Planview Portfolios Reviews

We use it for a little bit of everything: R&D, product development, project management, resource management, and program management.

It has given us much greater visibility to resource management and financials.

I like that it's an enterprise environment. I can look across everything that's going on and have a sense of what is going on within the organization.

We're looking forward to version 18, upgrading there, and seeing what we can find there.

It would be nice if Planview were a little more flexible.

One thing that we'd absolutely really like to see is an improvement in the administration capabilities. With the Planview administrator, the interface is very time consuming, and that is not fun. We could be doing other things.

It is very stable.

It's pretty scalable.

Overall, the technical support has good people who are knowledgeable. They are a little overworked. At least, they have been in the past year. We need them to focus on somethings from time to time. You can tell that they're really focusing on many things. It has gotten better, but I think they could still use some relief.

Karen Anderson has been a big help to us.

Historically, our company switched project management environments every three years globally and organizationally. When it was time to do a review, we looked at an entire enterprise portfolio management environment. Planview met the criteria that we had. It was a global organization. It was very solid from a financial perspective. It was able to do multiple currencies, etc.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

The deployment took us three and a half months.

We deployed it ourselves. We did have an integration with our SAP environment, but that was through Planview. We didn't have a third-party do it.

The Planview consultants were very good. They came in with a plan. They said, "If you execute this, then this, then this, and then this. This is how long it will take. This is how much it will cost, and it did. It took this long across this much, then we were up and running.

We have several hundred licenses. It costs us several hundred thousand dollars a year. 

We overbought our licenses. We looked at our needs three to four years down the road and tried based our contract on that. 

However, we were over aggressive. We use about a third of the licenses that we have. We're looking to adjust the makeup so we can start utilizing the amount of money that we are spending. Right now, we're overspending, and my organization is not seeing the value in Planview because we are paying so much for licenses that we're not using.

At the time of evaluation, there were only four or five environments in the entire world that could have met our requirements. Planview by far was the best. 

We evaluated SAP, Oracle, Planisware, and another vendor who dropped out. 

Listen to what they have to say. They know what they have to say. Start small and grow into the environment. Definitely get executive management buy-in for the environment.

What I usually hear from our own implementations and other implementations, they tried to do all the modules, integrations into this environment, SAP, Windchill, and Integrity together. Instead of that, just get the thing up and running. Get people used to the interface. You will have the executive management screaming at you to get it all in one place. But, if you can't get the actual users onboard with using the environment in a simplified manner, then you're never going to get the advanced solution in.

We are beginning to use the solution’s Lean/Agile delivery tools.

I think it's an eight (out of 10). I really like it. I don't really rate anything a 10 I just don't think anything's perfect. I'm happy that they've worked on improving the reliability of the environment over the last year, and I think they need to finish the integrations with all the different components that they purchased over the last year. Once they get that all together, it will be something special. But, let's see it happen first.

We currently use it for all of our technical projects. We use work and resource management for our technical portfolios.

The biggest impact for using Planview currently would be to understand the true costs of projects. We are trying to get to a point where not only do we take into account technical costs, but what the business cost is. Trying to integrate our business right now into Planview is helping us identify the true cost of the investments that we make so we can try and understand their value.

The tool does have the potential to impact our organizational delivery. As we continue to integrate our entire business with our technical teams into Planview, I definitely see it changing how we deliver projects in the future.

Currently, it provides insight to leaders that they don't otherwise have access to get. As far as delivery leaders from technical teams and determining their resource capacity and constraints, they don't have another way of figuring this information out right now unless they were to do it manually on their own, which would be very time consuming.

The most valuable feature is resource management. You get to work with a lot of resource leaders for capacity planning. Although, we don't use capacity planning to its full potential, we would like to go there as well as financial management for the projects.

All of the features that we get out of Planview, it just helps us to provide information back to our senior leadership and have those conversations to get insight. When we have that information, we get insight from them on what it is that they are looking for and what they need. Then we can transform that information from the tool and get them what they need. All the information is helpful for me to be able to provide the data that they need. We want to help them make the right decisions that they need.

