Planview Portfolios Reviews

We've been using this product for prioritizing work across our Organization and also demand and capacity planning. 

Work that gets added to Planview captures all the key information like t-shirt sizing, key stakeholder names, financial information, and, most important of all, resource allocations and role requirements - all in one tool.

It becomes really easy for the Project Managers to keep an eye on the progress of their Projects, and on the other hand, for the resource managers, it's really easy for them to identify what's in flight for their resources and what's in the pipeline, also do we have enough capacity to fulfill that demand.

Really happy with how Planview keeps transforming its capabilities to meet customer needs.

We are able to take up the right work and invest in the highest value ideas.

The challenge was that we were doing a lot of work without identifying what work has the highest returns. With Planview, we have that visibility across IT, and all the work that gets entered into Planview is surveyed and prioritized to make sure that we start with the highest valued investments. 

Not only that, we have visibility of all the resources as to where they are spending their time and how they can be utilized to better meet the vision and business strategies of the organization.

The best aspects include:

Work Management. Work that gets added to Planview captures all the key information, including t-shirt sizing, key stakeholder names, financial information, and most important of all, Resource allocations and role requirements - all in one tool.

Resource Management. We have visibility of all the resources as to where they are spending their time and how they can be utilized better to meet the vision and business strategies of the organization.

Leankit. The kanban board has really helped us be more agile and we can keep track of everything that is ongoing.

The solution needs to be better at accepting new ideas for upcoming releases. At times, we've requested Planview to add new features to the tool. But they have it go through an enhancement idea process, and we find it a long process. Your idea goes through only if the same idea is proposed by other organizations.

Email notifications for resource allocations/requests/requirements/reserves are something that could be added. A lot of the time, we get questions from resource managers. We would like to get an email notification when a resource request is made.

We've used the solution for nine years.

The product is stable and reliable, with 24-hour support around the globe.

Planview does a great job in scaling the solution with its in-house experts.

We got it implemented through vendor support and are really happy with the support.

The setup cost is mostly the same as competitors. That said, you get a lot of value and return on investment with just one tool.

We also looked into ServiceNow ITBM.

We have a huge contractor base and the solution is the primary time-keeping system for our contractors in IT. We manage all of our projects and financials in Planview, as well as the time submissions associated with those projects.

It has improved the way our organization functions by giving us the overall picture of our financials. Before, we were functioning using spreadsheets, and now we are using a tool where we're all able to collaborate right in it. I'm part of the PMO, and my team is Portfolio Management. My team manages the financials and oversees the financials for all of the capabilities and the departments within our IT organization, and so it provides us that one source of truth, that one data repository for us to obtain our project actuals as well as our forecast data.

I'm also the Planview administrator. When I first joined the company, Planview was primarily used for timekeeping. Since then, the level of information that we're now capturing in the tool has gone from a three to a nine. Within that three or four-year span that I've been working with Planview in my organization, I've seen us implement better measures and better data points within Planview itself. We had this information parsed throughout the company, and we are now leveraging the life cycle and the various configured screens to capture this information from end to end before a project goes into open active status.

The fast-track reporting has been beneficial to us, as well as the project and portfolio management tool. We don't have any add-ons at this time. We're exploring those at a later date, such as Projectplace and connections with Jira.

When it comes to managing project plans, we are currently in a crawl-walk-run with Planview, and we're just starting to walk. Right now, stage-wise, we can see, financially, a good picture. However, in terms of the attributes that associate the different phases in a project, we're not there yet. We're in the process of implementing that right now. I know it has great features to do that. We're just not there yet. I’d rate it at about a four out of ten, however, that's no implication on the tool itself. It's just where we are as a company. We need more time with it.

In terms of assessing Enterprise One for its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects, I would give it an eight out of ten. It provides us with the ability to slice and dice the data. We have capabilities. Most companies have departments. We’re able to leverage the project portfolios to have that visibility within the various capabilities. It provides us a more granular level, and it just gives us a source of truth in organizing our data as well.

It helps with our ability to share "the big picture" with management. It really enhances that ability, actually. We have a consolidated picture of all of the capabilities captured within Planview financially. From there, that said, we're not using the reporting features fully. We just upgraded from 15 to 18. We plan to start leveraging the Power BI feature. We do have the data now at hand where we're able to extract it and provide that overall picture to our upper management.

Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. It provides our project management with one source of truth in terms of tracking projects from creation. In terms of our backlog efforts, for example, we open projects on a quarterly basis, and so we're able to have that data housed or stored in Planview. Therefore, it's end to end, from project creation to if a project is on hold, and then that effort is reassessed and then placed into open active, and the effort is then in place while the project is going through the various phases through deployment, and then we have a complete end. Right now, for example, my quality and methodology team and I are looking to revamp our end-to-end life cycle to be inclusive of some additional project closure updates, as Planview does have that functionality available, and our quality and methodology team is currently using a different site to oversee their processes. It will be beneficial with that as well.

Enterprise One has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives in terms of visibility and the ability to leverage the portfolios amongst our capabilities. It does give us a better visual into slicing and dicing that data to assess the prioritization of the efforts. It's improved our business and its structure. The processes that we had in place previously have definitely been enhanced and we have more faith in having a source of truth versus various tools and spreadsheets.

