Planview Portfolios Reviews

We're using it for IT project management and annual planning. We also have CTM (part of Enterprise One), which is the true application portfolio management tool. The application portfolio management tool is more about managing metadata around our applications that we support. However, we are looking to do the integration between CTM and the PM modules.

The biggest impact is the maturity around getting projects in a single place so we can do portfolio level planning and use the tool for more than just timekeeping. This has been the biggest step that we've taken so far. This year was the first year that we did all of our annual planning in the tool instead of starting it in the tool, then doing it in spreadsheets afterwards. So, we're still growing there.

It has been effective for our delivery. It's given us much better visibility into what is being delivered and when.

Our finance/accounting department has been able to get more information than what they had before.

It helps connect funding with work execution. All of our projects have budgets and expected benefits to calculate an NPV. That is part of our annual planning processes. Then, we track monthly reforecasts and progress against those plans.

The visibility across the portfolio, who is responsible for what projects, who is working them, and where we are in terms of financials.

The integrations need improvement. We have some data exports. They're not even live app integrations. They're just data exports that run with our SAP instance. They either fail, hang up, or aren't configured correctly to operate. Those are the issues that we're running into now.

Some things that we're looking forward to are alerts and monitoring notifications for active notifications. We would also like more about the history of actions which are happening within the tool, so more recordable history.

We have been using the tool since 2016.

The platform is stable. We rarely have any issues with Planview for functionality. We don't have any issues with crashes.

We do have some significant issues with our integrations that we're working through. Those are not as stable or reliable as what we would like. I think it's processed-related, but it's all on the Planview side.

We haven't run into any issues with scalability.

We have run into a few issues with performance. It just seems to be slow, depending on how many activities you have in a work breakdown structure, how many projects in a portfolio resource, etc.

We are planning to implement more features, as the organization can absorb that change. We haven't tapped all of the capabilities of it yet.

We have used the professional services for the integrations. Their support is good except when the applications don't work. 

We have had several conversation, even at Horizons. It is really a process issue.

We switched from Primavera. We had sort of outgrown it. We needed more of a project and something that would be a little bit easier to use for our projects. We weren't taking advantage of the full capabilities of Primavera.

It's very complex. Maybe it was a lack of defined processes on our side of things. We really struggled to understand how we needed to answer the questions that they were asking, so they could configure it to support our processes.

We overcame it by trial and error. We kept at it until we got to a point where we could at least deploy and start tracking time, then grew from there.

It's been several years, but we did use professional services for their initial rapid deployment.

We would have a hard time calculating ROI at this point. It has been part of our normal operations for several years. Knowing what it would be without the tool, that would be difficult to calculate.

We recently did a new bundle for all of Enterprise One. It includes some of the newer pieces, like Projectplace and LeanKit. It bundled our CTM in with it as well. I think the total came out to be about $900,000 a year. This is for unlimited licenses.

We did evaluate other vendors.

We don't use Planview's Lean/Agile delivery tools. We use VersionOne.

Start with processes first. Do that hard work before you get Planview in and start talking about the capabilities of the tool. The tool can do pretty much anything you need it to do, but you need to know first what it needs to do for your company.

The tool is very powerful. Sometimes that complexity makes it difficult to use, but it certainly has more than what we need.

The tool has a lot of potential. Our particular implementation of it has some work to be done. I would rate it a seven out of 10.

We don't use Projectplace.

Public Cloud

Other

We use it to help us manage our IT assets for our company.

We've heard many heard sound bites from other areas where, five to seven years ago, they did not have this type of visibility into the IT assets for the organization. As it is now, we work with multiple teams who ask us for these different types of information. None of which would have been possible without having an application like Enterprise One.

The biggest impact has been the visibility into our IT assets.

Some of the most important features that we find are the ability to relate assets to one another (applications to software and hardware) and associate capabilities to each of our assets, as well as to whom the users in our user base are, whether they're internal/external customers and which departments. From this, we can create reports which can help identify for a particular department the applications that they use or own. Then, from there, the capabilities they offer.

