Planview Portfolios Reviews

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 this solution for managing our application portfolio. We do some lightweight business architecture connecting to our portfolio. We started rolling into the information portfolio and connecting that also to our application portfolio. Those are the primary use cases. It's also to support the bigger M&A activities that we have in our company.

One of our latest use cases is basically onboarding. Our information and risk management team were looking for a system that could house a catalog of information objects. I suggested that that can leverage our platform, and it already had prebuilt configuration screens so they could easily be on-boarded in starting to use it. We configured more elaborate workflows for the use cases, and that took a couple of months. Now, they are rolling it out. Time to market is important and we leveraged it in the existing system.

This solution has not yet transformed our organization strategy. While we have been using this solution for eleven years, our EA department got canned two years ago. We restarted based on the merger and acquisition. So, it's rebuilding and we're still a small team of only three people. It's basically restarting the whole discipline and also getting strategy, business architecture, and information architecture. While we were in IT, we only considered our application and technology. But we are now focused more on business and information. Once that is in place, then we can think about strategies, roadmaps, and the whole thing.

We do not use the Collaborative Work Management features.

We do not yet use the Lean/Agile Delivery tools.

The biggest impact that using Planview has had is the flexibility that it provides, as well as the ability to use the predefined metamodel and the new portal.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the completeness of the standard, underlying metamodel. We can put most of our attributes or information that we want into the standard metamodel. This is important because we don't need to think about what kinds of attributes or objects we need to create because they are already provided. If we stick to what is called the active metamodel, then the UI is on top of that and we don't need to do a lot of UI customization in order to manage that data.

This is a flexible solution in the places where it needs to be, although it is rigid in certain places because it still uses old technologies. For example, you can see this in the reporting. They started with a Cognos Business Intelligence/Business Objects, then they moved to BIRT, and now they have moved to SSRS. There are still some legacy flash components in there, so there is no clear strategy on that side.

The flexibility helps in that it has a vast amount of predefined roles. It's flexible to safeguard the areas of the platform that you open up. The new portal is flexible enough to create your own portfolios and column sets, which will cater eighty-percent to what people want. The flexibility allows it to become more self-service, and we can on-board users that do not have an IT or enterprise role, but more like an add-on list or even a business user.

Configuring the UI in the content management system is too elaborate and too time-consuming. The look and feel are outdated because it's more than ten years old, so it's not that flexible when it comes to using the real estate that you have on the screen to cater to certain persons. If you look nowadays at web UIs, they are more intuitive than what is currently provided.

The workflow engine needs to be improved to provide for easier configuration and better functionality. Creating workflows needs to be done in multiple places, and the process is elaborate and time-consuming.

We would like to see improvements made on the CTM side and the survey engine. We are now doing app rationalization and we took all of our applications out of Planview CTM and put them into a different tool to run the surveys.

All the parts are there for a low code platform, it needs some uplifting in the UI and workflow. this is the real untapped possibility of CTM.

We have been using this solution for 12 years.

I think that the stability of this solution is below average. With every new update, I find bugs. We have on average twelve bugs active overall and the number doesn't go down with each release. They will fix something and then I find something else.

The scalability of this solution is good. We're onboarding more people and because we're running on-premises, we can scale our VMs ourselves.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the technical support an eight. It depends on the question that I asked because we do a lot of our own development on Planview, and sometimes it's in a gray area. At times it will need to be Professional Services, but in most cases, I will get my answers and technology questions answered.

I believe that we have seen ROI because for us it brings value, but I cannot quantify it in a monetary sense. It's more in the insight and knowledge that makes things feasible. That's what is important. We're not in a place where we can put a figure against it. It is a subjective measure, rather than objective.

Our licensing fees are approximately $50,000 USD annually.

As an enterprise architect, it's our role to see what's out in the market and evaluate competing solutions. I do have contacts with two of their competitors, BiZZdesign and LeanIX, who would prefer me to use their solution. 

There are several reasons that we have stayed with Planview so far. First, we have a lot invested in this solution. The metamodel is still great. We are used to their UI and we have integrated our application portfolios into other systems. Moving away from this solution would require changing some of our integrations.