Users can assign resources and work and the product provides a variety of types the resources so that users have the ability, when they submit their timesheet, to select various work items that have been authorized for them to charge to.

The configuration of the list is really driven by the projects themselves, so it's pretty simplistic. There's no structure that I have to go in and manage. It's all project work-driven. They are added at the task level, the task is assigned, and is populated to their spreadsheet.

The flexibility on offer is very helpful in meeting the organization's needs. We have also transitioned a work authorization request process into Jira, and from there we have a good cadence where, when resources are needing a new work authorization, our project managers and program coordinators essentially are able to view those requests and implement them. In Planview, those new work tasks will be readily available for them on a Friday when they can make their time submissions. As long as the project is in open active status, there's no hindrance.

Enterprise One does allow program managers to group work together and see resource demands and costs at a consolidated level, however, we're not using the capacity and utilization feature at this moment, as we've got that work to do to clean up our resource roles.

In terms of helping with our on-time completion rate, I rate the product at a seven out of ten. I say that due to the fact that we have better visibility into the financials, and it assists us in the monthly financial assessments that we conduct. The project managers are now able to understand how their projects are tracking and to hold them accountable for a timely delivery. In terms of the time that we spend syncing with these program project managers to assess the timeliness of their delivery, I wouldn't be able to speak to an exact number or percentage. I oversee the system and the tool itself to provide the functionality for my team to assess that, however, I wouldn't be able to give a good quantitative number for that. It might be about 50% of our time.

The only area that I can see currently needing improvement is just the modernization of the look and feel of it. I just attended the Accelerate Conference and heard that that is underway. The configuration for the front-end user can be a little antiquated and it needs a facelift. That said, overall, I'm definitely impressed with the tool itself.

I've been using the solution for three years. The company itself has used Planview probably for about 12 or more years.

I was not a part of the initial implementation. The company had set up the solution before I started working for them.

We are just a customer and an end-user.

With Enterprise One, for forecasting remaining effort, I would give it a six out of ten. That rating applies to how we're using the tool at this time. For example, we're not using requirements and allocations, and so we're able to associate effort in our financials, pending additional effort based on forecast dollars, and things of that nature and accuracy, where we go in and do our monthly financial reviews and do a comparison of actuals to forecast, and we're able to get visibility to that.

At this time, Enterprise One's view into resource capacity and availability does not help us to manage work at this time. That is another component that we look at in the future, however, we're not using it yet. It's on our roadmap to have in place by year-end. We just have some role alignments that we have to facilitate, as well as some blended rates that we may need to assess to align to those roles, to then start using the capacity and utilization feature, which is ICP.

I would definitely recommend engagement from all stakeholders versus a core team rolling out the tool. From financial management to project managers to analysts within the corporation, it would need some blanket engagement, versus one core team deciding everything for an entire organization. New users should also be mindful of what level their PMs function at. Are they operating in a full-blown project management software development life cycle? Before a company builds a tool out to that, definitely be mindful. When I first onboarded, we were upgrading from version 11 to 15, and it was like a re-implementation as there was a lot of revamping of life cycles and things of that nature. We built out a lot of screens and life cycle gates and things of that nature that were not utilized. Being mindful of your user base would likely avoid wasted time if everyone was engaged from the beginning.

I would say the biggest lesson that I have learned is the tool itself definitely can cover a lot of mileage, and you never stop learning with Planview. It's a continuous learning curve when you are actively using it.

I would rate the product overall at a nine out of ten due to what the tool can do and the various features and improvements that it can bring to an organization, as well as the process improvements automation of manual processes within the tool itself. It brings a lot of benefits to the table.

We use Enterprise One for our Project/Portfolio Management. I'm new so I'm still learning about the tool but from what I know so far, right now, we mostly use it for tracking, status reporting, budget/financials/contracts, level of effort time tracking, and project governance.

Enterprise One has enabled us to minimize the usage of other tools like tracking in Excel and have one place of the source at a consolidated level. This tool has reduced the amount of time and improved visibility across the organization on Portfolio Management. Everything is in Planview. Planview is the source of truth. So that really helps us to efficiently look at the budget, scope, schedule and to identify if there is any variance. There's a lot of learning still to do as we are also new to this tool, but right now it works for us. 

There are also a few tool limitations, but this has also brought us together as a team and community to be creative, to revise and simplify the governance, focus on what is important to be tracked and reported. 

Real-time information. Enterprise One is good for enabling me to see what stage of work and the current financials. I'm able to see where it is during the project adaptation, project summary, and also comparison to the performance baseline. Since I'm still a little new to this, I am still learning how the organization is adapting to the tool. The Planview conference gave me a lot more ideas, in terms of what more I can do with Planview. 

We do have an in-house reporting and analytics team that are working on creating custom build reportings to generate tiles and utilizing the Power BI functionality. It has been really a very cool report that has graphics with color-coded information making it easy and user-friendly. Again, as we are still new to this tool, it has been continuous learning on how to use it better and as we continue to invest time, cost and efforts we are excited to explore what would be its full capabilities. 

We think that Enterprise One will help with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. We haven't gotten there yet because we're moving towards the product Portfolio Model.

