Planview Portfolios Reviews

We use it for its intended purpose of project management. It is a typical PPM tool.

I don't think we're trying to do anything with it outside the norm that would need it to flex a whole lot. Our intent is to roll it out pretty much out-of-the-box.

This is a platform shift. If it works as advertised, it will potentially make us a bit more efficient.

The reporting looks pretty good. Although, we're not into it yet, so I can't say for sure how well that will work.

The look and feel of it is pretty clean, so that's good.

Our version is definitely set up a bit more waterfall world. It would be better if some of the agile features were more in the standard product.

It doesn't look buggy based on what I have seen so far.

We're not live yet, so I can't speak to post go-live technical support.

The initial setup has been pretty straightforward. The deployment process has taken us four to five months so far. We are hoping to wrap up by year-end.

The implementation team has been good and responsive. They have been onsite quite a bit.

I don't think we have necessarily purchased everything that I would have liked to have seen.

We looked at other products, but I wasn't involved in the process of choosing Planview.

Compared to other tools, Enterprise One is definitely cleaner and easier to use. At least, that is the way it looks so far. It's a little more intuitive. It looks like the financial data entry piece is a little cleaner.

Because we didn't buy everything that I would have liked to have seen us buy. Just based on what we have, it's probably in the seven to eight range (out of 10). Some of the agile functionality and features would definitely bump that up a bit. However, we didn't buy everything.

The primary use case is resource management. Enterprise One is built for this. We have a specific function that we use it for.

We are going to be leveraging the planning tool within Enterprise One. We had a demo of it. It will be a really good tool for us. It will help us visualize all the projects that we have lined up for the next year, where we can shift things around, and see the impact of different resources being staffed to individual projects.

People are happy using the tool. It has had a good impact on the business. Some people may not like the tracker time sheets, but it is just part of the role.

We are able to see where everyone in the team is in terms of hours, where there is capacity, and where we can actually add them, e.g., other projects that they're not currently staffed to.

It is relatively easy to manage the workflow.

I would like easier ways to manage reporting titles in Planview. A lot of our users like to see things on dashboards, etc. I know there are integrations with Power BI and other applications. But, I would like a little more of an intuitive way for us to manage that.

There are some concerns that I've had on my side from the administrative side and controlling certain things. From talking to some people at this conference, there are certain tricks around these things. It sounds like tomorrow that there will be some sessions on improving that functionality specifically.

The administrative tabs are very confusing, especially in terms of configuring screens and users. It's not very intuitive versus many other applications that I have worked in the past. I have to go to separate sections than I think I have to in order to get to the place that I need to adjust something.

I have used the technical support more on the consulting side of things. There have been no issues there. Everything has been pretty straightforward.

Previously, we were just managing resources in Excel.

While I wasn't part of the integration, it's obviously a lot easier when you have a tool which can manage your resources. It's a lot easier to visualize.

if you need a resource management tool, the tool definitely does that.

We're working on an older version right now, so it is interesting to see how we can upgrade. For example, I am interested in learning more about the cloud.

I would rate it maybe a seven (out of 10). Obviously, there is room for improvement and ways that the tool could be more intuitive for our users. But, we're a very niche use case. What might work better for us, probably wouldn't work better for others.

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 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!

The layout of objects can be easily modified and customized based on the meta model requirements or user needs.

It's used as the source of record for the application portfolio so it allows information about applications to be linked to functions or projects giving a better picture of its impact.

Allowing users to have a link that opens a specific sub-tab or folder is a challenge. You can deep link to objects but it won't show the object in the context of the frame.

3 years

We didn't have any issues with stability.

We didn't have any issues with scalability

7 out of 10

7 out of 10

Troux has an easily extensible meta model and UI which other tools don't have.

We implemented it through a Vendor and they were excellent.

Not sure since I don't deal with the contract.

Not sure since I don't deal with the contract

I didn't personally but other options exist for EA repositories like Mega, Enterprise Elements, Adaptive

EA portfolio management is only as good as the data and people driving it. If the data is bad then a tool can't fix the issues or address the business needs. If there is no buy in from stakeholders a repository won't be of much use.