We do find the solution flexible. Having the ability to make customizations to the product offers a great deal of flexibility to buy business requirements as well as meet the needs of our clients and customers.

The product can probably improve in a couple areas: 

1. Support is still a challenge. We find it challenging more due to the responsiveness and getting a case or ticket assigned to an analyst. That's what I was just doing. I was following up on an email that we opened last week. We haven't heard anything, so following up on that. So, that's one area of opportunity.
2. I would like them to be more product-focused with the continuing evolution of the product. As companies transform the way they do IT asset management, the product should continually change with it as well.

We do have some interruptions in service for one reason or another, but a majority of the time, it seems very stable.

We don't scale. We don't have a lot of users, just in the hundreds, even though our organization is in the thousands. 

It seems fairly scalable, particularly as our organization is in the cloud.

We interact with technical support quite often, whether it's deployments, bugs, or errors that we run into. We work with them on a fairly regular basis, whether it's just typical deployments or if it's actual issues that we run into. Most of the time, it's on the Planview side, whether it is an outage or some performance issues. Occasionally, it's something that we introduced.

I was not involved with the initial setup.

Our ROI is the visibility and relationships between our applications and software with one another along with the ability to tie capabilities and assign owners to identify individuals who are related to the assets. In a lot of cases, different areas of the organization have different needs. They come to us for information regarding different IT assets, and we're fortunate enough to be able to provide that information from what we've captured and placed into the Enterprise One application.

I would rate the product a seven out of 10.

Public Cloud

The primary use cases are project management and resource management. We use both of those modules of the tool today.

The transparency piece has improved our organization. We're big into financials. We set targets annually. We are able see real-time based upon our reporting structure, and we do this on a monthly basis. We use some of the reporting features that they have in the tool to show this information to key leaders in our organization to be able to keep the wheels turning down the road.

We are in a very transparent company. I like that the data that we store is available for everybody. We're not trying to hide anything. Being an administrator, I know a lot about the tool. It is very easy to show somebody how to use the tool and get used to it. Hopefully that user doesn't come back and ask the same question twice is really what it is about. It's a very intuitive product as well. For what we use the tool for today, it's easy to learn and pick up.

I am looking forward to the upcoming features. Previously, we have had continuous upgrades, so not having to put in so many tickets to get in a queue to get the migration up and running. we'll leverage that. Based on issues that we've run into, such as, having to open up a ticket, then going through development and that whole process, it lengthens out to find out that, "Oh, we can't fix it. It's going to be in the next release." Then, we have to wait for that release to come out. From an admin perspective, I think the upcoming features are great. 

Some of the other administrative screens, like the configured screens, they are modernizing those, which is exciting. This will help me out.

About six and a half years.

We started in version 10. We have gone through the migration path of upgrading and the pains that they've talked about today of having to go through the process of upgrading to a new version. I'm very excited to see the features which are coming.

For the most part, it is stable, but we've had our struggles as well. From a reliability and performance perspective, we don't have a lot of users. We have about 350 users, not all online at the same time, but we've had our struggles with performance. It is good to see that Planview has seen that themselves and are doing everything they can to fix and remedy this. 

One of the reasons why we've upgraded so many times is because of performance standards. We've just run into issues where we've had performance problems. Maybe they are not upgrading, but they're adding more horsepower. Then, we do go upgrade and lose that horsepower, which is frustrating from my perspective as an admin to lose that horsepower. Hopefully, that'll change. It's been pretty stable though in the version 17.

The support is slow. I've heard that they're beefing up that side of the company. It just seems to be the same people who are slow. It's getting that first contact resolution to the customer after I submit a ticket. It's literally within two minutes that I get a response back that says, "Hey, we got that." Then, it may be a day or two after that before they will get back to me. It is just going back on their words. If you're going to say something, just do it. That's the way I was growing up: Finish it out. If it's going to be two days, just tell me it's going to be two days. But, if you're going to tell me that you're going to get back to me today or tomorrow, and you don't, that to me is a little shot in the foot.

Planview Enterprise One is way better than what we had before. We have been through spreadsheet hell. Being able to leverage Planview to get us out of that has been great. We've had some great success stories come in since we have launched PlanView.