When I just joined, it was very easy for me to pick up. I was able to get myself familiarized within a month or two. I think it's a very easy tool to use. Although Enterprise One is easy and user-friendly, currently the learnings have been more via trial and error, I think if Planview could provide better consistent training like a tool demo, structured training, how-tos that would help tremendously.

I have been using Enterprise One since I joined my company around four to five months ago but I believe it was rolled out in the organization about 1 year ago.

We're still learning about the tool being about 1 year in, so far it has been fulfilling the purpose and the need of the organization. 

We are currently transitioning to a more Product based model and Planview has been a great tool to help us and I believe as we succeed that might give us the opportunity to explore other Planview products that might scale the use of this solution.

Initially, it was challenging but most recently its been great. I've been in one of the few sessions that we had with the point of contact. We do have a list of the backlog of the things that weren't functioning as intended or something that needs to be added. Our recent rep has been very helpful.

Previously, my company used Oracle Primavera. I think they switched because of the stability. Planview gives the organization what they want. We're able to do all project/product management in a very simplified and yet robust manner without any added complexity.

I wasn't involved in the setup of the tool here, but I heard was it was quite challenging specifically for configurations and to receive good technical support. It took a few executive escalations, but we were eventually assigned an excellent support representative. 

I wasn't intimidated by Enterprise One because even though I'm totally new to Planview, it is very easy to use. It fits the purpose of what the organization wants. We just want to make sure we know how are we tracking our resources, budget, etc. Enhancing the integration part would help. So once we explore the integration aspect, like with JIRA, where we can pull the milestones in and automatically log time, etc, I think that will enhance what the company is trying to achieve.

Planview is pretty cool. It does what you need to do. My advice would be not to overcomplicate it.

I would rate Enterprise One an eight out of ten. 

We are using it for timesheet and resource management and project management activities. We also use the analytical reporting, including SSRS and Power BI.

The solution is on the cloud as a PaaS.

The latest version of the solution is using Power BI for reporting functionality, which has provided a tremendous number of visualizations where users can view all the details monthly. And all the visualizations are interacting with each other. We can see the interconnectivity between the work, resources, and the strategy. This helps our project managers to view everything in one screen, with a dashboard.

When it comes to using the solution for end-to-end work management, Planview announced at the Horizons Customer Conference that they are going to integrate it with an RPA tool and that will be very helpful. Currently we are updating tools and user accounts manually. Once they have this type of integration we can update them automatically using UiPath.

Previously, some of our customers were not happy with the way reports were generated. They had to run macros which could fail, but with this tool they are able to generate reports within Planview. That is one of the main advantages and improvements.

The solution also provides a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people. We have included our teams in Planview which is very helpful. We are able to authorize resources at the department level, at the sub-department level, and at even more granular levels.

It also helps us measure timesheet compliance. We have been able to create custom reports with the help of Planview and send reminders to users every week that they need to submit a timesheet. In the last six months we have achieved greater than 95 percent compliance with timesheet submission.

Resource management and project management are the most valuable features. Recently they included the Resource Management and Assignments stream which is very helpful for seeing results related to the resources. It is connected with reporting and helps us create reports easily.

Regarding project plans, we are using the workflow life cycle and create templates, using them to create a process. Some of them are Agile while others are Waterfall, depending on the workflow template that is selected. They are automatically triggered and the task is then created.

Its view into resource capacity and availability helps us to manage work. It also helps to see how much we are using. We derive that information from the work and resource management screen. That is very helpful.

In terms of its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects, we have done summaries of projects in PowerPoint presentations for our leadership team. This helps to highlight things regarding our program. We are able to show them summaries with the help of SSRS. This saves time and is helpful to management so that they can track everything.

It also helps managers see the performance of particular resources. They can see the resource utilization. For example, if we create requirements for a role, such as a developer, tester, or a technical architect, they can see how those resources are doing.

In addition, we can drill down into the details underlying the consolidated information. If a project manager finds he needs one more developer for a particular requirement, he can drill down to find a developer for that requirement. The drill-down approach means managers can completely utilize resources, each one to 100 percent of capacity.

When it comes to reporting there are some challenges with integration.

Also, some of the functionality with Microsoft is restricted.

We have been using Planview Enterprise One for around five years. We started with version 13 of Planview.

Overall it is very stable. Sometimes we run into issues, but not very often. 

Technical support helps us a lot whenever we face an issue or raise a request. They resolve them within two days.

Our initial setup took seven to 10 days. 

We started with a sandbox environment, went through all the test cases, and then moved to production.

We have about 2,500 people using Planview Enterprise One. They span the roles of team member, project manager, through to portfolio manager. We also have about eight staff who are admins for the solution.

I would suggest you go with this product, instead of using other tools. Every tool will have its own advantages and disadvantages, but with Planview there are more advantages. There are more things we can do with it. It is user-friendly and is integrated with many other tools. It is also constantly developing, providing connections with Power BI, which we have started to learn, and recently, with RPA using UiPath. That is also something we are supposed to learn. It isforcing us to learn and to keep up with the world. Planview is not becoming outdated, keeping up with recent technologies.

