Planview Portfolios Reviews

Currently, we're building out a model for managing work for timesheets in Enterprise One, and then syncing that work to LeanKit for teams that want to use LeanKit. This would include test agile costing functionality, as my organization shut down that feature before I joined, and now I want to run it as a test case due to the fact that I believe that we need it.

I can't provide any specific metrics at this time, considering the infancy of the project, and my joining the organization. The company's go-live was as of August 8th this year. 

However, in the short time I've been here, and since they went live in August, the people who may have been naysayers, after closing on the first month of financials and then comparing actual data, actual timesheet data, actual work performed to forecasted dollar amounts, have had a light bulb go off. They're seeing now where our money's going, why it's going there, and how it's going there. Now, it's prompting the right type of what-is-the-status questions. I'm seeing that. I just don't have any data to provide other than hearing people profess that in meetings.

We work as an internal support factory and use Planview Portfolios to manage our projects and develop software. And we are trying to migrate to agile functionality. We used the software for booking reservations in hotels.

The benefit of Planview is that you can manage all the features simultaneously, and you have the information you need online. You can change your information and manage the resources very well. Getting to view the project is the best feature in Portfolios.

It is primarily used for project and portfolio management within the technology department. Only our technology department is using it. It is what we use to manage our technology work in terms of resource assignment, timesheet submission and entry, and work schedule.

We're on version 18. They do monthly versions, so we are just a couple of months behind at this point. We're using the June 2021 version.

Enterprise One's view into resource capacity and availability helps us in managing work. We are able to see the capacity of the team and the capacity of the resources. Once you're aware that a team is above and beyond its capacity, you can go back and look at the work that they have scheduled and try to reprioritize any work if need be. If Enterprise One is showing us that the team is over capacity, then it is likely that some of the work that they have scheduled and is in the backlog won't be completed within the indicated timeframe. For example, if we're looking at a forecast through the end of this year and it is showing that the team is above their capacity, then it allows us to go back and at least start talking about how do we reprioritize the work that's scheduled for them, what can be pushed away, or what can be deprioritized.

With Enterprise One, we can see the end-to-end work management. It provides 60% to 70% capability for the end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work. 

We have it lined up against our strategic initiatives, so we're able to see underneath those initiatives what work is being completed and get at least a high-level view of when that work is scheduled to end. With Enterprise One, we have the ability to see that alignment clearly in one view or in one source, and it is a source that is maintained more frequently. In the past, it was typically done in spreadsheets, and because different versions of spreadsheets may have been passed around, you wouldn't know what the true reflection or the true status was. So, it has helped us in terms of being able to align the work and the strategic initiatives clearly within one tool or within one source. If any adjustments are made, those adjustments are visible to anybody who has the necessary permissions and access to see them. So, it has probably helped us in terms of accuracy for work and strategic alignment, but it is hard to put data around that. It has definitely helped us with being able to clearly see the big-picture alignment. Knowing that any changes that are made are instant, and we have one true source of this visibility is very helpful.

Enterprise One has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. It is used to help with those discussions at a senior leadership level. So, it has been helpful because the visibility of how much work is being done and the potential cost of the work helps people make that decision. They do use data out of Enterprise One to come up with how they need to prioritize it. So, it is a contributing factor, but I wouldn't say it is the only thing that is used for prioritization determination. It may be has made us 25% more efficient in terms of knowing how to prioritize. That's simply because we have that visibility and a true source or one source where we can see where work is and where resources are. So, at least, that's a contributing factor, and there has been an impact there.

Enterprise One allows program managers to group work together and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. It makes everything more effective because you're able to see where work is aligned. The way we've configured and structured it, work has to be aligned under a particular initiative. So, the program managers can certainly see all the active work that is going underneath their program. It definitely makes it more effective for them to manage their work and be able to make certain decisions.

With Enterprise One, you can drill down to the individual work items and the resource assignments from the high-level program. It did affect the ability in a good way because program managers can look at it initially from a program manager's lens. They'll see the high-level status of where everything is aligned, and then they can start to drill down. If they think that one project might be overburdening or spending more than what was planned, they can drill down to see where that impact is.