I would rate them as a seven point two out of 10. The magic quadrant says they are at the top of the top, and I don't disagree with them, but I think there's room to grow. I have seen that every year. This is my seventh time being at Horizons. It's just great to come back every year to be able to see what is coming next. You can definitely tell that they are listening to customers and trying to do everything they can to build the best in show product in this space.

I personally integrate with SAP, Workday, and JIRA. My stance on JIRA is that LeanKit is the way to go. I believe that. I think our company is just stuck on JIRA. We're in JIRA land. Everything is JIRA. It's not for everybody. I think the flexibility with LeanKit is the answer. It's just getting that message to the right people in our company to take that leap and go that route. I integrate with Workday and ServiceNow within our tool set at our company. They're all cloud-based.

We have a number of custom fields, but not really. It's pretty generic from that standpoint. We don't have a lot of bolt on things that need integrations. Flexibility-wise, it's good for our needs right now. We are right in the thick of agile transformations. So, it'll be interesting to see how we can hopefully leverage the tools that Planview offers to help ourselves and our company transform along the way. I'm looking forward to that.

Public Cloud

We are using it to monitor all the investment planning from the business. In IT. we using it for monitoring all activities, the financial spent, and the delivery of the work.

There have been new additional features helping us quite a lot, which have helped us to get executive adoption of the tool. Now that we are moving into version 18 with automated things, we will get more value with that. It's going to help us facilitate upgrades, I am looking forward to that as well.

It's helping us to be more mature in the way we handle change and projects from the business point of view. We have some transparency in what we do and are auditable in our different steps. That's a huge basic step, but a good start from the business point of view. We are now connecting to the IT through Columbia. There is now a nice simple flow.

It is helping to have a more structured process for planning and investment in capacity management for decisions. Now, we have information that is visible and helps to have more certainty that the decisions made are the right decisions. It's helping us to be more on the right side of the decision or have more confidence in the decision that is made.

Our transparency is increasing a lot. It is helping us to get people together. There are no dark rooms anymore. In some areas or concepts, we want to add more light to every single concept. That's the big impact that the tool is having. It allows conversations between people.

It gives us room to grow because it's very flexible. It gives us a lot of configuration that we can do on our own, so we can set up at our own pace. 

At the moment, the company goes at a slower pace than the capabilities offered. So, we can develop a lot until we hit its limits. This is a very valuable thing for me.

You have more capabilities. You can do things more quickly. It is helping us to transform the way that we are organized, communicate with each other, and interact with one another.

It could do with a quicker response time for some reports or portfolios.

What we are exploring now: 

• What happens after a business decision is made in Planwiew? 
• How is it enabled through other processes of the company, such as purchasing? 
• How we create a straight line of action for the users? 

We want to see what it does that is possible and what could be a good use case for it. The same way when information is collected in other systems financially, how does it comes back so we can reallocate it. Can we use something similar to ITV's business management in Planview? Is anyone else experiencing that? If so, that would be a great use case for the whole Planview community.

We have been using it for nearly two years. We started in January 2018.

It is stable and reliable. Downtime is marginal. 

Planview alignment is a replacement for SAP cost center, specifically the finance, controlling, and some PPM. That was the comparison that we started with. We didn't compare Planview to other PPM tools because what we saw gave us a run for our money with what we had before. 

The initial setup was quite straightforward. We had a very special launch that took three months during its configuration cycle. This was unprecedented compared to similar implementations that we had in the past course. It was brilliant.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. We have angles that can still be better, but the product gives us enough growth for years.

We use it for resource management, financial forecasting, and time reporting.

I am a user, not an administrator. I mostly do portfolio management.

It is good to have everything in a centralized place.

It has helped improve governance, mostly. People want to know where their money's going. Projects sponsors need to know what we're spending money on and what our burn rate is. Planview can give that to you straightaway.

The forecasting and time reporting functions are the most valuable features. We have about 200 people and can accurately forecast to the penny how much it's going to cost us for the year.

It is a bit of a rigid system.

