Planview Portfolios Reviews

Our primary use case is to provide an overview of the status of multiple programs and projects. We're doing many programs and projects at the same time and this is a way to provide a consistent way of reporting on their status and progress.

We're still in an early stage. Things will change as we use it more. I did program reports that are important and that will provide us with value.

I think that the user interface needs some getting used to. It's not immediately intuitive. That's potentially room for improvement. I think also that an organization needs to have good support from some senior management to get something like Planview established. If that's missing, then it's not so easy to get support for it in the organization. If I was to talk about a feature or something for improvement, I think it would be the user interface and, in particular, the link between strategy and work.

We started using Planview in November of last year. 

We haven't experienced any issues with scalability or stability. So far, the application seems very stable and scalable. But we're not using it for 5,000 users at the same time. We're more like a couple of hundred.

We worked with Planview consultants to configure Planview to the organization's needs. So, if there's something that is important that the customer, namely ourselves, understand what we want so we can help Planview to configure it well. Investing in knowledge before starting is quite important.

I suspect it's perhaps a bit more expensive than some other competitors, but I wasn't involved in the competitive bid. My job was to implement what we had bought. I don't have comparison prices.

I would rate Planview a seven out of ten. 

In the next release, I would like to potentially see better integration between the strategy and the work aspects of Planview, so that you can report across them better. I think it's also quite early to say. We need to use it for several months to get a better feeling for that.

The interface has to do with the fact that it takes some time for new people to understand the tool. I don't think it's too bad myself, but, potentially, they could make it even better. More intuitive. In the first instance, the user interface requires some familiarization. It takes a while to get familiar with it. It could be improved.

The primary use case is for portfolio management on product development.

We do a lot of big projects which are pretty expensive to structure the product development around and see the progress. Every time we start a project, we have to expense the spends for certain amounts. We need some baselines, like predictive versus actual.

The product has been stable and reliable throughout our testing.

So far, it has been scalable.

The support is good. There are some good people there.

My frustration is that there is so much turnover at Planview. Every time we have had an issue, particularly on the sales side, you're talking to a new set of people. 

The technical people are very competent, but there is so much turnover in the people that we talk to, and that's frustrating. They will say, "We can make this work." Suddenly, that guy has left, and we have no one. Then, we have to start all over.

The decision was made before I was in charge of Planview.

We found it the best to hire the Planview team and get the setup done through them. It took a couple of days.

We used Planview for the implementation.

It is way too soon.

Our licensing costs are about a quarter of a million dollars per year.

I would rate the product a seven out of 10.

I have a governance role in our strategic portfolio management and I use this solution for reporting out against the strategic portfolio. I interact with the PMOs and FPNA and help to get the two on the same page.

Our ability to do strategic portfolio reporting has gotten much better. We're more accurate with how we report out. One of the biggest things is that each year, we've had a lot of shifts in how our pillars are set up and we can quickly shift to meet those needs without having it be too lengthy or too difficult.

Using this solution has helped improve how quickly we can deliver. It saves us time.

Collaborative Work Management has affected our operations because we're able to collaborate with different groups. We've got our PMO groups, and I'm able to get the information that I need from them. They go in, pull all of their information and I get the reports. We collaborate really well, from what I can tell.

My understanding is that we are using the Lean/Agile delivery tools, but I am not sure if we are using them to the full extent.

The most valuable feature for me is the ease and customizability of reporting. We can get different reports and customize them to do different things.

I also like business objects capabilities, although I haven't used them in my current role.

This is a flexible solution.

This tool is easy to use. I have used solutions such as SAP and Oracle and compared to using those products, I picked up up this tool right away. Once I had a little bit of training from our admins, I thought that it was really intuitive. It was easy for me to go in and build reports, where I didn't constantly need other people to do it for me. That is nice because I have administrative access, so I can do pretty much anything within the tool that I have the knowledge for. That is a plus for a business analyst. You can get the data you want quickly, export it to Excel, and slice and dice it the way you want to.

I would like to be able to integrate with Oracle to supplement what we're currently doing with reporting. We aren't doing it right now, although I don't know if it's a limitation with Planview or it's a limitation with us. I know that it would be helpful for me to bridge that gap because we have to deal with two different datasets.