LeanIX is not ArchiMate 3 compliant and has a limited set of relationships and components.

With BiZZdesign, you need to have multiple products to match what Planview can do. 

Generally, Planview is always keeping in touch with the players in that field. They are always heading towards a common discipline.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to start small. Think about your primary use cases and build it out from there. Also, think about what kind of information you want to use or start with. Make sure that you are safeguarded for scope because Enterprise One is a strategic and tactical system, and don't try to make it an operational system. We tried to do that in the past, doing more like IT operations, like CMDB, and the system is not geared for that. It's more on the strategy side, but that also means that you are more thinking in logical construct and conceptual, than really operational things.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We have a smaller organization than some of the other organizations. We have 10 project managers. We manage it for the customer experience division for electronic arts. Therefore, we do only projects wrapped around how to improve our customer experience. Anybody who plays our games, we want to manage those projects to make life better for our customers.

We are able to organize work. Prior to Enterprise One, the organization had no visibility in the projects that we were doing. We had people doing random projects, and we didn't know if they were benefiting the business or harming the business. The fact that we have visibility into the work that we're doing along with the status of the work that we're doing has been incredibly impactful.

The solution’s integrated product portfolio has transformed our organization’s strategy as we continue to roll out different products. We started with Enterprise One. We now have Projectplace and are looking to use Spigit. We are also looking at all the different integrations with JIRA and Workday. It really has transformed the way that we do panel work and approach our work and company.

We use Enterprise One for the formal things in our organization that have been gated. So, we go through our fiscal year roadmap and we have X amount of things approved. All of those things are required to go through Enterprise One. There were some required to do phase-gate exits and all of those principles. Then, we have the Projectplace that is more task-oriented, and we have a ton of users on that. That is more task, activities, and people looking at doing agile work or combined work. We found a way to use these tools together. Hooking them together, we will do some great reporting. There are some cool things that we're trying to do with those two that will really change the way that we will work.

These are two different teams. The people who are on Projectplace were never Enterprise One candidates. The fact that we were able to get them to use one of our Planview tools and see that there is potential in it, maybe in the future they will be the ones who are running these projects and programs. Or, at least they'll have an idea of what the Planview tools can do. So, we feel like we're in a better starting place with them.

The most valuable to us is that we have a standardized schedule. We're able to put in our phase-gates and everything that we need to make sure that we're operating and running our projects effectively. 

We now use WRK14 reports and are moving to other more complex reports in order to manage our business. 

The solution’s integrated product portfolio has transformed our organization’s delivery because people are a lot more accountable. When you have no accountability, then people don't always deliver the way that you want them to. Once you get accountability, they know that somebody is watching and the way that they manage their work changes quite a bit.

It is flexible. We started off where we had a workflow that had about 150 steps in it with gates, because we didn't know any different. We went back and talked to Planview about it, and said, "We are in a really bad way. We need somebody to help us." They came back and helped us change everything. They helped us undo all the mess that we had created. They moved us to about a 15 to 20 step process. The flexibility of being able to create something, then redo it if it's wrong as you continue to evolve and partner with Planview is really important to us.

When you get a tool, you have to know your business before you get a tool. We didn't know our business. We put the tool in and tried to wrap the business around the tool. That doesn't really work. So, we need to continue to work with them to figure out:

• What do we need? 
• What is the best solution? 
• How do we work with this tool when we just trying to figure out our business?

We're finally at a good place. Now, how do we restart with it the way that the tool thinks about work. Sometimes, it's just not the same way that we do. Therefore, how do we manage that within the business? How do we manage our internal customers? That's what we really have to work through.

The first step was to have Planview come in and retrain our organization. That was really helpful, at least to make people not so mad, because they hated the tool. They were really nasty about it. When we rolled it out to the organization, we rolled it out in a way where we didn't ask for their help. So, there was a small group of people at the leadership level who went in and said, "Okay, this is the tool we're going to use." But, we didn't really ask the people who are going to use the product. When you do that, they get angry.

They don't love that knowledge. Then, we had to go back, and say, "Okay, we're going to start over. Tell us what your grievances are." We had to identify whether the grievance was with having a tool or as a grievance with Planview. They are two very different things. Once we identified what their grievances were, Planview was able to come in, help retrain, and get some of the sentiment better just about the tool and using a product in general.