We are looking to upgrade next year and the big thing for us is BI integration. The project already has that, so that is what I'm looking for, and Planview has sort of covered that base already. This will make our reporting a lot more customized. We can be more flexible. Right now, we are sort of using custom reports, which can be a bit buggy, as they're not native to Planview. This will be native integration.

About three years.

Stability and reliability are absolutely fine.

We use it very basically. We only have 200 people on it. Most other organizations have thousands of people on it. Our entire company is 1,500 employees.

In the time that I've used it, we've doubled up the amount of dollars on our intended projects. We have managed to double the number of people using it and doubled the amount of projects. We went from one portfolio to three. All of that was a walk in the park.

I am a user, so I don't have to contact technical support.

It was there before I came.

I would recommend Planview compared to what is on the market. I would even say that Planview is the market leader.

I have also used a customer solution in the UK and Microsoft Project.

I would rate the solution as a 10 out of 10. It does what I need it to do, so I've got no complaints. From a user perspective, it's perfect.

We're a global company. The biggest thing for us was to find a digital solution that enabled our global company to see everything across the globe. We have a lot of different groups at this point going up on it. We have manufacturing facilities, quality, human resources, IT, etc. The whole gamut is using Enterprise One, then beneath that we have certain groups who are using Projectplace and we will be implementing LeanKit as well.

We can see all the different initiatives that folks are working on and have been able to hook groups up, to say, "Let's not redo that. We're already working on that." Instead of having all this duplicity, we have one streamlined group working on it together.

The solution’s collaborative work management has affected our operations. We were in a place of using a billion emails, Excel templates, etc., so project documentation would get lost and no one knew what was going on. From a time savings perspective, the fact that we have Projectplace specifically, with everything in one place and we are part of a workspace where we can go and see what's going on, that has had a major impact in the way that we work.

It helps make sure stuff is aligned to strategy.

The biggest impact has been getting all these global groups into one space so we can even have intelligent conversations about what are we trying to accomplish. Before, it was just different regions doing whatever. Now, we're all talking the same language, and that's good.

It gives us the visibility and ability to see exactly what is happening for our organization. Even though we're a global company, we had our Asia Pacific and EMEA groups doing whatever they did. Then, in North America, there was no visibility across the board. So, there was a lot of duplicity and duplication in different projects, initiatives, etc. So, this solution is really giving us the ability to say, "Wait a minute. You're about to initiate this. We've got another group who is already doing that. Why don't we link you guys up together to figure that out?"

This has been a huge win because of the collaboration piece. Unfortunately, our organization has two different tenants of Microsoft Office, which means we can't communicate on teams, as an example. So, we have groups utilize Projectplace in place of that. Therefore, we can all talk, understand what's happening, and communicate that way, which has been amazing.

The colloboration between Enterprise One and Projectplace has been good because we didn't have a standard place to do this type of collaboration. There are a billion emails with Excel sheets, etc., and the way that we've utilized it is from the PM up. They are in Enterprise One, and they build their plans, doing whatever provides good reporting for our executive level leadership. Then, at the team level, there is Projectplace. The fact that we can integrate our Enterprise One down into Projectplace or sync the spaces has been really helpful.

I don't find the solution flexible. We have almost like a third-party group who has to do a lot of our configurations. It's a bit painful for us anytime we want to make a change. The other issue is that we have different groups all in the same instance. So, if one group wants to make a change, it impacts everyone. Then, we all have to come together, to say, "Yes, we approve this change, or no, we do not." Thus, it has not been as flexible for us. However, I don't know how much of this is a result of the way that we set up the configuration versus the true flexibility within the tool.

As an organization, we implemented it four years ago. Recently, they created another group, which I just joined. Hence, why I've only been using it for about two months. We're in the process right now of taking out what was put in because they didn't put it in well. We're redesigning our whole Enterprise One configuration.

I've only been in it for a couple months, so I haven't really noticed any stability type issues. 

Some of it's a bit slow. We are starting to get some Power BI dashboards built into it. Sometimes, we have to stay updated or refresh them, which I have noticed that in comparison to other BI solutions I've used, there seems to be a bit of a lag. However, I don't know how much of this is because the way it's hosted or if it's a true issue.