Some of my colleagues are currently using the CA PPM tool and they are saying that they are facing issues. I explained to them how I work with Planview, and the functionality it has, including Planview LeanKit. I noted that we can merge with Tableau and ClickView. They are thinking about using Planview.

We use Enterprise One to capture everything in IT that we're working on from projects that require capital funding, to running the business. We are doing everything from soup to nuts, including timesheets. We've established the full implementation.

It provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. We're able to see the full scope of what people are working on. We can see all the different types of activities that they are charging time to and we can do an analysis of whether we think that's the right distribution of the workload.

Enterprise One has improved my organization in terms of everything that we're working on. We're able to see where our resources are allocated and when we have availability, which helps us to schedule the portfolio. That's really the main intent of Enterprise One.

The ability to capture timesheets is the most valuable feature. Also, the ability to see what the full organization's working on is probably the biggest bang for the buck.

Prior to implementing Enterprise One, we didn't have a tool to do any of that. We were hard-pressed to understand what our people were working on. Now, we have a full view of projects, allocations, and effort to deliver our portfolio projects.

Enterprise One's ability to forecast remaining efforts is pretty good. It's a regular schedule, so you can see your burndown rate and see what's left on the project to spend from a labor and non-labor perspective.

Its view into resource capacity and availability absolutely help us manage work. We can't plan out projects for delivery until we know if we have resources available to deliver them. That's been really critical. We look at our projects and see what availability of resources we have. That helps us to determine when we can start new work.

Project managers can group work together and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. They can create portfolios. 

We are able to drill down to the underlying details via consolidated information. We can see exactly what people are working on and we can see where they're charging their time. We can see their allocations and redistribute the load if we need to based on how much is being demanded for individuals.

We hope that it will increase our on-time completion rates. That will hopefully happen when the projects are delivering. Some of them have end dates coming up in the next quarter and some not for another 6+ months. We'll probably be able to start viewing that within two to three months.

I don't initially expect the on-time completion rate to be increased, but I'm hoping over time, we get better at project intake and estimation. That will help us to deliver things more efficiently and meet our timelines.

The scheduling's kind of clunky in terms of its ability for us to see what stage work is at. They could have done better with that. It can be difficult to use.

We don't use its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects. I think it's poor.

We implemented Enterprise One three months ago. We're about to upgrade to the September release so, we'll be current as of next week.

It's mostly been stable. There have been a few times where things were delayed but it came out pretty quickly.

We will be rolling it out more broadly across the organization. I don't envision any issues with scalability. We plan on expanding it to many other areas. I'm already talking with seven other departments within my company. It's going to be rolled out enterprise-wide. The supply chain is probably the biggest organization next to ours, then there's legal, and a couple of other departments who it will make the biggest impact for. 

There are 750 users across our organization. 

Technical support is fair. Some people are very talented and very knowledgeable but others are not. They're generally responsive. There have been some times when they've not been, but they are 75% of the time.

The initial setup was very complex. If you've ever done the implementation it's not an easy implementation. It's very complex. We had a group of 20 people working on this project for 6+ months to implement the tool. The configuration alone was six weeks just to set up resources, initial lifecycles, and things like that. 

In terms of the implementation strategy, we had the project all laid out. We knew what and when we needed to deliver it. We knew what the scope of our work was. We had a massive communication exercise. The change management aspect of this going from no tool to a very sophisticated tool like this one required extensive communication and change management. I was the project lead, I lep up the whole implementation and worked with project managers. 

Maintenance requires three people. I oversee them. I have two full-time people.

We worked with Planview's implementation team for the deployment. 

As long as we can get enough participants, it will make the pricing more reasonable. We signed up for an enterprise license. That makes the per person cost much lower.

Aside for standard licensing, we had a cost for the implementation but nothing besides that. 

We evaluated nine other solutions including Planisware, Clarity, Microsoft, and ServiceNow. Enterprise One is very similar out of the other two industry leaders. Clarity, Planisware, and Planview are the three industry leaders. They're all pretty comparable. We ended up getting a reasonable price, which is why we went with them.

For the organization, people really have an appetite for the data. Being able to pull it all together really was the biggest benefit for us.

My advice would be not to underestimate the amount of effort it takes to implement. It's much more than the vendor would tell you.

I would rate Enterprise One a seven out of ten. I would give it this rating because of the amount of effort it took to implement and bring an organization this big along. It was a monumental effort. It took a lot of work to do that.

At the moment, we use it for work and resource management modulesmainly in the area of R&D. In addition we started using the modules Planning and Outcomes in several areas for solution and program management.

With Planview we got  more transparency in the resource utilization and the budget ussage. Planview gives us the insights where we spend out budget and how we can improve the utilization of our internal resources. 

The most valuable features are: 

• The resource management
• Outcome management
• Work management

It helps us to see resource utilization and resource needs. We get more transparency out of the system to plan the resources and resource skills to train our resources or support the long term onbording process.

We can see the budget spend for a product or release with the outcome area. We can also monitor what we have planned against what was spend, to monitor how good the programs or project is running.

The view into resource capacity and availability helps us to manage our work. It helps us with resource management and when we see have available resources we can easily start new projects. If we see with the tool that there not enough capacity available we can prioritize projects and programs according to our resources and the business needs.

