.

It would be nice if all of the licenses were FLEX. They've been fairly stable with their pricing over the years.

We evaluated five other solutions. They were PPM solutions from Computer Associates, HP, and a couple of other smaller ones, mostly the ones in the upper right corner of the Gartner quadrant.

Some of the others were much bigger and more costly solutions. Planview seemed to meet our needs where we would need just one solution. We might have needed others to compensate for some of the areas that they didn't do as well as we plan. Microsoft had a product but their financials were nowhere near what we needed. We would have to have a secondary tool for that. Planview offers the best all-around package. Enterprise One is equal to them when it comes to intuitiveness and ease of creating reports. Oracle also requires more training.

Planview is a very well designed application that with a little bit of training can be easily adapted by the entire organization. The different modules really round out the product, which gives it an advantage over some of its competitors.

Enterprise One is a very reliable product and offers robust reporting. The company is very in touch with their customers.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

We have historically used it for resource management and project, so, work management. They're maturing different pieces of the resource management and the work management to leverage some of that. Other use cases that we've started with would be planning, strategies and outcomes. We have it initially built out from a beginning use case and continuing to mature that as we roll out some change in the organization of moving to a strategically managed portfolio, not just a tech portfolio.

The more we have access to data and being able to portray the reality of the situation, as long as people are managing the data right, we have more opportunity to make data-driven decisions as we move forward. As we look at what's happening in a project and its execution throughout the lifecycle, its understanding where they're at, what they're doing, what challenges they are having, and what their forecast looks like. Are they going to be able to meet some of those milestones, or do we think that the data says they may have some challenge? And then we can ask the anecdotal and the non-data-driven questions about what's happening. It helps us drive to ask more pointed questions and dialed-in conversations.

Enterprise One has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. That's what we're getting to implement now. We're working through the hierarchy and the alignment piece right now with our executive leadership. And what I'm excited about is we'll be able to show them the alignment in data and reports. As we move through the planning process, it's not just being tracked outside of that and it's not just conversational, it's about understanding what they're wanting to do, how it aligns, and then not only the strategy but the outcome because that's the important part.

We can determine if something is our strategy, what our desired outcome is, then how it aligns, and how it is going to add value. I'm excited about what it's going to bring into our planning as we move forward from here. This was something I've been looking forward to for quite a while, so I'm glad we're turning the corner to implement that.

A lot of of the value is around the project metrics so far but as I get more plugged into the strategic management, it's strategic planning and programs and then tying that into outcomes. I work with executive leadership and that's really what they're looking for, to say, "Okay, what outcomes do we want to achieve and how are we going to get there, plan that out, sequence that out, and then get the work to do that? And then track the work back to where we're headed with our outcomes."

A lot of seeing what stage work is at is based upon how you instruct people to build them out. As far as the tool, the tool has the capabilities, it's just getting the people to make the right choices in how they set up and then manage the data. That's always the challenge.

It does a great job with forecasting remaining effort. The dependency is on the people and the process. With whom the people are managing, what their future plan looks like so that the forecasting can be accurate. It's about the due diligence and the work between the resources, resource management, and project management to say, "Here's what our schedule is. Here's the work remaining." And as long as that's being managed, it's great.

The resource capacity helps us look at not only our future forecasting and what we need to do from a resource standpoint, but we can go back and see what we used. We can even leverage historical to understand what our future might look like and find the balance there. It helps us do both.

Its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects is great as long as you're managing the base data correctly in the roll-up. I love a lot of the out-of-the-box reporting that they have and the ability to manage the configurations within our team. To be able to say, "Okay, we want to show this or we want to slice by this." And being able to be flexible in that.

The reporting options are great because not only can you have so many out-of-the-box, but you've got the abilities to use Power BI, pull down things in Excel, and do portfolios. There are all kinds of different ways to manage data.

As we transition into using the strategies and the outcomes, I'm very excited about some of the strategic dashboards that are out there. One of the things that we've started looking at are TreeMaps. TreeMaps have taken an interest in our leadership to see the distribution of some of the information and just by showing it in different ways. The only thing I'd say is that it would be nice to see some of the TreeMaps, not just on strategy, but on other data elements too.

It provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. Historically, we've been just doing technology data, tracking, and reporting, but as we shift into the strategic management, I'm excited about the opportunities to be able to manage all work, not just tech work. We'll be able to track and understand where we're at with milestones towards our outcomes. We're looking forward to the system transition there.