From a stability standpoint, I think it's solid. I haven't had any major issues with it. I'm always able to get my reporting and I'm always able to do the things that I want to do.

My understanding is that we have seen ROI from this solution, but I am not aware of the specifics. I know that other Blue Shield organizations are using it, and I have heard that it has been successful for us.

Currently, we are not taking advantage of the full functionality that is offered by this solution. We really need to push to get to that next level and use everything that is being offered. I think that there is a disconnect between the people who are the administrators of it and the people who tweak it to get it to do what we want. We just need to have the conversations and that vision of what we want it to do. I know we've got some limitations within our own company, where I think we have a vision of where we want to go and things that I want to get. We're just not quite there, yet.

We've always struggled, but we have been getting better with our reporting each year.

This is a great tool. I have a stronger finance background, so I've used more ERP-type systems and this is my first project management system. From what I can tell, it's great. I haven't used Oracle's or one from another vendor, but I think that this one works well.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The primary use cases are soft management and work management. We are expanding at the moment to outcome management and strategy management as well as ICP planning. Next year, we will expand to CTM.

When I started in the group on the German side, we could only have aliases as resources. Now, we are able to have named resources through the agreement, and pulled from the worker's council, for example. 

We have more stability in the data. Our group has plenty of portrait data now, as we are part of the source of the tools for portrait data.

Planview has helped connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. We started to have strategic planning inside going then down to the outcomes. Out of the outcomes, we will try to wait on the projects and other teams, then growing slowly to link it.

It brings transparency to our projects.

I like the Excel interfaces that we have and use it for. 

It gives us the vast ability to churn out-of-the-box reports and have an overview about approach rates and resource utilization.

The product is flexible. E.g., the work infrastructure is easy to adjust. Some other structures are really easy to configure, adjust to our behavior, and adjust to our processes.

Overall, the UI needs improvement. The UI should have more possibilities for users who are not specialized in using Planview. At the moment, it is more of a technical UI. I would like it to be an open user UI. 

improvement is needed on several modules, like resource management and outcome management. 

The product can grow with us. We can add more users.

The customer support center is really valuable. I have had a lot of email discussions and talks with them. We have found several solutions. Sometimes, it ends in an enhancement request.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We plan to upgrade to version 18 next year.

We did an assessment of several companies.

I would rate the product as a seven out of 10. 

Our primary use case for this solution is for managing a 450 million dollar portfolio from the inception and ideas into a strategy. We do this by turning it into an actual project and then understanding how that project performed and taking lessons learned for the next time around.

The biggest benefit that we have seen is that it's increased visibility across the board. It's given us a lot of data to actually make data-driven decisions, whereas before this product we didn't have the level of detail to make informed decisions around a lot of trade-offs with our strategic portfolio.

With respect to our organizational strategy, it has not been transformed by this solution, but it has enabled us to achieve our strategy and achieve our goals. We went through the large process of setting up our own IT shop in the past ten years, and Planview was a big part of being able to do that.

Collaborative Work Management has affected our operations by providing visibility and transparency throughout.

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

This solution has helped us connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. I do not have specific examples of this but that is my understanding from my colleagues.

The biggest impact that using Planview has had is that it has given us the ability to manage the main capacity of working our resources and getting better at that over time. We are better at planning for our people and making sure that we use them appropriately.

The most valuable feature of this solution is reporting.

The integration with Power BI, in particular, makes it very easy to get information in a useable format out to our stakeholders.

This is a flexible solution. The flexibility allows you to take care of your stakeholders in different ways. Depending on their way of working, you can accommodate several different processes.

Some of the out-of-the-box reporting is not immediately useful and although it can be configured or customized, there are still improvements that can be made.

This solution is stable. I've not had a technical issue where I was not able to access it. It has always been a solid, high-quality platform.

This solution is easily scalable. It really just depends on the administration team that you have in your company. When somebody wants it, you ask them a few questions then you turn things on for them.

The technical support is among the best in the industry. They're very clear, very thorough and they get right to the heart of the problem. They're willing to work with you and help discover any issues that arise, as well as the implications.