Primarily, we were only focused on the project side of it. This year, we are trying to roll it out to more operational people, which is different from project side. On the project side, these are people who are sort of career project managers, product managers, and program managers. They're willing to work with us a little bit. When you move over to the operations people, this is not their business. They don't know about tools. All they want to do is help the customers. They don't want to have to deal with tools. 

Our challenge will be this tool is complex. It is not necessarily easy to start and learn from the beginning. How do you get people who are not professionals to adopt it, use it, and not be mean about it? That's what we're trying to work with.

We are on year four of using Enterprise One.

We haven't experienced any issues with the stability of it. So, I feel confident in the Planview tool. I feel confident in the employees. This is our third year of attending Horizons. Every time I meet more of the employees, I feel better about everything. I just get an overall good vibe. 

There is so much that we can do. They have Spigit, LeanKit, and all of these things which are really exciting to us. I just have to go find the money, but it's pretty exciting. It's really great. In regards to Enterprise One, they have resource management, and we haven't even touched that. We are just now getting into resource management. There is a lot that we haven't even scratched the surface with using the tools that we have.

We have a super small organization using Enterprise One. Right now, we are at 20 to 30 users. We have primarily only focused on the project side of it. Now, this year, we are trying to roll it out to the operational people.

With Projectplace, about a year ago, we had one user. Now, we have 108 users on it. For us, that is a huge win when we had to fight for every user on Enterprise One. We're not having to do that for Projectplace. Projectplace is now going out and selling itself into the business. So, we have parts of the businesses which are using it that are telling other person's business.

A specific example is the customer experience support: It is all about making it easier to get back in the game and play our games. We have a group that takes our customer escalations and they're able to take those and look at them in Projectplace. They can get cards and match everything up. We're solving their problems faster. We know what their problems are. We're able to group all of their problems together. These are big wins for us in terms of things that we couldn't do before because we were having to do it much more manually before we had Projectplace. So, it really changed the way that we do business.

I would rate technical support as a 10 out of 10. We have the benefit of being right down the street from Planview. That helps us quite a bit. We have had no shortage of people willing to help. It's been no secret that we did not start off in a good place, but they helped us. Together, we admitted our flaws and they admitted their flaws, then they helped us get back on track.

We were about to quit because we were so frustrated. They came in and helped us. They did things for free that they probably weren't supposed to do. But, they came in and really tried to save us as a customer to understand what the problems were, what we were dealing with, and help us solve the issue, probably to their detriment financially. This was to make sure that we didn't leave and to help us tell the story. I think that signifies a pretty good company.

Prior to Enterprise One, we did not have a solution in the business. So, people could use Excel or anything that they wanted.

We also had no reporting. Or, any reporting that we had, it wasn't manual. It was whatever somebody thought it was.

I was hired. We had had six tools come into the environment prior to me coming onboard. So, the company knew that they needed something to organize the work, but they didn't know what. They didn't know why they needed it other than they heard that they needed it. 

It was, "Well, we have to have this, and we need it right now."

"Why do we need it right now?" 

"Because we do."

Now, we are able to be more structured. We had no structure nor accountability. With the manual reporting, we had no idea if we were on track, behind, or how much we were spending. We couldn't track the way that we did our business. To be able to understand our business and make progress towards our goals, this has been incredibly important. The tool allows us to do that.

The initial setup was super complex. We were being asked questions that we didn't understand. It was pretty clear that we didn't understand. It just wasn't a great experience. We weren't ready for it. It was more complex than what we could take in the environment. We were answering questions on behalf of the entire organization when we didn't know what the organization's needs were. It was complex and compounded by the fact that we didn't know anything, making it incredibly challenging. Some of that was on us and some of that was on them.

If they could walk you through step by step:

• What is it that you're doing? 
• What is it that we're doing of this stuff? 
• You are making decisions. 

We didn't understand the downstream impact. Nobody told us this is a critically important decision, and if you make this wrong, we're going to set up the whole tool wrong. It felt like there were a handful of those. If someone would've said that to us, maybe we would've been like, "Oh yeah, hold on a sec." We probably would've at least paused, which we didn't do.