It's quite flexible, depending upon how the organization chooses to use it, which I think is great. There are some different ways that we've chosen to use it that maybe down the road, we may flex and change that as we go forward. I like that there's an opportunity to use it and partner with Planview to understand what your use cases are and what's the best way to manage through that.

It can go through and group together in a strategic program on the strategy side. We've chosen to implement it so that it ties up there and then manage the initiatives. And you can see then the attachment and the roll-up, so it's an association. It sounds like there's maybe some more coming as we look at some more flexibility. We're able to drill down to details underlying the consolidated information.

It's helped us drive awareness into what's going on and then being able to manage our completion rates better.

We've been using it for a while, so it's about maturity. It's about being able to build out things in Agile groups and teams and some of that. Then really trying to drive into the direction of Lean Portfolio Management and more Agile program management, I think is where we're heading.

I have been using Enterprise One for three and a half years. 

The stability has been great. I haven't noticed any issues as far as that goes. I think anything that we've had any challenges with has been handled very quickly and it's usually in an off-hour. I haven't noticed any issues personally.

The scalability has been fine from a user standpoint. We haven't had any issues. Our biggest thing is as we switched our contracting, we looked at FLEX licensing and I think that's going to be a huge asset for us to be able to have much more flexibility in bringing people on and having roles go up and down, versus a contracted set number of roles. That'll help.

In terms of increasing our usage, we're pretty early in our expanse of the capabilities. A couple of years ago, I walked through the capabilities with our leadership team and road mapped out from a portfolio standpoint what I'd like to see us leverage across the organization for me to be successful in strategic portfolio management for the organization.

We're working down some of those implementations and those capabilities. We started by ensuring that we were reset and set up well on the handful of core capabilities. We'll continue to build that out as we go and mature. I love the roadmap of where they're headed with capabilities and what they're offering organizationally. It aligns with where we're headed in our organization too.

I don't personally use technical support but our administrator does. I know that we've been plugged into conversations that she's facilitated with them. Some of the times we have to just ask them to contact us because it's much easier to have a conversation about it versus what we think is wrong and what we're seeing in our scenario. 

I'm not sure what my current company previously used but where I had worked previously, at my other employer, we used Clarity. That was the only other tool that I had used. They're similar to a certain extent, but what I see with Planview is where they're headed and how they bring things together, more than just what I understood Clarity to be doing when I last used them. Keeping up with where things are headed.

Since they've gone to the regular releases, the initial setup is pretty straightforward. I don't know that we were doing a good job of managing regular releases when it was major releases. It became a little bit more of a struggle there as we got caught up in our releases. Now that we are managing on a regular, monthly cadence, it's so much easier to take an increment than it was, skipping major upgrades and then trying to figure it out.

Upgrades are done overnight. We get it for a week or so to play in the sandbox and validate it, then they process it overnight, and then we're able to leverage it the next day. It's a very quick turnaround.

Because it's so component-based, there has not been a huge strategy that we've had to do from an implementation standpoint, but as we look at being able to deploy or mature some of the capabilities, then that would tie into the strategies at those points.

We've only used Planview's global consulting services. We haven't used an external company to do that.

For maintenance, we have one main owner of the application with her back up, so we've got two people that support Planview overall for our organization day to day. They're application owners. 

In terms of users, we roughly have 1,000 to 1,200 technology partners using it and then a handful of business partners.

We're looking at the FLEX licensing or the partner licensing for our renewal. Where we are looking at having access to all of the products in our contracts so that as we decide to continue to build out the capabilities and make changes, we have access to their other products as well.

We've got PPM, but we're not holistically using that a ton yet. As we build out our business architecture and enterprise architecture, we've got that and we've got the ability to use it. One that interests me from a portfolio standpoint is the connectivity to Azure DevOps, potentially LeanKit, and Lean Portfolio management capabilities that way. It's on the roadmap.

A big lesson for the organization was not to so prescriptively narrow their opportunities. The way they had it configured prior to me coming on, they had shut themselves off from being able to implement feature capabilities because they had driven out so many restrictive requirements that some of the things couldn't be leveraged.

We've been understanding what the capabilities are and where we would like to be, and having a different conversation with Planview when we partnered with them and their global consulting services, to understand what that roadmap looks like, so that we could be guided a little bit better about what to implement and when, and how it might work together as we move forward.