I would like to be able to copy and paste from Excel into work and assignments along with roles and hours, as opposed to having to type it out one by one.

It's very stable. It's a great tool that is evolving. It provides more information and opportunities for us to expand what we offer to our customers. 

We do use the technical support. We always have a good experience. We have dedicated people who we can work with to submit tickets. The responses to tickets are always in a timely manner.

We did the upgrades with the help of Planview. It was a really good experience. 

It wasn't just me. An entire team from Planview worked with my company, so this helped us get all the information so we could make each upgrade. We've done multiple upgrades so we could make each upgrade be as seamless as possible. So, the support that we got from Planview was nice.

We have seen some return on our investment within Planview. As we transform here to turning on more of the features, reworking what we've done, all the customizations, and trying to just start fresh, I think that we'll see an even bigger return once we can take advantage of the features that Planview offers that we aren't currently using right now.

This is information that we can leverage from PlanView once we transform how we use it today. The information that we can leverage that will, in turn, provide a return on decisions that we make, how we deliver work, and maybe delivering it faster. Then, we would see a reduction in costs for some of those projects as well as having our leadership setup to make better, more informed decisions than what they currently can do from the data that we provide. I believe that once we started leveraging all the tools that Planview can offer from what we have in Enterprise One now, we'll have more information for our leaders.

My advice would be do to planning. Ask a lot of questions and do a lot of planning out first what the goal of the organization are. Then, from what their goals are, utilize the tool to try and meet those goals.

I am an everyday user of the tool. When you don't have everyday users, or users who go into the same task over and over, it probably is not as flexible for them. For myself, I do find it very flexible.

I would rate the tool a solid eight (out of 10). I wouldn't give it a 10. Part of it probably is that we haven't activated all of the capabilities that Planview has. The other part of it is that I work in the tool everyday. So, some of the things that we would like to do as an organization may very well be available to us. We just haven't utilized them yet. Once we go through this assessment process and sit down with Planview next week to go over what we can do, it may change the team. This is where we are in our current state for everything that we want to do.

We are in the process of having Planview help connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. We are just building a roadmap for this.

Our strategies have evolved from other factors, but not necessarily from the tool.

We do not use the solution's Lean/Agile delivery tools nor do we use Projectplace.

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.

The primary use case is project costing, resource forecasting, and financial reporting of projects. It is implemented only in departments that touch what we call our project portfolio. So, the people in IT who do the coding, programming, developing products for customers, and the maintenance on our systems, they're all in the solution reporting time. However, our payroll and human resources do business as usual. They run the company and business, keeping the lights on, but they are not part of our time reporting community.

As we grow, it will help us because nobody in the company speaks or understands Planview data. It allows us to take that and put it into a format where we can walk into a boardroom, and say, "This is where we are. This is where we're going. This is what we need."

The biggest impact on our company is resource forecasting.

Planview has helped connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. That is the key use that we have for it. We use it to validate the work that we're doing and the funding that we need. The difference between the previous version and current version for us would be the ICPM and the way it gives us different scenarios. We can go in and build that out.

Nothing is the most valuable. We're really just tapping into what Enterprise One will do for us, such as, the ICPM. planning, and data that comes out of the system right now.

The flexibility of the solution would be around the reporting, resource forecasting, work breakdown structure and how we build out a project, and the lifecycles at the beginning of a project.

We have required more time from our resource managers to spend time in the tool. The adoption has been slower than we would have hoped. So, I would think from a rollout perspective, if Planview could help us with material which gets non-Planview users or previously light Planview users to become more heavy users of the system, then this would help us with the rollout. Our biggest improvement that we've seen has been in the annual planning process each year that we go through to map out what projects we're doing and what are we handling next. It has become noticeably easier the better that we have gotten in Planview.

It's still a project management tool. It's that slow adoption thing. It hasn't come full circle in the other parts of the company. Therefore, it hasn't transformed our company's delivery.

The technical support piece needs improvement. 