Because we're in this process, I know that our organization right now doesn't have a very positive view of Planview's scalability because of the way it was implemented initially. So, we're in this whole process of ripping the whole thing out, reconfiguring it, and putting it back. 

So far, the support has been really good. We have a third-party through whom we submit most of our ticket issues. 

We got to sit down with the technical support face to face to sort of crafting what our solution would look like. I thought that part went really well. They seemed to have a really good understanding of what we are trying to accomplish and what our prior challenges were. So, I feel really confident that the solution they're proposing is going to meet the basic needs of where we need to go. 

The initial part of the problem was when they implemented the original Enterprise One, they implemented the most complex version of it. Our maturity level is that we can't get people to follow basic Projectplace. So, we definitely see the roadmap for it to do transform our company's strategy, but we're just not there.

We're going to be doing a fast track deployment with Planview. We have our first meeting to talk timeline on Monday following the Horizons conference.

We went to a roadmap meeting with this very specific thought in mind that if we couldn't figure out how to do this in the way we needed to, then we were prepared to walk away from it. But, we did not have another vendor selected because we recognize and can see the power of the tool. It's just figuring out how do we best use it for our offices.

I would rate the product an eight (out of 10). I've seen enough use cases from other organizations who have really transformed the way that they work. It's just clear that my organization is just not there. I have a lot of hope that this product will be what we need it to be once we get this initial configurations figured out.

The biggest advice is to make sure you've done a maturity assessment on your organization. Whatever you initially implement, you're implementing at the lowest common denominator. For us, they tried to go immediately after things like capacity planning and resource management, but our maturity isn't fast. As a result, our users ended up being very frustrated. The other piece would be, when you implement it, think about the users who are doing the work. We implemented based on what we thought our executives would want to see, and that is backwards. Those are the two biggest things. The tool is so big and powerful that it is very easy to say, "I want to do all these amazing things." But, if your business maturity isn't there, you're going to fall and that will hurt.

Public Cloud

The primary use case is project management (PPM) for the IT and PMO departments.

We can easily see which functions are overcapacity. Before, we did not have visibility into that.

Planview has helped us connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. Now we understand that if we reprioritize projects in the pipeline, it will impact downstream capacity.

It hasn't transformed our delivery yet. We are still new at it. We're learning all the functionality, so this is something that we're working towards.

Once we get more comfortable with the tool and the data accuracy, strategy will be a great step forward for us.

It's an end-to-end integrated tool. We can look at resources, finances, tasks, etc. 

It is very flexible. It's almost too flexible and lets us do stuff we shouldn't do.

We want to deploy the program management function. We are not there yet. It's not already part of our solution. It's a further enhancement that we want to purchase eventually.

We have been using it since April 2019.

I would rate Planview technical support as a seven out of 10. When we first deployed, there were some issues. We never got to the root cause of why they happened. Since we didn't have any history with it, we weren't quite sure if this was a standard operating procedure or it truly was a glitch.

Before, we did not have an integrated tool. Now, we can load all the resource and project requirements into a portfolio to see where we have gaps in resources, capacity, etc.

It was straightforward. However, I don't think at the time we understood exactly how all the processes were integrated. So, it was the learning experience for us.

We deployed it with the help of Planview consultants. Our experience with them was good. They came onsite, gave us a training, and were always available by phone.

We evaluated other vendors before going with Planview. We chose Planview because of the end-to-end integration.

I would recommend coming to the the Horizons conference first. Ask a lot of questions. Talk to other companies who have gone through a similar experience.

We use the waterfall delivery tools.

I would rate the solution as an eight out of 10, because I don't know all the functionality. 

Public Cloud

Other

The primary use is project and resource management. Right now, it's just used for technical infrastructure, which is IT. But, we are also configuring it for business.

We are not live yet. It will make us more "agile" in things whenever we deliver. It will bring better visibility for projects, in terms of: resources, whether we are lacking resources or not, If we are in alignment with the global strategy of the company before a project has been delivered, financials, etc. 