My advice would be to be open to the possibilities and not tying yourself too closely that it has to be a certain way. Be open to understanding where you'd like to head and then how that all needs to come together, and leveraging the opportunities that way.

I would rate Enterprise One a nine out of ten. We really like the tool and a lot of the possibilities that are there. We've really connected with our support, consulting, and even our sales staff. As we've worked with other partners and conversations throughout the processes, we've really had an enjoyable experience with them as we've gone through our transition. Not only that, we like using what we see every day.

We've been using Enterprise One for a long time and we mainly used it largely for a lot of traditional waterfall, project management, resource management, and things like that. We were just about ready to pull the plug on them but we had a renewed effort in using it.

Over the last months or so we've re-engineered it a little so that we can hopefully get a little bit more of the agile use out of it. Being able to balance the old traditional resource management, costing, and stuff like that, with the new agile way of doing things as they were. We do have integration between Enterprise One and JIRA and we're trying to pull over as much of that information as we can from JIRA so that the people, the frontline folk, are doing their day-to-day work in JIRA and we have more of the product owners, project managers, program managers doing the high-level planning work in Enterprise One.

In terms of the most valuable features, the strategy view is something we never really did in the past. It shows us what all of our strategies are, what programs we have under those strategies, what work is happening, and what the current status of that work is. It's all at varying degrees, whether percentage complete, effort complete, hours expended, those types of things. From an overall corporate perspective, so far I've seen a high-level strategy program view into the data.

When it comes to managing project plans, Enterprise One is awesome at enabling us to see what stage work is at. I've always thought it was awesome because it's good whether we're doing a traditional WBS or we're linking in epics into projects that are supporting the programs and the strategies, I've always thought it was an excellent tool. We do want to try to capitalize a little bit more on some automation. Percent complete is the high-level metric that we're really trying to drive to. So if we have a large effort, we can see how far along in the process we are based on a high-level plan that we think is going to run from August to December, we can see where we are in the process. We can't have a plan unless we work it. And so we're struggling with that just a little bit, but from an overall status of things, I think it's great.

The Enterprise One view into resource capacity and availability does not help us to manage work because we don't know how to work it. It absolutely cuold and that is one of the things in our current use case that we're really struggling with because the pure Agile folks say, "You don't plan. You don't estimate. You just do." And management, managers, VPs, and above are saying, "Okay, what is our capacity to make all this work?" So we're struggling with that just a little bit. I think once we settle on something that Planview does give us a view into what our capacity is and how much work can we really take on.

Its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects is pretty good. Planview has invested a lot of years and a lot of money in creating a lot of out-of-the-box reports. It's just us trying to learn them again and really trying to find out what's available. We've been providing reports and information to our upper management, and our CIO said, "That's too much information." We're trying to find that balance between a one-page summary of everything going on versus providing all the details that might be needed. So overall, Planview is very good at providing whatever level of information we want.

In terms of sharing the big picture with management, this feature has really helped because there are certain strategy reports or certain work reports that do provide a one-page overview of everything. It's just that management is trying to decide what information they want to see. Then, in turn, can we from an administration perspective, modify the report enough to be able to provide that information.

It provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. Admittedly, when we're looking at all the different products that Planview provides, whether it be LeanKit, PPM Pro, or whatever, they do bend toward a certain type of methodology. Obviously, Enterprise One has been very traditional work and resource management focused, but I think over the years that we've been with Planview, and especially with the introduction of the Enterprise One model, they're really trying to make it to where you can have different types of projects. Whether they be traditional waterfall, Agile, Lean, SAFe, etc. Planview Enterprise One does a good job at all of that. It may not give you the capabilities of everything that you want, but that's why they've introduced these integrations with other tools like Azure DevOps, JIRA, Micro Focus, and those types of things. So that you can get that overall big picture of what's going on.

Another example of how it's been able to improve the way your organization functions is that we can now look at the strategy view to say, "Okay, what do we all have?" Because you've got this group doing something, another group doing something, and another group doing something, but overall what is everything we're doing? And as we mature in the use of the tool, not only from how much work we have out there, what can what our capacity is to do everything. But looking at the ICP portion, the investment and capacity planning portion of it to say, "Okay, we think it's going to cost us this much to do this work," but "Oh, by the way, we need to shift something around." What does that mean from mainly from the way we use it, from a capacity perspective? Because we're completely internal. We don't draw revenue directly from the internal work we do. But hopefully, we can get the benefit perspective where something may be big work, small benefits, whereas something else is small work, big benefits, and we can see where we need to re-adjust our priorities there. Overall, I think it'll help.