When we rolled it out, we rolled it out out-of-the-box, which didn't allow for hardly any customization. We found out that we probably should have slowed down and customized it. Giving advice to anybody, I would tell them don't do the out-of-the-box solution. It's worth it to sit down, customize it, and make it work your way.

So far, we've not had any problems with it. We did have a couple of little hiccups. Most of our stability issues have been around that it is hosted at Planview. When our network goes down, so does our connection to the outside world. Then, we lose all of our cloud-based solutions. When everything was on-prem before, we could lose that connection to the outside world and still function as a company. Now that all of our solutions have moved offsite, anytime we lose that connectivity, it's a whole office of people sitting around twiddling their thumbs because you can't get to JIRA, Confluence, etc. Most of our projects are still actively managed out of Microsoft Project and saved on their desktop. That's probably the only thing that we can still leverage when that connection goes down.

We lose Internet connectivity once every two to three months when there is a hiccup somewhere and something goes down in the matrix, then we lose connectivity. It is usually down for maybe 30 minutes to an hour, then we're up and running again.

I would rate the technical support just slightly below poor. We have found that for us to communicate with Planview technical support and open a ticket, we have to make a business case with a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation including screenshots, red circles, and arrows. We have to draw it out for them, then we make a video showing this is us and everything the way it should look. Then, we do this activity: Here's the outcome and the malfunction with the explanation. We have to remind them that we don't use allocations, that we're just using reservations. We go through this whole diatribe of putting almost a packet together. Then, two weeks later somebody calls us, and says, "Hey, we're looking into your ticket. Can you explain what's going on?"

It's like, "I just spent all that time. Did you look at the video? Did you look at the PowerPoint?"

"Well, not really."

"Well, go back and look at it." Then it's, "Well, did you understand it?"

"Well, I don't know. I can't reproduce it. Let me..."

Then, the other day, we went through that same process. They called us up. and said, "Hey, we couldn't reproduce your problem, so we just went into your production version and updated your project for you." I don't ever want anybody from outside of my organization to touch one of my projects. So, I was pretty livid about that.

In some ways, the solution is flexible. In other ways, it is not. It seems that the support that we get from Planview when we call them up over the phone is almost misleading at times.

When we talk to people at Horizons that have had some of the same challenges, they found it very flexible because they knew about a thing to make Planview work the way they needed it to and we didn't get that assistance from Planview. The biggest benefit in being at Horizons isn't the support from Planview, as it is the support from the user community having been in the software.

My wish is the company, Planview, steps up to be just as valuable as the use cases and user stories.

We found it straightforward. Some of our end users found it more complex because they were required to get in and do new things. The expression we used is, "We're all growing new muscles together. We're working out new muscles and we're learning new things." Like when you start a new workout routine, you're sore in the morning. You're going to get sore from Planview until you build up muscles to do this. There is a learning curve.

Our business users are still overcoming the learning curve, not as fast as we would like, but they are getting there.

Glen Van Koojic and Mike Moulden were outside trainers and facilitators who helped us with the rapid deployment of Planview. They are contractors, not actual employees, of Planview. They are great guys and helped a tremendous amount.

We have seen ROI in non-tangible ways. There is still much more to be had there as we improve our business plan and operation.

We evaluated Clarity, Rally, and a Microsoft Project Enterprise solution.

We already had Planview. We looked for a while at Workday because Workday was coming on to do our HR stuff. The idea was, "Maybe we can get some sort of work management project piece out of Workday, then have it all be integrated into one tool with one check to write." There wasn't enough meat on the bone for us to go that route. So, we went with Planview.

We decided to go with Planview because of familiarity. We didn't have to change to a whole new system. Even though the difference between versions 11 and 16 was a totally different code base. It was beneficial for us to keep similar look and feel, layout, and shorter training time.

We still use Microsoft Project as a standalone. Most of our projects are managed out of that because we use Planview as a financial reporting tool. We will hopefully replace Microsoft Project with an expanded use of Planview Enterprise One.

I am happy with Planview. I would give it an endorsement.