We did the initial deployment with the help of Planview. We went in and gave them the parameters, and they implemented the parameters that we asked them to do. 

We have seen ROI with just being able to trace everything, do the reporting, understand the status, the accountability, etc. We have already renewed our contract once. Spending the money on this is a really big investment for us, where with other companies it might not be as much. However, it's a big percentage of our budget. The fact that we've been able to renew is a pretty good indication that the leadership team is seeing value in it.

I think all in we are at $33,000 a year and that includes Projectplace and Planview. We used to have the integration to JIRA, but we don't pay for that anymore. 

We did an RFP where we selected Planview. It was an RFP for probably 10 vendors on the list. Workday was on there, for sure. However, we did not look at Microsoft Project because we are an Apple shop. That wasn't anything that we ever wanted to do.

The main reason that we went with Planview was something we haven't even used, which is ironic is we wanted it for the prioritization. With the prioritization, we can move things up and down within the tool. We could show our leadership team because prioritization was taking us like a month and a half. We felt with the tool, it could take us just a few hours. We still use it, but we just don't show it to the leadership team. But, it has helped us.

The tool is a nine out of 10. Mostly, because I don't give anything a ten. There is always areas of improvement. We have had a lot of pushback when people started up in Planview. I think we're past the cultural part of it. I don't know what makes it difficult. I think it's more difficult than other tools that people have used. I hear over and over that it's not intuitive. Some of it is counterintuitive to the other tools that they've used. Once they get going on it, they're better. The word within our user community is that features are great, but the user interface seems to be very difficult for our team to use.

The problem is a lot of them came from Microsoft Project, which is really easy to use, but you also don't get any of the reporting. There are just some things with the parent-child relationships and how you link them. Also, there's something with start and end dates and the rolling of them, which really angers them. They just don't fundamentally understand it.

We were not ready for the tool when they bought the tool in. I would encourage people to know their business, have their processes in place, and understand what they're trying to achieve before they go out and buy the tool. Then, they will be better suited for it. It doesn't matter how amazing the tool is, if they don't have the processes and things in place that they need to do, then it's never going to be successful.

We have the business side who uses the project management stuff for managing their plan and stuff. We have our IT side who uses the project management as well as time management to keep track of all their projects and the hours being spent on projects by all their resources. This way they are time compliant, e.g., they run this every week to see how many of hours are being spent as people enter their hours.

With the IT side of it, the tool gave them visibility on all their projects from a program and enterprise perspective. The tool helps the enterprise with more capabilities in terms of decision-making, making better decisions on efforts, and the money that they spend.

The solution’s integrated product portfolio has transformed our organization’s strategy because previously we didn't have a specific tool which was being used for project management. People were using different sets of tools for managing their projects, and there was no centralized tool where the organization knew what people were working on. This tool gives them that visibility on all projects.

The solution’s integrated product portfolio has transformed our organization’s delivery. It gives them their capability to govern and set some governance models around what they want to see in terms of projects progressing and how they can make them better.

The portfolio management gives you a view of all the projects as well as all the information about the total amount of effort, time, and cost being spent on the projects. It gives the organization how much money and effort should be spent towards projects so they can budget and do better capacity planning in the next fiscal year. It gives them visibility into their resources and if they have capacity.

I have found this solution to be flexible. I have found it flexible enough in terms of tweaking different configurations for helping the customers doing VMs.

I can access the system anywhere. I can manage my project wherever I am. Since it's web-based, it's flexible enough for making any changes. I can go in at anytime. I can just login from my cell phone.

I would like to see more documentation pieces. Right now, they do have the content repository. I would like to see more out-of-the-box features with document repository capabilities.

We are currently on Version 16.9. We started with Planview 13 and have been on it for more than three and a half years. We have using Planview for our medical center and plan to move to Planview 18.

With Enterprise One, because it's cloud-based, we have never experienced type of crash. It's always available 24 hours. I've never seen any critical issues where the system is down more than an hour or so.