We're not doing direct assignments but if we were, I think it is a very flexible tool. Probably the only thing that I really struggle with is doing allocations at a certain level. And you have to do it at what they call the lowest leaf level. That's probably the only drawback I see. I'd like to be able to see allocations happen at a higher level and to where we're dealing with Epics. 

In fact, I had a scenario this morning come up where we had an Epic that was created. Some allocations were put on the Epic, and when somebody tried to put a story or a task up underneath that Epic and we couldn't. And so that's the only feedback on the whole resource assignments, how I'd like to stay flexible enough to where I can go at a higher level to where I don't have to do that. A developer is going to be working on this story and we're allocating X number of hours to that particular story. I'd like to know that, I know Jane and Joe are working on a project or this work. And I think over a course of two, three sprints, months, whatever, I think they're going to be working about 75% of the time. So it is flexible, but it's not flexible.

There are pros that we're seeing from being able to draw down and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. I'm a product owner and when I look at an overall endeavor and I know that I've got five Epics and 10 stories across that, from an investment perspective or a cost/benefit perspective, they say, "Okay, Epics are like features. Which feature is going to cost me more to provide?" And then hopefully I've got an idea in my brain if I'm a product owner of "Alright, this Epic is going to give us more value than then another Epic and Epic A is only going to take five story points, whereas Epic B, isn't going to give as much value is going to take us 30 story points or something like that." 

I've personally been using Planview for going on 17 years now, and I think they have made some great improvements in it. I've used it both as a Resource Manager and Project Manager, and now I've been using it from an admin perspective for quite a while. I think some of the administrative aspects of it could be a little easier, especially when it comes to designing reports. The reporting coming out of it could be a little bit better.

There are some small things that are troublesome to me as far as assigning resources, setting people up, trying to configure resource structures, and stuff like that. But those are just small nibs. I think overall from a usability perspective, it's really good. It's huge. Planview's the Microsoft of project planning and PPM. There's a lot to it and people just need to take the time to learn it.

I have been using Enterprise One for about 25 years. We use the latest version, Enterprise One, PPM release. We're on the continuous cloud.

I think the stability is great. Planview had some issues about, three or four weeks ago. But I think they've gotten over that, as far as the technical stability. It has pretty good functional stability. I think it's really good there. There's just a lot of stuff we don't know. Everybody working from home has had a big stress on internet service providers and big companies like ours are using a VPN solution. And so if I'm on VPN and I get on, try to get into Planview, there are some issues there, but overall, I think it's pretty good.

From a number of users perspective, it's how many licenses you purchased from the amount of data. I'm not worried about that since we don't have it on-premise we could probably go as big as they want it to it's just until Planview says, "Hey, their cut back" or something like that.

We are looking at expanding the ICP usage specifically. I know that's integral into it and we're trying to go a little bit more enterprise maybe. That's specific to Enterprise One, but a little bit from a cross-tool perspective, we are looking at the capability and technology management offering for our enterprise architecture group. I think we're going to start looking at LeanKit.

Technical support is very good if they know what's going on. The reason I say that is because we have introduced a Tasktop as the integration between JIRA and Planview. And so the support model is we have to go through Planview to get all of our support. I have found it a little difficult to get answers based on some recent questions that I've had with regards to the Tasktop Integration Tool. That's my only complaint, but I think it's fairly new, I know task integration with Tasktop is a little bit more than a year old.

I think the whole integrations team is fairly young and, they've got a lot of different tools that they have to support, but maybe the support model for Tasktop and the integrations could be a little bit better.

The initial setup is complex but it's huge. There's a lot to configure and there's a lot to consider and when we reengaged with Planview to get us to reset back up, we spent from March to June and beyond getting things configured. I look at trying to set up Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft teams. There's a lot to it. Is it impossible? Absolutely not. But would it change my mind on going with Planview? Absolutely not.

In terms of strategy, we were trying to re-initiate and figure out how we can mix the traditional sense of what we've used Planview for in the old waterfall method, timesheets, and all that. How we can blend it into this new, Agile methodology they were using. And we still have some teams that are very Kanban-oriented work comes in where it goes out, that type of thing. So that was our strategy to how can we mold all this together and be able to get the necessary information out of the tool that we want for upper management. We have a reset goal yet.