We're trying to move in a more lean, agile direction. Everything we use right now for that is JIRA, Excel spreadsheet, and Microsoft Project based.

We used Projectplace during the rollout. I really liked it and would like to keep using it. We don't currently use it, as we are not currently customers of it. I think it was their tool to use when they were rolling us up and because we were participating in that project with them, so we got access to it that way.

I find value in both products: Enterprise One and Projectplace. I didn't see any synchronization or data feeding between the two of them. So, I can't tell if there's any synergy between them. I believe there probably is based on what I've seen at Horizons, but I've not witnessed that synergy.

We barely use 20 percent of the features that are in the current version. I am excited about all of the products that Planview offers and how they seem to integrate together. I would like to see my company mature and develop to the point that we could bring on a second or third Planview product, then we can really start becoming lean, agile, and innovative. However, we need to get our own house in order before we can even talk about future features of Planview.

We need to do a better job of being us than we currently do. We need a little more leadership maturity. We need to refine our business processes. We have a new CEO, and he's setting a new direction for the company. We need to get his business vision a little further down the road than where we are. We're sort of in a state of flux right now.

The product is probably a seven or eight (out of 10), but I think our adoption of it and use of it right now is probably a five (out of 10). So, we need to be better at using the tool. 

The primary use case is portfolio management. We're looking at the business unit portfolio and health of the portfolio as a whole. We are not just looking at projects on time, but capacity management for resources, and on the financial side, if we're on budget.

It brings visibility into capacity, how that affects our projects, and having the whole portfolio be able to see everything at the same time, then talk about it. 

One of our guys actually has a great quote that I use, "Planview Enterprise One isn't a tool that takes away communication. It actually increases the need for communication." It brings people to the table to talk about more things because we have transparency in all of our stuff.

I like that everyone is able to see the same data. All of our users who aren't just time reporters have read access to all the data that is out there. So, it is one source of truth where everybody can go in and see the exact same data that everybody else sees. It is transparent.

To see work, resources, and ICPM and those different cuts and views is very beneficial for us if we just want to focus on resources. E.g., here are all the resources, but here are the projects that they're working on. If we want to look at the work, then we can look at the work and can bring in the resources. Being able to slice and dice that way is really good.

• Integration
• The cost of other pieces and integrating them in.
• The response to certain issues that pop up.

It has been pretty stable.

When we put in tickets, they are responded to them as quickly as possible.

There is improvement there on responding back to customers. On our side, we've got quite a bit of experience in tools and systems like this. Normally, when we are putting forth a ticket, we know that it needs to be escalated. 

There can be improvement on the sense of urgency because a lot of times we've exhausted everything that we can, and now, we're reaching out. So, it isn't a, "Well, have you tried to reboot this?" We've already done everything. Once we put in a ticket, there should be more of a sense of urgency on it.

In 2006, we engaged Clarity. We were using Clarity. We had just gone through one merger. We were completing another merger while we were trying to implement a tool: two different banks, two different cultures, and one new tool. The implementation wasn't that successful. So, we had a system that was too robust for what we needed. We sort of needed what was now called a low code common language type tool.

We ended up building our own. From building our own tool, we made changes to that, and rebranded it. Then, we made changes to that, and rebranded it. 

One of our CIO's big things was we needed a tool that will be able to facilitate our evolution into automation, Agile, and everything else. That's how we came to Enterprise One.

The initial setup is more straightforward for us because we've had other tools in the past, so everything is there. One of the things that we're excited about with version 18 is the configuration: Some of the entry points and user experience will be a lot better when we can collapse certain information. The clean look and feel of it will be really nice.

The product is flexible. We have someone on our team named Allison Cobb who is our Power BI and reporting specialist. She went in and learned the whole schema of Enterprise One to where we have more flexibility than others because we can see certain things, and go, "We want to put that in a dashboard. We want to be able to use that in a different way."

I would give it an eight out of 10. The reason why I would give it an eight is what's being brought into the suite of Planview. The integrations that you're going to be able to do with Planview with LeanKit. All of these things, it's really forward thinking on, "These are all the different pieces which are needed to move forward." All of this is great. 