In terms of reporting, we're mainly using Power BI connected to Planview data and we generate our own dashboards. 

Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool.

The system has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. Enterprise One is the only offical place for our projekt data and in this way it gives the portfolio management back the data of the projects for prioritization and monitoring. 

Enterprise One provides a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people. There are a lot of possibilities for the resource management. There are some improvments in the area of agile team managment and team assignment which could be improved in the future development of Enterprise One.

There is improvement space in the handeling of agile teams and team assignments in the work planning and the resource reservation. 

My company has been using Enterprise One since 2016.

Up until the last few days, it's been very stable. It's been stable but slow for the last few days and last week we had some connectivity issues. 

The scalability of the system is really good. You can choose which module you want to use and it is possible to make a seperate role out of the different modules.  

Enterprise One is able to be adapted to the already established processes and could be confugured in different ways. 

The main useres users are data stewards, scrum masters, some project leads, finance and resource management. 

The quality of the support depends on the technician you get. Overall the expirence is really good and if there are second level support needed it is available same as the correct contact in the product management. Planview customer service is really good and is cutomer centric.

Before Enterprise One, we had some solutions which we can't use further. 

With the consulting team from planview it was a good process but sometime due to our business complex to get our work processes into the system. At the end of the configuration process all worked well

We implemented direct with the planview teams.

As Enterprise One gives us more transparency we can use our budget and resources better and trough this the ROI is given

Yes we have one in 2015 an assesment with several tools and than decided for the best tool for us.

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 case is for all of our agency's IT work that will be recorded as projects and/or contracts that we have with our agencies from an IT department perspective.

We are using Enterprise One to record all the new business-case intakes. Any new project that comes in from my agencies is being recorded in Enterprise One. That gives us a better view of what's out there, what needs to be done, and what the requirements are for my agencies. It also shows us how we can focus on the demand for those agencies.

We are not using strategic objectives yet, but we have a custom prioritization calculation that has been done for each project that comes in. Work is prioritized based on a specific scoring with some markers on each project. It's affected us to a point that we can react to demands.

Enterprise One provides a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people but it's only as good as you've set it up yourself. You can set up Planview in any way you want to use it. The type of resource that you assign is based on your own company's requirements for that. It can be anything that you want. It's flexible in configuring these assignments. This flexibility enables us to look at demand from agencies and with our own productization system, allow us to assign the resources that are needed. 

The most valuable features are scheduling, resource management, and, from a project perspective, the functions like issues that change orders. They are valuable because, from a project management perspective, we use the workflows that we build for project management and do active risk management and issue management for the projects that we want for our agencies.

We use a phased approach for our projects: plan, initiation, planning, execution, implementation, and closure, and all those processes have their own lifecycles. Then we have some customized cycles in support of that to ensure that if a contract is needed, that the contracts are being signed off by a security organization as well. Any network and infrastructure changes will be reviewed as part of that process. We use this end-to-end process for our project managers.

The forecast for remaining effort is something that we are starting to use. The challenge with that is it is only as good as the resource managers are editing and entering the allocations for the resources. An effort was started to refocus the whole resource management. With that automatically comes the forecasting. We also have some custom reports that allow us to look at our workload.

From the perspective of what's in the pipeline, what is currently being worked on, and what's needing help, we are able to know instantly where we are.

We use custom reports and we use portfolio management to look at it from a forecast perspective like who's been assigned to a process and what the workload is. Then we use it for resource portfolios for each team. They use it to assess the ability to reassign or assign resources to upcoming work. But most of the reporting is done through custom reports and some Power BI reports that I've created.

Its view into resource capacity and availability definitely helps us to manage work. It allows us to react to a new demand. It also helps to provide end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. We use it for resources like hardware licenses, software, and such.

Program managers are enabled to group work together and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. Because we use portfolio management or resource portfolio management, with that setup, we can look at it from a program perspective. If you identify portfolios within a program or projects within a portfolio program and the same with resources, you can classify them by type, by departments, and desk to see where your availabilities are.

We can drill down into the details underlying the consolidated information through the individual resources and we also do that through a custom Power BI report. Then based on time entered on projects, we can see where resources have spent time in the past, up until the current day. We have a statistical overview of where our resources have gone.

Our on-time completion rate has been reduced but it all has to do with the size of the project. When we do our planning for projects we tend to deliver it within a timeline, but there's also external influence that you can't control. From a project management perspective, we always deliver what we tend to deliver.

The biggest room for improvement are the scripted dialogues. The scripted dialogues are a logic that you set up to force a certain workflow or process to happen. It's very old in respect that there are no clauses that you can apply to that logic. That definitely can use a lot of room for improvement. The amount of text that you can manage within a scripted dialogue is limited as well. That can use some room for improvement as well.

We've been using Planview Enterprise since 2013 and we moved to Enterprise One in 2018 with the latest version.

I'm very impressed with the stability. We are a client that uses the monthly updates. So far, we have not had any issues when it comes to the new versions that have been released. I'm very pleased with the stability of the cloud platform that we use.

Scalability is not an issue because we can always add more licenses when we need to. We have almost 400 licenses that do not impede the workflow or the process. It's able to cope with the amount of users that we have.