If it was up to management, we'd have it yesterday. We're getting back into some traditional project status things like what's the current health of the project, what's the current red, yellow, green status? We're trying to financially cost things out through the financial planning details and stuff like that. Our goal at least for projects data thing is hopefully by the end of this month with hopefully some more customized reporting, hopefully by the end of October.

We brought together a good cross-functional team between our PMO, which we have five people that write five or six people on the PMO. We brought in some scrum masters and product owners. In our core team we have about 10 employees working on it from a day to day maintenance perspective. There's one that would be me from a data maintenance perspective. It's falling mainly currently on the PMO members, which is to get to three contractors. There are seven or eight of us on the PMO.

In terms of how many people use this solution, we have all of our contractors entering timesheets, so we can do timesheet reconciliation, which is about 50 or 60. The number of people that are in it week to week are around 30 or so. That's going to increase as we're trying to move our project status thing back into the program manager, product owner space as well. 

We have time reporters, team member roles, program manager roles, mostly most of the users that we have set up are in the program manager role for being able to see statuses and updates statuses, we have about 10 people that are in what's called the requester role or more the executive I just need to be able to see the information. I don't need to be in the weeds entering data or anything like that. 

In the past, we have seen ROI. Again, we're still trying to figure out who, where, what, why and how. And so, I think the ROI calculation may come about a year from now.

It's kind of expensive, but I don't write the check. As long as the bosses will pay, we'll write the check. That's fine. Pricing isn't really part of my concern, per se. And again, not knowing what other solutions are out there and how they compare from a licensing perspective, I couldn't give you opinion either way.

There's the SaaS cost and there was a cost for the Tasktop Integration as well, but that's to be expected. We use JIRA and anytime we want to bolt on something new, we need to spend some money to make it happen. I don't think it's unreasonable.

The biggest lesson I've learned is that there's a lot to it. There's a lot of information, and the big thing is trying to interpret what the information is telling us. I can look at one report one day, and the same report another day and get a different picture. It's just really understanding, especially week to week, what the numbers mean.

My advice would be to be ready to work hard, understand your needs, understand your requirements, and understand what information you want to get out of Enterprise One. So that, in working with Planview on a solution, they can tell you what information you will need to put into Planview, or the Enterprise One application to get that information. That's something I think that we didn't do very well. We thought we knew what we wanted, but then we'd get a month down the road, and we'd say, "Okay, I'm not getting this information." Planview was right to say, "You didn't ask for that information." So again, it totally goes against Agile methodologies, but you've got to really set a good base of what you want, so that you don't have to continually shift, on a week to week basis. Thankfully Planview has been very gracious to us and has reacted to our needs and our changes in requirements. 

I'd rate Planview an eight out of ten. It's a really good tool, very powerful, and very robust but very complex.

We not only use Planview for resource allocation but also for tracking financials towards the projects that we have set up. We also have financials and resource allocation and we also use the project planning piece of it.

We use Planview quite a bit to articulate and tell the story around where we're at, whether a project's at risk, whether it is on track, whether or not we need to either extend the timeline or add additional resources.

I just took it over about four or five months ago, as part of my responsibilities. But from what I can tell it's pretty robust in terms of flexibility.

It maps back to our SDLC process pretty well. I'm able to see the stage of where things are at. We also use Azure DevOps for all of our requirements and our coding. 

The work is in Azure DevOps but the planning aspect of that work, the financials, and the resource allocation are done through Planview. I'm trying to figure out how to connect the dots. Meaning, if I have a project where I've burned through 50% of my financials, and I've done all my resource allocation inside of Azure DevOps, I'm able to visualize and see the data that says, "Hey, I'm 50% through the development work of the project. I have this work that I currently have in flight, and I have this much planned for the remaining amount of time, which represents the remaining 50%." And then I want to see how that then maps to Planview. Because Planview could say, "Hey, you know what, we burned through 80% of our money." How do I then use the data coming out of Azure DevOps to then either go ask for more money and more funding or to do something to make decisions?

Resource capacity helps me to ensure that I have the individuals needed to complete the work. We basically go in at a high level. We know we have a project and we know we might need around 500 hours of a cloud engineer. And so we'll go out, we'll make the request, and the allocation is done for it. Then you have a person that's allocated for those 500 hours. The only thing I don't have is when they've burned through those 500 hours, I understand that they're burning it against the project, but I don't know how to tick and tie that to the features that they burning it against. 

It provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of the types of work. From a project view, I'm able to see where things are at by the financials, the allocation of resources, as well as the lifecycle of the project.

It also provides a variety of types of resources assignments for assigning work to people. It's pretty flexible. We could set up a variety of different rules within Planview across organizations. Each team sometimes has different roles that they need to pull in for the project or for the team. And so having the flexibility of adding roles is good.

Another thing that it has helped us with is our burn rate of dollars, more than anything else. We're able to look at things and say, "If we're coming towards the end of this year, we know our burn rates higher than it should be." And we can look at certain projects and say, "Let's remove certain work streams that we don't want to work on."

As more and more organizations are adopting agile as a framework of how to deliver work, they should build in some flexibility within Planview of connecting the work to the teams.

For example, right now the old waterfall methodology of planning was to say "Hey, I need an allocation of a resource." Normally with other tools I've seen, it's if I need an allocation of 18, I know Planview has that. We, unfortunately, made some modifications, we didn't go that route, we're on fast forward. That is an example where I think Planview has done that. 

When you think of planning at a PI level, roadmap planning, or release planning, I think they should make a little more headway into how agile delivery works, tying it back into the financials and the planning to Planview. I think it would be good.

We have been using Enterprise One for four to five years. 

The stability is good. I have not seen a lag time and we haven't been down when I've had to use it.

The scalability is good. We have 20 to 25 project managers that use Planview, a couple of team leaders, and then we do our time cards in Planview, so really the entire organization uses it, at least in IT, so it's probably around 400 to 600 people.

I would like to see us use it more. When we use Planview I would like to use it at senior level leadership planning where we can see forecasted spend, my allocation for the budget, my resources, and all of those things. I want to be able to tie that to detail work that's in Azure DevOps.

The initial setup went smoothly. It was straightforward. I don't think we had a whole lot of tickets.

We do a lot of upgrades. It's usually overnight and it doesn't take long. We had a major reconfiguration about two months ago and it went pretty smoothly.

From our side, I think we had about four or five analysts involved.

For the management, we have two people that help support and manage Planview.

We only worked with Planview, not third-party integrators. 

It's pretty easy to use. It's not that difficult.

I would rate Enterprise One a seven out of ten. 

Enterprise One supports our portfolio planning and approval process. People who are interested in having a project done would enter it in Planview and we would use Planview to facilitate the approval process. If it's disapproved, then we would cancel the entry and nothing would happen. If it's approved, then we use the tool to facilitate the execution of that project from a cost estimation and management resource as well as tracking the project progress and current status.

We also use it for risk management and to facilitate change management.

One example of how it has improved my organization is the introduction of Microsoft Power BI reporting. It greatly improved the visibility and the flexibility in those management reports. Prior to that, oftentimes there was data taken out of Planview and Excel created visuals for management. But with Power BI, definitely, the visualization capabilities are very strong.

It has definitely helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with the strategic objective in terms of strategy, outcomes, and capabilities. It lets us tie projects to strategies, rank them, and prioritize them based on a number of attributes.

Enterprise One also allows program managers to group work together and see the resource demands and the costs at a consolidated level. That's basically the core of what Planview Enterprise One does. It gives you the ability to see across a portfolio the cost and resource demands. It doesn't affect project management ability specifically, but it helps us in the portfolio management to make sure that we're working on the right things and have the right amount of resources and it gives us visibility into future demand to help us plan for resourcing.

It drills down into the details underlying the consolidated information to a number of different levels, all the way to tell individual tasks and assignments. This lets us see what the resources are working on to help us prioritize. If we have constraints in a certain skill, we can see the detail and then make intelligent decisions on what work may need to be put off versus what work needs to get done now.

I'm not sure it has increased our on-time completion rate specifically itself, but it certainly gives us visibility into what is on time versus what is finished not on time.

The financial planning capabilities are very useful. We have integration for an SAP system, and so we load financial data from SAP into Planview for prior months. And then we use the forecasting capabilities to get a complete picture of the cost of a specific project. The financial management is very useful.

The resource management is also useful to show us resources utilization, as well as capacity and it gives us a picture across our employees as to what capacity we have, which helps us plan what work we can take on. It helps us with scheduling when certain things might begin or not begin. It also gives us visibility into if we need to consider going external for contracting or consulting resources to perform certain tasks.