Since the IT side is already using the tool, we are promoting it to the entire business side as well. There are a lot of groups coming in trying to use the system now. We have an onboarding process that we follow for each group where we explain to them how the tool can help them. In terms of your project and portfolio management, we sort of customize or tweak the tool to satisfy their wants and needs. That is when they begin to agree to onboard the system.

We do one BU after another. We do workshop, training, and demo sessions where we understand their needs, then we do a customization of their requirements. We do custom configurations, which we show them, and they become happy.

We have used the technical support for a number of things, like reporting. 

We use our customer success team for any questions where don't know the answers or if we have a query. We do put in a ticket for that and they are pretty good with their response.

I would rate them as a nine (out of 10) because they are pretty fast in their response. I would have rated them as 10, but we use the capability and technology management. That's where it's gone a little down in terms of the support. As far as Enterprise One and the PRM side goes, they are very good.

The initial setup was straightforward. In terms of the lifecycle, it was pretty straightforward and we wanted to start small and see how it went. We wanted to see how people would react to it. We were pretty small with the initial configurations.

Our initial implementation was with Planview consultants. They were very good. We love them.

We have portfolio managers, resource managers, project managers, and time reporting licenses. These are the licenses that we have.

We did on a comparison of different tools, such as, Planview and some other tools available. We did our evaluation of those tools and came up with Planview as the tool that we want to use.

Initially, the university and medical center were one company. Then, we split because the university was using Planview. Then, we also took the same tool but after evaluations we came across Clarity and Planview as the bigger, better tools. We went with Planview because it was already being used in the organization and everyone was familiar with it.

The tool has transformed. I have seen it grow. I have more than 12 years of experience working in Planview and have seen the tool from the start. I've seen all the versions, and it's grown to a more flexible tool.

Right now, we are mostly focused on the waterfall method, but we are also promoting the lean and agile method. E.g., we are promoting tools like Projectplace and LeanKit. We're trying to get our customers and project managers to use those systems. Our developers are mostly more comfortable using JIRA because they've been using it for so many years. However, we are promoting these types of tools as well, where we can see if we can add value for them.

We don't use the financial management piece because we don't have clear visibility on the cost aspect of projects.

I would rate this product a 10 out of 10.

Our company has a PMO, which they use to intake their projects. They use the request module and do a process for the steering committee before its turned into a project. Once they turn it into a project, the project managers take it over and work the WBS all the way through to the end of the project.

The product is deployed on the Planview cloud.

With the lifecycles, it helps us step through our processes easier. We'll take a process and create it in Visio, then we'll go and implemented in Planview. Anytime that we have to do a new process, this is what we use. We just step it through the lifecycles and the configure screens are very easy to use. The fields that you need are easy to use.

With the prioritization that the company is getting into, it's easier to do that using this solution, including a ROM. Normally, the ROM is done in the work, but we put it in the request module. You don't have to have an in-depth ROM. You don't have to create a project, we just do it in a request module today, which has been very helpful.

For the delivery, we can tell when a project will be late, so the PM can find out why. The PM would have to tell management why it's going to be late, but they can see that right off because they do weekly status reports. So, they don't have to wait to get a status report. They can just go in there and look. Also, with the reporting capability, where they can do the subscriptions, they get it every Friday.

Resource managers can see their resources. They try to do things on their own, so that is good. Today, we don't have high-level resource management, but we are going to start doing that. We will start having demand or resource meetings to see where resources are available. However, we are still developing that. 

We don't have that today, but I worked at other companies who used Planview and saw where resources were available, scheduled, and short. It was very useful. We would meet every two weeks to view resource management. We would just sit in a room and say, "These are our projects. These are the projects that are incoming. Where are our resources today? What are they working on?" So, it was very good.

The biggest impact has been the ability to see your resources and what they're working on. Most importantly is having your projects in one place. We don't have that specifically here at GM today, but we're working towards that. That's our new initiative: Get everything in one place and have one place to go for intake. So, if you have a new request, they go straight to plan B. Once we post a project, they can do that today. We get on reporting for Power BI and the ease of use of Power BI is very big.

It's easy to use compared to other platforms that I've worked on, e.g., Microsoft Project. Innotas was one of our contenders, but they ended up buying them, so it's good to see that those features are coming out across Enterprise One. 