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.

We have three different teams on Enterprise One right now. We currently have research and development, MIS, and sourcing continuous improvement. The main business cases are new product introduction, MIS projects, and also continuous improvement of productivity projects.

We are on the cloud.

We have recently had some good portfolio discussions about what types of projects and how much effort is going against each type of project, then making better decisions around how they better tied back to the strategy that we want to chase. 

It's around innovation versus continuous improvement versus maintenance-type projects:

• Do we understand how much time and effort we're putting against maintenance projects?
• Where do we want to grow more in innovation? 
• How do we better focus our resources on these types of things? 

That specifically has been how we've been doing it recently.

I don't think it's transformed our strategy yet. I think it's getting us better visibility into how we're working on the strategy. But, I wouldn't say it's changed our company's strategy.

We've brought our portfolio altogether. We have had multiple ways of reporting out what our portfolio is, whether it's in Excel, Word, or in different places. We brought all of our projects together in one place. That has worked out well for us. We've been able to manage the work on Gantt charts and our resources better. The big thing for us on research and development is around managing people's time, on which projects they are working on, and how much effort does it take to launch our projects.

I have found the solution to be flexible. It has the ability for us to have three teams working on it, plus we're going to have capital planning coming onto to Planview next year. The fact that we can all be working on it: MIS folks working on their projects at the same time that you have research and development, new products coming in, and we'll be doing capital projects. We've all been able to work on the same platforms, and it's very helpful that way.

I would rate it as an eight (out of 10). We have had some difficulties with trying to get the financial component of it to work the way that we want it to. The way that we do IRRs, we tried to do that in Planview and the financial model didn't quite get there. It depends on who you talk to, but some of our project managers would probably give it a higher score. When you start talking to some of our financial folks, they would probably give it a lower score, as they are trying to figure out how to best use it financially and have had some struggles.

The stability has been fine.

So far, scalability has been fine. It's added quite a bit to it. It's worthwhile.

The technical support has been pretty good. My technical team would be able to talk more to that than myself. Recently, we have gotten on a newer version. We're currently on version 15. Some of the things that we've been running into roadblocks on, it looks like the solutions will be coming out in versions 17 or 18. So, we have to upgrade before somethings can get completed, but I think for the most part, we've been happy with the support that we have been receiving from the help desk.

We had multiple groups on different tools. Those things were not working for us. We had one group on Access and another group doing things in Microsoft Project trying to manage a portfolio there. All of our project activators were in Excel, Word, and scattered all over the place. It was tough to find information.

It was fairly straightforward. We understood it pretty well out of the gate. We understood the format. 

The format of the tool worked well for us, but there were some things that we were not too familiar with in the tool. We probably didn't learn some things and some training in the tool before we actually got into implementation would have been better. There were some things we were agreeing to ask along the way where we didn't quite see the end picture because we were trying to implement the tool. We were trying to make decisions when we were not sure what the end game looked like. Once we started working on it, it was pretty intuitive and worked well for us.

Planview consultants helped us with it. Our experience with them was very good. It was a different approach than how we typically would have done it internally before. So, we did take a pause along the way and make sure that we were getting what we needed. For the most part, I think we did well with it.

We have not calculated a return on investment at this point. There actually wasn't necessarily an ROI project for this. It was more just trying to pull visibility and get multiple groups under one table. We didn't measure for this one on an ROI basis.

We are on the Flex licenses.

We did talk with SAP and Planview. Originally, we also considered Innotas, which was acquired as Planview PPM Pro. 

Planview Enterprise One was handled best across multiple functions. Everyone came up with different requirements. Planview was good at meeting all of those for each one of us. We did a detailed RFP and scored it all the way through. Each group scored it where they thought it worked for us. Planview scored best.

The big thing for us is that if you're having a difficult time trying to keep track of all the different projects that are going on in different areas and you need one place to be able to go for it. This has worked really well for us.

The biggest impact of using Planview in our company is visibility to everything that is being worked on.

We have not yet used Planview to help connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. I think we want to get there, but we're early on.