Enterprise One does a very nice job of telling us what stage a project's at. We also use it from a portfolio management standpoint to gauge the health of an overall portfolio of projects. And from a planning perspective, knowing when projects are going to be ending helps us in planning future work.

It also does a nice job of letting us forecast effort either by an individual person or by skillset. If I have an individual person assigned, I can plan out their work into the future. If I have a need for a certain skill set, but I don't have anyone assigned yet, I can still plan the work being done.

It does a very good job of providing summary reports across multiple projects if there are different options of reporting available within the tool itself. It also connects with Microsoft's Power BI. That's integrated as well to provide some dashboarding KPIs.

Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. We use it for different types of work. We use it for project work. We use it for production support monitoring and production support work. We also use it for managing smaller work requests that don't require a formal project driven by a project manager.

In terms of improvement, I know one of the things they're moving to is a single Planview account ID. Right now, if you have multiple Planview products, you have to log on multiple times. But that's a general statement. It's not specific to Enterprise One.

I've been using Planview for 14 years. Enterprise One is their current version, their core PPM application.

It's very stable. In the four years I've used it at my current employer, I think only once I've had an actual issue where there was something that they needed to fix. It's a very stable platform.

I know in our case specifically, we've had over 1,000 active projects at any one time with over 1,000 users using it all over the world, and it performs fine. I know other companies only manage several dozen projects at a time but Enterprise One definitely seems scalable.

When I joined, we had about 1,200 users. We've spun off a couple of parts of our business that used to use it. Presently, we're smaller, but when I first joined, we had about 1,200 users.

We use it within our IT organization and within IT the adoption rate is 100%. There were other business areas that were using it that we sold off. We're having discussions with other business areas on using the functionality.

In terms of the types of users using Enterprise One, project management obviously is very active in it every day. We have people that work in portfolio management. They're in it quite often. We have a team that we call our relationship managers. They're folks that work with a business on project prioritization and project ideas. And management uses it, again, for visualization reporting. Resource managers are also in it to view what their people are working on and view assignments to projects and approve assignments.

I manage the solution. I'm an IT manager, but in this capacity, I'm the Planview architect so I do all the configuration of it.

The technical support seems strong. I know they've started doing some more off-shore support, and that space still needs some growth. But the US-based technical support is fine. Their off-shore support is something new that they're laying out and the team just needed some development in terms of skill and experience. 

I was not involved in the initial deployment here. I've used this product at two different companies and I actually wasn't involved in the initial deployment in either one.

In hard dollars, I have not seen ROI. In productivity and the ability to help support achieving our strategic objectives, I have. But I couldn't put a dollar figure next to it.

I'm not involved really in the pricing or licensing aspects of it. One of the things that Planview as a company has done is introduce something they call FLEX licensing, where if you have Enterprise One licenses that you're not using, you can exchange them for licenses for other Planview products. So as a company, the licensing seems flexible. But that's not an Enterprise One statement specifically.

One of the big lessons, and this applies to any solution, is not to customize it and use it as it's designed to be used. Adopt your processes to leverage the capabilities of the tool. I've seen many instances where people take applications and customize them to fit their processes. And it just ends up being problematic later on. That's one of the things we did in the latest implementation of Planview four years ago. We had an on-premise version that was heavily customized. We moved to a SaaS model that was not customized at all, and we've been able to keep it current. Upgrades are easy. So one of the lessons I would recommend is: Don't customize.

I would rate Enterprise One an eight out of ten. It does an outstanding job of supporting our needs in this space, and the company has done a great job of continuing to enhance and improve it.

We use Planview Management to assess the current project portfolio, evaluate resource availability, and prioritize projects based on strategic objectives, ROI, and risk factors. 

Planview Management improves an organization depending on how well it aligns with the organization's goals and processes and how effectively it is implemented and utilized by the team. 

Our overall experience was good. Our primary use case is Planview Management. In this scenario, it is to improve project visibility, optimize resource utilization, and drive better decision-making to achieve organizational goals effectively.

This software totally changed our organization's workflow. Planview Management offers a centralized platform for managing all projects and portfolios. This helps to improve visibility into project status, progress, and resource allocation across the organization. 

Planview Management enables our organizations to make data-driven decisions. The centralized platform offers robust reporting and analytics capabilities. 