There are about 400 users. The majority of those are people that enter the time or are the actual resources working on projects. They may have a section of project managers, then have a section of managers and resource managers. We also have a section for a specific business case.

The deployment and maintenance are all done by me. We heavily use the sandbox environment to prototype changes, then test those changes and then implement those to production. We continuously make enhancements to the system and we use a sandbox and production approach.

For the specific tasks that we do with respect to business case intake and project management, it has a 100% adoption rate. We have plans to expand the number of users in respect to time entry. That'll happen over the next year or so.

Their support is great. When I open a case I can always cut the responses within a couple of minutes, depending on the severity of the case.

My company used a different solution before my time. I think they used a custom solution that was built in-house that was replaced with Planview.

I have been involved in the restructuring of the solution. The initial solution was not implemented by me but I have redone that whole implementation and we were able to downsize the support team from seven individuals to one individual.

The service that was implemented was very archaic. It was complex. The way that we've now implemented it is streamlined, easy to understand and identify how it's been implemented. The process took us six months. 

We went through a process improvement process where we identified the process as we would like it to be not as how it was in the system and using that, we identified a workflow in the official diagram for the various processes that we support and use.

We didn't use a consultant, we just did the deployment ourselves. There is an in-house team who worked on it. 

I can't quantify the ROI because we've been using it for so long that we really can't go back to an older system and compare it.

Pricing all depends on how many users you have planned to use. It's kind of expensive but at the same token, it's worth the investment for the functionality that it delivers.

We evaluated ServiceNow but based on the Gartner review of the marketplace of Planview, there really aren't any other competitors that can provide the same service that Enterprise One provides us.

My advice would be to have one or more individuals become experts in the use of Planview, in terms of how to set it up, how to maintain it, and how to create a lifecycle. There are scripted dialogues because the more knowledge you have within your own organization, the easier it is to accommodate change requests from within your organization.

If you have to call a consultant for services it's rather expensive and they might not be able to react to the changes that you want to implement sooner rather than later. So my advice is to create experts within your organization.

Make sure to test a lot. It can be very complex. Have a second set of eyes that can see the pitfalls that you, otherwise, might run into.

I would rate Enterprise One a ten 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 use it for contractor and associate contracting which reflects directly to project resource, "our spend". We do a calculation based on the vendor that the contractor is through, as well as each associate has a per hour rate that is applied to the project to attract the spend applied to that project from the resources. 

We also track the number of hours spent per application. Every application in our bank has the application code that we tied back to Planview so that we can track and see how much time is spent within the application, either with upgrades, maintenance or break-fix type of situation and also to report. It's primarily for tracking reporting.

Enterprise One has improved my organization with the ability to look at the hours that people track. Prior to Enterprise One we didn't have any estimation model. As we grow within Enterprise One, we're able to pull reporting to see how much time it takes for each individual person or a team to perform a task to complete a project. So with that, we're able to start building that model to estimate the approximate number of hours for each task so that when we provide that to project managers, it reduces the amount of time building the project plan because they've already had that base model to use for each of those tasks. It's created our ability to forecast how much time it would take to perform specific tasks that are very similar to each other. 

It also improved our communication. Prior to Enterprise One, there was not that much communication between project managers and resource managers. So that when a project manager went out to Microsoft Office or to Microsoft Project to schedule a resource for a task, which they actually didn't, they have to have a separate spreadsheet. They would put down a number of hours and it was just a guess. A resource manager would then come back and say, "They can't do that." It was very back and forth. It wasn't like a synergist, a single point of information where everyone looking at the same thing, it was back and forth. So with a project manager entering just random hours and just guessing to get a specific dollar amount or to fit a specific dollar amount it was a lot of work on the project managers to try to adjust it to fit in with that dollar amount.

Now, with Planview, with them being able to see as soon as the project manager submits a request for some hours, the resource manager can communicate with that project manager instantly and say, "It won't do that. It's not going to take that much time". And then when it comes back where the resource is actually entering the hours on the task, there's an exact number. So it's hard to put a number on how many hours were saved or how accurate it's going to be because we're still growing. But prior to this, the accuracy was really, really off. It was terrible, but now we're getting more and more accurate where we're in the, I would say, closer to 70% accurate on the estimations. So it's getting really close to being very accurate.

Enterprise One helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. We use what we call Roadmap, Roadmap items under the planning and capacity section. We're the best at the capacity section. With the Roadmaps, our department heads are able to categorize the project by rank. By ranking those we're able to, especially during this COVID period, we've seen so many projects get pushed down to the bottom or completely removed due to the inability to complete those or the return on investment not being there. It really helped a lot with that planning, investment, and capacity planning.

In terms of the flexibility of configuring assignment, my other administrator and I actually came up with that solution. We decided that was the best way to go primarily because at the state that we are in our company, the project managers weren't mature enough to utilize allocations and the resource managers weren't mature enough to reject or approve those allocations. And that was causing people to be over-allocated because they weren't charging time. Because it the estimation on the number of hours needed was completely off. They were just putting however numbers in there. The resource would show over-utilized 1,300%, 1,300% and it would just throw off all of our reporting.