• I love the requested intake.
• I love how you can do calculations of fields. 
• We put in the lifecycles, which I love. 
• Love that you can get notifications within Outlook. 
• The reporting: How you can do subscriptions of the reporting. So, you don't have to sit there and send reports manually. That's very helpful.

These features save me time. Anything that you can automate is always helpful. When somebody doesn't have to come and ask me, "Hey, can you do this for me?" They can do it themselves, then it's easy to use. You can show them one time, and they go through it the next time by themselves.

It's flexible and very easy to use. Just having all of our projects centralized and all our programs in one place so we can see what the PMs are working on. Now that we've gone global, we can bring in the other PMs and PMOs easily because we've already configured stuff. Although, they may have things that they're reporting on, we can easily integrate those into our current system. 

I would suggest for the request module that they open up the fields and columns so it's like we are doing our work in the work module. You can't do that with today. We also have to make sure that the fields can go both ways with the request and work modules. Including fields in the column sets would be helpful, because today they only use attributes.

For the multiple fields that you have, there is not a single select field, but multiple selections. You can't use those in column sets today. It excludes those fields when being reported on. So, you have to figure out another way to do that.

It would be beneficial for us if it was able to integrate with other tools and have those tools integrated into Planview, which they're working on. Examples of tools being integrated DevOps, JIRA and Projectplace. Since we're a mature PMO, and not all of our PMOs are, if they can integrate with Projectplace or the Planview PPM Pro, that's good. 

I have never had an issue with the stability of Planview. That's one thing that they can tout very well. Performance issues have not been an issue. When running a report, all I have to do is let them know, and they will expand my timeout limits. So, I've never had an issue with performance with them, not in the cloud.

It's very scalable. We're on Enterprise One, so you normally have to be pretty mature. Where I came from, we were immature. We adapted to Planview and became very mature. I know that other companies can do that too. They start out with Projectplace or PPM Pro, then they'll go to Enterprise One. So, it's very scalable. It's a great solution for scalability.

The technical support is very good. I've never had an issue with them. They answer their tickets right away and always come back with a solution very quickly.

We moved from another tool to Planview. I don't know what tool this current company was on. I worked for them for 10 months, then I left and I came back. I've been with them since June again. Another company that I worked with, we went from MS Project Pro (the PPM tool) to Planview.

It was more complex because I came from MS Project Pro. Planview has so much more to offer, so you had to consider a lot more. You had to figure out what its capability were, what your portfolio and programs were going to be, what your teams were, how they were structured, and what type of resources you had in what roles. So, there were things that we had to consider, but Planview asks the right questions. They bring that out of you.

We did a test for three months, then we did a soft launch. So, only our PMs were on it, and they brought all their projects over and managed their projects there. We had another tool, where we had to do double-duel entry for time sheets. So, when they ended their time sheet over there, then they started doing it in Planview. That was just to get them used to it, and saying, "We're going to do our time sheets." We were a company that already did time sheets. That seems to be a big thing for other companies. How do you get your people to do time sheets? But if you're doing financials, they're going to do time sheets.

We used consultants, and I would recommend that for everyone. They're very easy to use. They listen to your needs and requirements. They gather them. They've been in the business so long that they understand what people are saying. Some people may want a lot of details, and they'll talk them down from that by saying, "Do you really need that? Let's start with this, and then we'll see. Does that give you what you need?" So, they're really good about listening to the requirements and providing what you need from the beginning.

When you talk to a consultant, make sure you know where you are, how many users you're going to have, what number of projects you have today, where you think you're going to go with it, and what are your pain points. 

Know your pain points, and definitely tell Planview what your pain points are, because they'll have a solution for them, whether it's reporting, which is real big, or just the ease of use. Everybody is so used to using Microsoft Project, but it's really not that different from Microsoft Project. You just have to use the tool, like Word or Excel, and the more you use it, the better you get at it. It's a very good PPM tool.

The learning curve is not steep. They have very good training and a lot of people. My recommendation is when you take on Planview, get the training. Have trainers come onsite and make sure you budget for that. Make sure you budget for consultants to come onsite and train your people. Don't try to do it yourself, let them do it.