Prior to the solution, we were using the HP Portfolio and Performance Management System. We switched because it wasn't as comprehensive and couldn't handle tying everything together. We had a big issue with getting visibility.

We realize ROI through this solution because it is the way that we manage our strategic portfolio. It is difficult to quantify, but it is an essential part of our operations.

This solution has reached a pretty comprehensive state, so it is difficult to immediately think of features that it is lacking.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of solution is to make sure you're working with a vendor like Planview, who has a comprehensive solution from innovation to the inception of ideas all the way through getting your teams to be able to collaborate together. It really makes a difference if they're all in the same environment.

This is a good solution, but there is always room for improvement. Planview seems great at identifying what needs to be improved and then moving the ball forward.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

It is for total strategic management, portfolio management, etc. It is used for end-to-end projects from the beginning to the end. Our entire company is using it.

I am a developer. I work on RBI reports (financial reporting) in Enterprise One for our business leaders.

The product has been good. The strategic planning started in 2017. They have been making good decisions based on the data that is available in Planview. They can do a drill down to the results level and what is happening exactly in every project.

They are trying to use the product portfolio. I had news that our management team is trying to get the product portfolios in place. It's about to launch.

The integration stuff from tool to tool, like Projectplace to Planview, to manage projects is the most valuable feature. It keeps all our tasks up-to-date. It closely follows up with everything, which is really cool.

From a reporting angle, it is flexible. We can use it in multiple ways, like with the in-house dashboards inside of Planview. With the security and all its options, the data can be limited to the extent of that user's need based on their roles, which is awesome. There is a lot of connectivity to a number of tools.

We had issues with the data rephrasing. 

The integration stuff is not going so well. I heard that there are a lot of updates to version 18. It is almost 40 to 50 percent updates on the integration part. We should feel the difference and our problem should be resolved.

I am looking forward to exploring the bots on the recording part. This will really help us out when it is added.

The stability is good.

Impact-wise, more users and teams are getting onboard, seeing Planview within the organization. People are using it in IT, engineering, manufacturing, R&D, etc. Users are increasing daily.

Technical support is awesome. I personally know Natalia. I have been interacting with her for my last couple of calls. Whenever we have support, we raise the last developmental request, and they are very good. They're very helpful all the time.

The product is a nine out of 10. I need to give a little space for improvement.

It's primarily for project and portfolio management, which includes resource assignments onto projects as well as financial management of our projects.

When we implemented it, we were able to intentionally assign resources to the projects that they've been approved for. Previously, we didn't have a way of restricting resources from charging time against any active projects that we have. By utilizing Enterprise One, we were able to reflect and show the resources when they went to enter their time sheets for only active projects and projects that they were approved to work on. This meant that they were charging hours against work that their project manager was expecting them to work on.

We are still going through a lot of transformation as an organization on the whole. Planview is a good partner because one of the ways that we have tried to change our strategies is to move to a product-based approach. I think Planview will help us with that.

It has helped to transform our organization’s delivery. It is enabled us to see actual planned start and end times of projects, then we can look back when the projects actually closed out. This gives us an opportunity to look back, and say, "Why did it take us so long to finish a project, especially if it went above the proposed plan?" It also manages our costs to say, "Based on how we're trending on our costs, how are we going to finish within budget? Are we likely to go over budget?" This also affects schedule.

Planview has helped connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution because we utilize the strategic module within Enterprise One to help with that work.

The biggest impact has been resource assignment and management. It has helped us consolidate those and be very intentional as far as the tasks that resources are assigned to track. It has a big impact on our financial planning as well.

The most valuable features are the resource management, the time sheet entry and usage, and the financial planning. With our projects, we primarily focus on resource assignments, as far as determining the actual forecast and actuals of our projects. A lot of it is based off of the resources utilized on those projects. The time based helps us capture the actuals. The amount of time people are spending on working on their project tasks. Because they've built this into the schedule, so we can build the forecast. With financial planning, we're able to look back on what our variance is and if there is anything between the scheduled forecasted hours, dollars against the actual hours, and the costs that they utilize.

We are able to adjust it based on any process changes that I've identified as far as our work types and the way our workflows work. We're able to go in there and make those changes ourselves. It's helped us because we can do some self configurations.