We cracked down on it. We had people to start utilizing the utilization percentage. Making sure that they had that communication line with the resource manager since we have our estimate as growing. But with the reserve and authorization, being able to authorize an entire team to a specific task and reserve them, allowed us to easily create the schedule that works best for that agile environment. Especially with the specific number of hours used for each person that was really easy to use those types of assignments.

We have different groups that use it for different purposes. There are project managers who use it in place of Microsoft Project. So they track their project through its phases, their financials, keeping on schedule, on time, and on budget. Our resource managers use it primarily to track their resources, to see how much capacity their team has to perform different tasks or different projects, and how much time they're spending on each individual application. Technology managers actually represent the overall group who use it to roadmap, outlook,  see what's down in the pipeline, what team has what capacity to actually take on a task, see if that project is worth the money, that return on investment is worth actually doing it. Executives are just in it for the reporting to track the financials, to see how much we're spending within the technology and enterprise operations departments. Enterprise One is useful in many ways. We have a little bit under 2,000 people using it.

Another good thing is that we can create custom reports, which is great. If I created a custom report, a tile that tells me how many people have logged in today. We currently have a little under 2,000 users, and that's only users, we actually have integrations, that we created a custom form that sends hours directly to Planview. They're not using Planview directly, but they're sending their hours to Planview through an API. We have over 1,500 contractors overseas and within the United States, that submit their time to Planview, so we can track their work in their project as well. In total, I would say the amount of user input for Planview would be close to 3,000.

Inside Planview, they have what they call a "lifecycle". It's basically a workflow, it's a set of steps that each project has to go through, and with its customization, being able to match our own project process, we match it one for one. And so we can see at each stage of the project where it is either through the gate, from gate zero through gate four, and even with Agile, being able to iterate through that same gate, by using scripted dialogues, or exit scripts, we've been able to track projects exactly where they are. Each schedule can be tied back to either the hours entered, by either date, or a percentage of the effort completed on it, so it ties together pretty good.

It's being used a lot for the remaining effort. We actually create tons of reporting off of it. We've created multiple Power BI dashboards. Data feed allows us to create our custom Power BI dashboards, so that way we can track what efforts been used, what efforts are remaining in a very graphical, easy to read way. We've created this primarily for the project managers and resource managers. My manager has a breakout session that discusses our Power BI dashboards. It's really nifty for tracking that. We use it a lot. Our executive challenged us to be able to forecast and estimate hours used on each task. That's why we implemented Enterprise One initially, but we since provided what she wanted and now we're providing more. Initially, it was just the requirement and now we're exceeding that requirement to give better visibility to all resource managers and project managers.

We have a really large organization, 22,000 associates total, including the 3,000 people using Planview. Being able to group projects into portfolios based on specific filters, either the project manager or any other approver organizational hierarchy, once you set your portfolio, you can either share that with your team or whomever so that they can all be on the same page. With the Power BI dashboards, we have a very open information model where we want everyone to be able to see the same thing. There's only one section where it's confidential and we as administrators have to provision that separately, but everything else is open for everyone else to see. So if you're just a time reporter or just have a reporting, you can go in and see the same information as a manager. Being able to group projects in the portfolios, filter them, and being able to see all of that data graphically using the Power BI or the standard reporting that came with the FastTrack setup has been very helpful to our entire organization.

For all the work that we perform, Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. We have our technology projects. We have what we call non-technology projects, which are basically projects that don't necessarily have a technology component in it. It's things like branch opening and closures, even though sometimes they will have the technology, but it just depends. We also have what we call OTW, which is another planned work. This is primarily for resource managers so that they can track their applications like how much time is spent on their applications doing upgrades or break-fix. We also have programs of work, another resource manager tool that tracks Agile programs, and we also have Roadmaps. For all the project types that we, or work types that we have within our organization, it does great.

We just started doing the on time and on a budget since we are in infancy with Enterprise One, we weren't really holding the project managers to that. We were holding them to it through the governance, but not through the Enterprise One. Now that we're a little more mature, we've started tracking that grader as well as being able to use those change requests to track as scheduled, budget, or scope changes. It has allowed us to definitely increase our on-time and on-budget awareness.

The content management definitely needs to improve. We don't really use content management for projects inside Enterprise One. We have actually switched to a SharePoint site. We have a feed from Enterprise One every night of all the projects that are created. And once they're created, we run our process that goes out to create SharePoint sites for each project. Because of the inability for drag-and-drop file ingestion, the best thing about it is the versioning, but that's also done in SharePoint. We just don't use it because it's HTML and it's hard to use. It's a little bit more cumbersome than it should and then we like.

We implemented Enterprise One initially for our pilot group at the end of 2018 and we went into production last year in April.

We have the cloud solution. It's all hosted. The team that is using it, for the most part, is just the technology area, application development, information security does our technology group. We have some enterprise groups also that are using it.

We haven't had any issues with stability. In the previous versions, there were interface issues with Internet Explorer because it's just an antiquated browser. With Microsoft adopting Microsoft more of the Edge and Chrome, the stability is fine. We haven't had any issues.