I think our company has seen ROI. If you can see where all your projects are, what type of projects you have, what resources that they're working on, and finally, where your budget is. That's a win-win, all the way. 

We have unlimited licenses for all of our functionalities. Since we went global, we went with that model.

We evaluated MS Project, because we thought we going to stay with them. We evaluated Planview and Innotas. There was another minor one too and we want to be more mature than that. Those were the main ones that we evaluated.

We chose Planview probably for the centralization of all the projects, ease of use, views, and the configured screens were very easy to use. Ours was more about resources, knowing where your resources are, for example:

"What projects are you working on?" 

"I'm over here working on these five projects." 

"But they're not on my list!" 

This solution is just about able to see what your resources are working on and having all your projects in one place, even team schedules.

We do not use the solution’s Lean/Agile delivery tools yet. That's one reason why we were looking at this heavily at the conference. They seem to be really focused on that, which is good. A lot of companies that I talked to seemed to be struggling with it, so it's good to see that Planview is trying to move into that direction, taking everything with it.

Today, Planview does not help connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution because we only have one PMO which is using finances. I don't think that they're doing a capital budget yet, to say, "These are the projects that we're going to work on." But, as we've gone global, we will start doing that. So, it'd be very beneficial. The other company that I worked for, it was very highly used. We forecasted constantly to see where our budgets were, what our capital budget was for that year, and what projects we were going to work on at the beginning of the year. That was good.

There are so many different functionalities within it that you don't have to take in all in one day. You can just grow with it. So, that's what I like about it.

I'm always a person who will never give anything a 10. I would probably give it, compared to other tools, a nine (out of 10). I would've given it an eight (out of 10), but they've made improvements this year. So many good things are coming out, and they really listen to the customers. I'll give them a nine for that.

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.

Our primary use cases are for portfolio planning, forecasting, budgeting, and obviously reporting. The project managers input for projects, input resources for proper forecasting, and for budgeting. It's the same with our resource managers to monitor their teams' capacity and then also for finance purposes for our annual budget planning.

We don't use the solution a lot for the project planning itself. As far as tasks and milestones, we don't use some of the features to see what stage a project is at. We really just use it to input the project. We actually use outside applications to manage a project in most cases. 

As far as project planning, entering specific tasks and resources assigned to the project to forecast those projects is about all we use it for. And then, of course, start and finish dates. The flexibility to use a certain finish date is nice, but we don't really go into the project details in Enterprise One.

Enterprise One improves our monthly portfolio and resource capacity planning and forecasting. It improves the visibility of the resource capacity and the team's capacity to take on new work. 

It has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. We have not used the strategy feature much in Enterprise One, but it does help to prioritize projects based on the need and the capacity of the resources to take on the work. It ultimately helps manage the project to have the bank customer in mind. So as we're taking on new projects, we can all work for the same goal with the customer in mind.

The assignments are in a project that's assigned to a resource. The capability is there.

The resource capacity planning is the most valuable feature because you can evaluate your team's capacity by team and what projects they're working on and you can forecast easily by team.

The resource capacity and availability help us to manage our work. During portfolio planning each month with new projects that are presented, we're able to use Enterprise One to measure the capacity of each team that's being requested to be on the project. And obviously, the resource managers and project managers are still getting used to using the tool. But I think that as time goes, it's a good tool to measure, to see the capacity and overloaded resources, as far as projects go and taking on new projects.

Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. It does do end-to-end project management. It's a good thing that we can do end-to-end project management as far as monitoring the project resources, capacity, and timeline, and the schedule of the project. But that's all we use it for. They get what they need from an outside system in order to manage the project end-to-end.

I do all of the reporting for Enterprise One and it's not as user-friendly. So there's not a whole lot of flexibility of what we can do with the reports or custom reports like we could in our old system. The ability to customize reports is not there. And we actually have to pay for Planview consultants to capture reporting that we really need because of the inability to configure the current track record for Enterprise One. That's the thing that we are struggling with is the reporting capability in Enterprise One, without having to pay for extra services from Planview to get what we need. The downfall of this is because Enterprise One is a hosted application, our administrators do not have access to the data table to all of the data tables, to all of the data, and all of the data sets that are running in the background.