Planview Management integrates seamlessly with other tools and systems used within the organization, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and collaboration platforms. This integration enhances data visibility, streamlines workflows, and eliminates silos between departments. All other services are sophisticated

Enhancements are needed in:

Advanced reporting and analytics: While Planview Management provides robust reporting and analytics capabilities, further enhancements could include more advanced data visualization options, predictive analytics features, and customizable dashboards to provide deeper insights into project performance and trends. 

Enhanced collaboration tools: While Planview Management facilitates collaboration, additional features such as real-time chat, video conferencing integration, and collaborative document editing can further improve communication and teamwork among project teams and stakeholders. 

Scalability and performance: As organizations grow and their project portfolios expand, it's essential for Planview Management to ensure scalability and performance. This could involve optimizing the platform's architecture, enhancing database management, and improving response times for large-scale deployments. 

Overall, by addressing these areas for improvement and incorporating additional features in the next release, Planview Management can continue to meet the evolving needs of organizations and remain a leading solution for project and portfolio management.

I've used the solution for six months.

My primary use cases for this solution are: 

• Time reporting
• Portfolio management 
• Capacity planning

Enterprise One has improved my organization by enabling us to stop committing to work that we can't do.

The most valuable feature is capacity planning because only Planview does that. 

The resource capacity and availability have helped us to manage work by preventing us from starting work that we cannot consume.

It gives us flexibility in configuring assignments. We can do both Agile Teams and non-Agile Teams. This flexibility affects our ability to meet our company's particular needs by allowing us to work in a hybrid model, some Agile Teams, and some non-Agile Teams.

The solution out-of-the-box that we established was insufficient. We had to purchase and set up OData. I don't believe that it's a great solution out-of-the-box but eventually you can get there.

It does not provide end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. It also does not help with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives.

The portfolio creation user interface needs improvement. It's not intuitive, from a user experience perspective. If you've never used it, it doesn't click here and then the next thing opens, click here, then the next thing opens. You get all the features upon opening to create a portfolio.

The request screens, the request process, and the workflows have a poor user experience also. The workflows are definitely not intuitive. You're clicking links and going back and forth. It's way too many clicks and it doesn't make sense. It's not intuitive. On the request side, it hasn't been updated in a long time and it's the entry point for all of our work. It could provide more data value than it does today.

I have been using Planview Enterprise One for 15+ years. 

The stability is fairly high. The only problem we've had so far is that for whatever reason, Friday morning, the page load is ridiculously slow. I don't know if that's when the staff is doing updates or what, but Friday mornings are very slow.

I'm not worried about scalability. 

We have about 450 project managers, resource managers, team members, leadership viewers, and power admin users.

There are two staff members for maintenance. They both administer maintenance, consult on new capabilities, and develop reports and new functionality.

We're only one of 20 lines of business in the organization and we're the only ones currently using the solution. Within that number, there is around 20% adoption. Time reporters have to report time, but I don't know that I would consider that. They do it, but that's not a tipping point. We do have plans to increase usage. We have a proof of concept with one department outside of ours.

I'm unimpressed with technical support. When my folks call or email they say if it doesn't do whatever it's supposed to do out-of-the-box they can't answer a question and we end up back with some solution consultant.

I did not enjoy the setup process. It comes with a set way of thinking that is sometimes limiting.

We started the last deployment in June of last year and we deployed early November. Employees started using it a hundred percent in December of last year.

We used a consultant from Planview for the deployment. They went above and beyond, but their approach needs upgrading.

We are seeing the start of ROI. We have additional capability. It didn't save us money at all, but it gave us new capabilities.

I like where they're headed with the whole FLEX model. Your license gives you access to whichever tool is the one that makes sense on the Planview platform. That was a pleasant surprise. That has not been their approach over the 10 years I've had exposure to them.

We also evaluated PPM Pro and prior to that, in another organization, I evaluated CA and PPM Pro before it was owned by Planview. We have applications of Workfront, WeTeam, Trello, Azure DevOps, and various things.

Enterprise One's sweet spot is people, work, and money. They're pretty much the only one that can do that hat trick. If you want that, you have to get them, but we don't use it for any team capability. It's too cumbersome and the user interface is still lacking.

My advice would be to discuss your data upfront before you agree to an implementation. See what it looks like to have the data you need and what sort of costs would be required to do that from the very beginning. Then, see not only how will you visualize and record that data but how will you migrate data. That cost us a lot of time and delay in the user adoption because the migration of data was manual.

I would rate Enterprise One a six out of ten.