Scalability is great, with the monthly improvement push, they're on a monthly cadence of updates with the new version 18, the improvements come every month. It's awesome. They have a vast library of API calls that we actually have a contractor system. We're actually onboarding that now and we're going to implement API calls to Planview that way. I have created a multiple UiPath robot that used Planview to create reporting, to add users, to do monthly maintenance, as well as the call API to UiPath. I do a lot of robotic process automation and I can do a lot of the automation with Planview. The scalability, being able to integrate with JIRA, Workday, create custom integrations if we need to, being able to use API calls through either JSON or primarily SOAP, is pretty awesome. I don't have any complaints so far on the scalability.

We're looking to integrate JIRA into our Enterprise One with LeanKit. We're still working out the financials on that to try to figure out a way to integrate that either through a flexible license or through individual licensing. Initially, we started off with technology because that was the executive who decides to start tracking the projects since that's where the project management organization lives, under technology. But more and more enterprise business unit groups are starting to want to track time and see what their resources are spending their time on as well. We're growing slowly throughout the rest of the organization. With the amount of data that the Planview provides and that type of reporting, it's kind of giving other departments and other groups visuals into what they could have by using Enterprise One. We're growing through them. 

Technical support is great. It's just like technical support at any other institution where sometimes you'll get someone who is very adept in the system, and then the others are a little less. But, generally with the way that Planview is set up, if we have any issues, we have a representative we can talk to and bail and get the right people to work on it. We've had no issues.

We were previously using a homegrown SharePoint site that we worked with our SharePoint team to build. It didn't have a nearly as robust workflow, reporting approval ability, and tracking as Planview.

In terms of the setup, I actually got hired on in the middle of implementation, but we had a Planview representative on-site performing the configuration. She basically did training while we were there so I was able to pick it up really quickly and become adjusted to building or configuring the system through configuring screens, scripted dialogues, and the lifecycle. It was really easy. It seems like a low-code solution, so it was really easy to pick up.

I would estimate the setup took from July to December. That is when we did the primary build-out of all of the integrations. We had a previous system that was homegrown through SharePoint that we had a lot of projects and data in. We had to do a lot of data manipulation in order to put it in a format that's ingestible by Planview. That took a little while too. I wrote a robot that would automatically convert all of the data over to the new data format, and we were able to send that to Plan B to have them import it.

The big parts of the strategy were just integrations with our financial system. We have a general ledger financial system that we had to integrate with and that we had to send a file over to Plan B to enter that information. We also have a Workday integration for resource management. That is a pretty nifty one where whenever the Workday feed comes over, it either removes resources, adds resources, and creates users based on if they're in a specific hierarchy of the bank. That was really nice.

From our end, it was primarily just me and my teammates working on the deployment. We were the primaries. We actually had one other resource through application development that was helping us. That was primarily for the deal integration. The Workday was just a file feed, and that was all in Planview. My colleague is also a Planview administrator. He doesn't do the robotic automation, but he does a lot of the architecting of the system.

For management, at this point, it's just me and my teammate. We have one other person who is specialized in the reporting. They do a lot of the SQL queries, SSRS, and Power BI setups, but they don't do really much of the administering of the system. 

We only worked through Planview. We didn't work with any other third parties.

The area with the most ROI is our ICCMO, being able to track that on time and on budget, all of the resource managers. Those are going to be the department heads for each of our technology departments. They would be the ones that would see the most return on investment. As well as tracking their contractors and the hours they're spending on the applications.

The pricing and licensing are fine, but with the model we currently have, we don't have the FLEX license just yet. We actually have the tiered based on the access side from just a team member to project, we call it portfolio manager to admin. The pricing is fine. That was one of the solid points for switching to Planview. There are additional costs for integrations.

We actually did an RFP. So we looked at the Gartner quadrants and we had other people provide proposals. But with all the requirements, Planview was the only one that was able to provide all of the items that we needed which is why we went with them.

The biggest lesson learned would be regarding making sure to have Planview do the training. When we did our training for our organization, we did a train the trainer where Planview came in and trained just a few people in our organization and then they went out and trained their people.

But it's like a game where you tell one thing to a person that you pass it down the line and it gets changed by the time it reaches the very end. If you have the budget for it, have Planview perform the training because I think that would increase adoption a lot easier. We had a lot of people who came from different areas that had different methods of tracking projects from Visio Excel and Microsoft Project. Getting everybody on the same page to Planview we had a lot of contention and a lot of people who didn't like the product initially. And that came down to me to training. With the trainer themselves not being very familiar with the system, being unsure about what they're trying to train the other people on didn't give the other associates much confidence in the system initially.

The adoption was a lot slower than we wanted. I think that if Planview had worked to perform the training, it would have made people a lot more of a point of contact to reach out to. And having a lot more acceptance and what they were being taught. So that would be the lesson learned.

Especially if you're an administrator, go through the advanced training if you're doing FastTrack and if you're doing the configuration so that you'll be more familiar with what the consultant is doing. Our consultant was great. She did a lot for us, but we also saw afterward, once we became more familiar with it, we saw a few errors that needed to be corrected but they were easy and we were able to fix them ourselves. If you don't go through advanced training, you wouldn't recognize it. 

I would rate Planview Enterprise One a nine and a half out of ten because nothing is perfect.