The feature to create summary reports across multiple projects affects our ability to share the big picture with management. The flexibility to customize the reports in the way that management would like to see them, we cannot do. We have to engage Planview in order to have access to data to provide to management.

The reporting capability and access to the fields for our system administrators to have access to the data without having to pay Enterprise One to get the data that's needed to create custom reports for management to create reports need improvement. 

Another improvement would be on the request side for visibility. For the requesters to see progress for work and reporting for requesters portfolios, and for requesters to be able to monitor the working end to end.

I would also like to have the ability to report at a task level for chargeback purposes.

We just configured Enterprise One last September and we went live in December.

There is very minimal downtime. The only thing that is room for improvement is that their reporting is very slow. It's a very painful process to pull reports, it's just really slow.

It does slow down based on the number of projects and also based on the amount of data that's being pulled in a report. If we are pulling reports, from September, for example, it's pulling nine months of data into a report. Every month goes by it takes that much longer because it's pulling in that much data, especially if we're trying to get time-phased effort.

We have about 500 users and the roles are requesters, project managers, executive users, resource managers, compliance, finance users, and we have our system administrators.

We are using it about 50% of the application's capability and we have plans to increase that by bringing in cost capital. It's basically expenses.

I would rate technical support a six out of ten. Most of the time, if a ticket is open for an issue or we are not able to do something, we're just referenced to go read out into the customer success center without actually getting help from the customer support. Or by the time a solution is provided by customer support, our system administrators have figured out a solution. Our customer support representative that monitors our tickets is really good. He monitors our tickets for us. He follows up on the tickets. I think that that is a good thing to have for all clients. I think clients should have a customer support representative to collaborate on what tickets are open.

Secondly, the reason I gave it a six is because a lot of the things that we bring, that's not an actual error, but has to do with the functionality of the application, we're just told the functionality is not there. No, Enterprise One can't do that or yes, it can, but you have to pay a consultant to set that up for you. Which are things that should be able to be done by an administrator. But again, with the application on the cloud, in the cloud, we are very limited on the flexibility of what a system administrator can do within the application.

Then timeliness of resolution and tickets being routed to the correct team's queue to work on the ticket could be improved. The customer support representatives are great. I think they're as helpful as they can be. But their knowledge of the system in itself has them answer us in a way that say "Just go read about it on the Customer Success Center."

The initial setup was very complex. It was rushed and there wasn't a lot of follow up after the configuration. Our consultant was very knowledgeable, he was very good. But there's only so much he can do in so little time. The configuration was basically the consultants setting everything up with very minimal help or interaction with our administrators, and because the configuration and go-live are so far apart, there was not any followup. To improve after configuration, there should be a series of follow-ups with the system administrators and the product owners, as well as going live, make that available.

The configuration was about six to eight weeks. We had our plan B consultant about that long. But after the system is configurated, we didn't go live until December, because after configuration we also have to take time for the creation of training material to train our end users because it was a completely new system. After configuration, you need a couple of months to just create the training material and provide training and adoption of the application. We were not able to go live until about December because of the time it takes to do the training and adoption of the application. By that time when you go live, you're not really using the system right after configuration until then. There are going to be things that come up that a consultant should still be available for the solution as the company goes live.

We had implementation strategies based on the user role. To start, if you think of end-to-end projects starting with the requester, all the way down to closing the project. The strategy was starting at the initiation of a project and continuously moving in the training, the order, or at the same workflow that a project goes.

The licensing and pricing are a bit high and the flexibility of the licensing is high. I think that the pricing to engage consultants is high. I don't have anything to compare it to other than other applications that I've supported. So there's just not a whole lot of flexibility in our licensing, which makes it very limited to what our requesters can do and different roles in an app.

My advice would be to be more engaged between the system administrators and the consultants during the configuration stages. Also, for Planview to be more transparent about what the system administrators can and cannot do as far as reporting. And then also make sure that there is time for a training plan and a very well-thought-out training plan based on each phase of a project and user role as they are interacting with that project.

The lessons I've learned is the need to ask more questions about how the application works as far as configuring the system and learning more of the limitations of a system administrator so those questions can be asked upfront during configuration.

I would rate Enterprise One an eight out of ten.