We have used Troux every day over the last three years. 

The portfolio and technology management are well built, however the lack of templates harden the initial learning curve.

Visualization and reporting areas could use improvements by having canned reports.

Its support to legacy paying customers is something PlanView is not handling well. We were unable to implement due to lack of professional support by PlanView. 

The overall interface is very easy to use. It puts together strategy and execution across all your investments. The demand, organizational resources, financials, strategies, project execution, and ideation elements are all brought together in this solution.

It resulted in a high rate of adoption and sustainability of changes that are associated with the business unit and its regions.

It proved a single set of reliable and actionable portfolio plans, consisting of ranked ideas, projects, and services across the organization. Thus, it enhanced visibility.

It would be great to see Planview incorporate agile interfacing/methods in it. Like CA Clarity and other leading PPM tools – Planview should enhance or develop the interfaces to ingrate with other market leading Agile tools (like TFS, JIRA, RALLY, etc..) and collaboration tools to support the seamless Organizational investment data flow from and to these tools, it could prove as a great eco-system aligned with today’s emerging frameworks, methodologies………

I would like to see them publish their guides, FAQs, tips, and Knowledge Management Database (KMDB) for free in their community, as other market leading PPM tools do. Planview has not published, shared / made available it’s tool related guides, QRGs, release notes in public domain. Only the authorized customers can access their repository – I hope they should think about this and create the open / free / openly accessible community blog, sites where users can found the threads / discussions and can download the user / feature / admin / functional / module guides etc…

Scope of customization – it’s a great tool built with set of best practices from project management perspective, but they should provision the scope of customizations. I have grown up working with Planview versions 5 / 7.4.1 (10 years back, almost) and have never seen them provided the ability to create any custom object / module, if required. What Planview suggests is to use their existing modules as they suffice the PM and Strategic requirements. But like the other tools, they should provision for the scope of customizations so that users can create a custom module / object / entity – which will work individually (as the work, strategy entities do) having the object specific supporting attributes / lifecycles / Scripted dialogs etc… it would then certainly revolutionize the whole PPM space…

I have used this solution for over ten years.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

10/10

Technical support is great. They have got really good experts on their team.

I have used other PPM tools before, but I found Planview Enterprise to really be the best-in-class for project and portfolio management practices.

The licensing part is a bit costly in comparison with the other available PPM tools. However, it is worth the price for those organizations who seek to bring their strategy to life in a world of limited resources.

We evaluated other solutions, namely Microsoft Office EPM and HPE PPM solutions.

Go ahead and get this solution implemented. Do not limit your organization’s exposure to the timesheet/resource management. Instead, use Planview's solution starting from the intake part through the overall strategy management.

The most valuable features are the resource planning and tracking.

Project planning: The work plan is a bit kludgy and difficult to use. It does not work like MS Project which irritates a lot of PMs. The learning curve is pretty steep - this is a robust application with a LOT of moving parts - and most users do not have the time, or inclination, to dig in and learn it while in the middle of managing a project.

I have used it for 15 months.

We only encountered deployment issues in the user up-take area.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is hit and miss. GREAT front-end c/s; not so great once you're up and running. They have a difficult time determining, as do new customers, if an issue is a system error or knowledge gap. Most of their support team will not respond to requests for real-time conversations and the gap in email responses drags what turn out to be simple solutions into days-long aggravations.

They have a huge number of articles, videos, and documentation which they constantly refer users to. The amount of time that is taken researching an issue which would take a minimal amount of time for a support team member to answer is staggering.

I rate technical support the same as customer service.

We previously used Excel spreadsheets and MS Project plans, and everyone used them differently. There was no systematic shared approach to project management or resources. Most of these docs were not shared, which made any sort of accurate, or even best-guess, projections nearly impossible and extremely time-consuming.

Initial setup seemed straightforward but was relatively complex. As I've mentioned elsewhere - the system has a lot of moving parts. Additionally, their terminology is different from other mainstream tools.

A combined in-house/vendor team implemented it. The vendor team was excellent!