The flexibility is whenever we implement for technical infrastructure, we have our business transformation process with targets, etc. Now that we are in the process of configuring for the business, there is a totally different solution. We have all the lifecycles, capability, and capacity to create screens based on workflow, shifts, etc. This is giving us huge flexibility to accommodate the company's needs. If we didn't have this flexibility, there would be one global solution for different processes of project management in the organization.

We are using the Lean/Agile delivery tools. The new solution for waterfall will be extremely helpful in making delivery faster because of visibility that the application brings to us, such as the schedule, resources, and what is happening in the background. Before, we had projects, but we didn't know if we'd have enough resources. We didn't know a lot of things. Now, with this tool, we have the full visibility of what's happening: 

• Do we need to hire resources? 
• Do we need more project managers? 
• What is our capacity? 
• What are our investments? 

Now, we can see fully into the portfolios and that everything is integrated. For the project financials, we can roll up and spread down. It's pretty good.

The most valuable features are the control and visibility that you have for portfolio management in terms of projects and capacity planning for resources along with strategies and outcomes, etc. It's so easy to access information for sharing analytics and reporting.

When I started working with Planview, I didn't know anything about project or resource management. I had to learn everything: the admin side, then the user side of it. Probably, in the beginning, I would implement in the blueprint or workshops more demos. A live demo of how the system works because we would like a little deeper dive in how the application works for us to understand what we need to provide, what we are doing, what we will be doing. Because in the beginning, it was so overwhelming, and we didn't know anything about the tool. 

You know your process. You know how you work, but you don't know how you're going to put that in the tool. If we had more demos in the beginning to make us more comfortable with the tool, we could have improved the success of the configuration.

We finished our configuration in June. We have been proving the solution here and there by running test and everything else. It does work the way that we want it.

So far, the stability is good. We haven't had any issues.

The scalability is good. The only thing that is hard with scalability, and may have a little hiccup, are the structure levels that we need to define in the beginning of the configuration. It makes for a lack of ability to be flexible whenever we are scaling, and we are growing as an organization. We are stuck with the levels that we set up in the beginning.

Whenever we define these levels, we state the amount of levels in a way that will allow us to scale in the future. That is our workaround.

It's just moving with technology. We cannot be living in Excel files. The company needs to be able to grow. Yet, we were still using Excel or other applications from Microsoft. So, we needed something more robust to support the growth of the organization. I think Planview came at the right time.

The initial setup was complex. We didn't know the tool in the beginning. So, it was harder to understand what is being done and what information we need to gather. Planview helped us gather all the information and deliver it. However, in the beginning, it was so blurry. We didn't know what was happening. We just went with the flow, then suddenly, "Ah!" Things started clicking. We started seeing things as they became live. Then, we were like, "Okay, now I'm getting it."

Configuration-wise, we took six weeks. Then, we had some issues after the configuration. It took us four more weeks to get it back into shape. Overall, it took us about 10 weeks.

We are planning to go with this project now that we finished the configuration. We are planning to go live on the second week of January 2020.

We used a Planview consultant for the deployment. Our experience with them was challenging. The initial consultant lacked some knowledge to help us. He didn't know the user interface, plus had very superficial administrative knowledge. 

Once we escalated the issue, we were taken care of immediately. Now, we have a way better consultant. We are extremely happy with our current solution architect (consultant).

Planview just jumped on this issue. They have been great and extremely supportive. They have been making sure that we are on the right path. 

The company evaluated other vendors.

The company chose Enterprise One because of the potential of the platform. It links to Spigit, PPM Pro, and a lot of other things that will support the scalability and growth of the organization on one single platform. This make it easier to manage licenses, administrate contracts, and everything else. It's one vendor with many solutions.

I would rate the product a 10 out of 10.

We are not using outcomes yet. But on the course I took on Monday, we saw the value of having outcomes. It was also brought to our attention the gap that exists between strategy programs and how you connect everything together: strategy outcomes and programs. How we can connect all this, it seems to be the way to go.

We are a big company, which has almost 30,000 employees.

Public Cloud

Other