I would like a bit more flexibility, as far as the configuration, and have additional capabilities to configure, making it more flexible for our use.

It's very stable. I am very happy with the stability.

It is very scalable. I think it's helping us grow, as far as we are a changing organization. Planview has been able to grow with us in that respect.

We've used that technical support. We have faced some challenges with some of the enhancement requests that we might want information on and the process it takes to get some of those changes put in. The process has improved from when we first implemented it. We have noticed a difference. 

I am leaning towards rating the technical support a seven and a half to eight out of 10. I would expect that next year, I'll probably be able to rate them a 10.

We're using Innotas at the time, which is now Planview PPM Pro. Ironically, we didn't realize that they were going to be acquired by Planview when we started using it. We switched over just for maturity and to have better financial planning and reporting application as well.

It was a bit complex due to the change nature of the product from where we were with our old legacy application, then moving onto Planview. Once we settled in, it became easier to use and manage.

We partnered with Planview in terms of the initial deployment. They had an onsite consultant who helped us with the configuration and creating the test environment before we were able to cut over and move into the extra production environment. The experience with them was very good. I would rate the experience as a 10 out of 10. We had a very good cut over experience.

We don't track the ROI. I think that there is some ROI available just based on the cost of how much we've been spending on our portfolio the last year and on how Planview has helped us manage those costs.

From PPM Pro to Planview Enterprise One, we did not evaluate other vendors. We already had the relationship with Planview from using PPM Pro so that helped us. Planview came to us very receptive. Also with the costs, they were very understanding. Knowing that we were an existing customer, they were very much willing to work with us to make sure that we were able to transition to Enterprise One.

I would rate them as a solid nine out of 10.

Give Enterprise One a fair consideration. It is very scalable and flexible with the changes that we are seeing with version 17. There are a lot of integrations, so the capabilities are much broader than what you may initially perceive. I would definitely put it up there as a product that is as good, if not better, than anything that's out there in the marketplace that is similar.

We are not yet using the Lean/Agile delivery tools, but we're hoping to do so in the next couple of months.

Mainly, we use it to manage all of our strategic and capital projects. There are about 80 to 100 projects per year that we manage with it: schedules, issues, risks, and financials. We manage everything in the tool.

Our reporting is much better. There is much more visibility on projects, schedules, tasks, and in our milestones. Now, we have a consistent way of reporting out to the committees and getting all of our schedules and milestones.

The most valuable feature is the reporting. We are able to extract monthly reports out of Planview Enterprise One. We then report out to our leadership and executive committees. It is a combined report that lists all of the issues, risks, our schedule, and milestone. It gives leadership as well as all the committee members and everyone a one page view of the progress of the project.

The tool is easy to use, and that is good.

We had some learning issues at the start, but now that the users are in the tool day after day, they are getting there.

Power BI versus getting reports within Planview could improve. Instead of having to leverage Power BI, those reports could just be generated within the Planview tool using the tiles. This would be a huge jump for the product.

For most part, it's pretty stable. The only issue that we have seen is with the reports. Sometimes within the application, when you pull a report, it takes awhile performance-wise for the reports to pull up. Otherwise, it's good for the most part.

The technical support is pretty good. We have opened up many cases with Planview which get addressed in a timely fashion. 

It's when we want to get into integrations that the time response could be a bit quicker.

It is changing the culture of project management within our company a little bit. Before, we had multiple tools, so project managers were either using Excel or some had Microsoft Project. Reporting was done in different ways. This tool just brings the project management community together. We're all on the same tool and reporting on the same structure.

The initial setup was complex because we also implemented it in a three month time frame. This was a pretty aggressive timeline for us. We got it done.

We didn't get all the integrations done, but that was sort of our phase two. We started in December with our build portion and went live in March.

We did not other vendors. 

We're part of UT. Because we already had an existing contract within the UT system, we piggybacked on that contract and utilized that to implement Planview.

It is about a seven or eight out of 10. I think for the most part that the tool itself is excellent. It meets our needs. It gets us the reports that we want. It has all of the portfolio and program management functionality. All of that is working well. I would've given it a 10 out of 10 if the integrations in some of the reporting capabilities were easier,