They have the PRM portion and the CTM portion. We predominantly use the PRM portion. We have installed the CTM portion, but we have not put it into production. We concentrate mostly on the PRM portion. Within the PRM, we use the Strategy module, the Planning module, the Work module, and the Resource module.

Our production has the July 2021 release. We typically take two to three months to upgrade. We are in the process of upgrading to the October release at the end of the month.

Its view into resource capacity and availability helps us in managing work. It helps our management team to see where the demand is and whether we have the capacity, which allows us to ramp up and ramp down so that we do not have any constraints. Even if we have the budget, we might not have the resources to fulfill the demand. So, that gap has greatly reduced for us. 

It allows us to create summary reports across multiple projects. They have provided reports, and we also develop our own reports for certain specific needs of our business. Because we are on-prem, we have the ability to create those custom reports within our own environment. There has been no issue with what we want, and we're getting that information. These summary reports help us a lot in sharing the big picture with the management. There is visual and graphical information that we can drill into. We can see how things are happening and dig into the raw data that is feeding the charts.

It has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with our strategic objectives. We use the Strategy module, the Planning module, and the Work module to get that visibility. About five or six years ago, we used to do all of this in spreadsheets. We had to maintain multiple versions of those spreadsheets, and we would miss things. The result used to come to us, and then we had a huge amount of work at hand to replicate all of that into Planview where we were only using the Work module. Planview has replaced all those spreadsheets, and with the additional improvements that Planview is making and where it is right now, we can bring into place both agile and hybrid models of project management. In a short time, we were able to wean our users away from spreadsheets. The system is supporting them. So, there is one source of truth.

It provides various types of resource assignments for assigning work to people. We do demand management for when a project comes in and there is an ask for funding and different types of resources. So, we make use of both the requirements and reservations. 

It increases our on-time completion rate. When a particular project extends or crashes, it gives us visibility on the demand within a particular month, which helps in managing our teams. If there is a requirement for an additional resource, they can bring someone in. They can also move someone out. Projects are not an island. There are multiple projects, and a task of one project may be dependent on another task or other projects. Planview gives us the ability to link tasks from one project to the other project. Their Dependency Management module provides visibility to the program managers and the project managers who are managing those individual projects. They are able to see where the demand is and their bottlenecks, which helps them in better management. We have seen our project teams having more success. We have never seen any kind of surprises and delays. People know in advance if there is going to be a delay because of its features. When some task gets finished sooner, other project teams get to know that they can start their task sooner. This way, our time-to-delivery has actually improved.

We use it for change control for all IT changes in the organization. It is used to do the project work for anything that is changing from the technology perspective. We also use it for forecasting and planning work on the projects. We don't do detailed planning in Planview.

We are using the July 2021 version. It is a cloud version. We use Planview's cloud. They host it for us.

Having a single source of the truth, specifically with the integration with Power BI, enables us to give leadership more relative content for decision-making. From being just a local project manager and reporting status type of a tool, it is now being leveraged heavily in the executive decision-making process. They meet every month with summary reports that we generate to make decisions.

It has helped with the prioritization of projects. That's a part of the reporting process. From an IT perspective, we've gotten better at the delivery process. We're not, by any means, near great yet, but it is a journey that we're starting. Over the last two years, we've had a lot of adoption because of senior leadership's involvement, and therefore, things are moving more aggressively towards that point where it is more relative to what we do on a day-to-day basis.

It allows program managers to group work together and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. It puts the data that the program managers need right in a single source. However, they don't do capacity planning and capacity management in Planview. So, while they can see their burn rates, the resources that they're using, and the roles that are being leveraged, they don't actually use it for capacity planning.

We use it for high-level milestone management. We use it to see if projects are falling behind. We also use it for change control and financial reporting. Our senior leadership makes decisions based on the data that is reported out of Planview. So, it is used not for detailed project planning but rather for executive reporting and consolidating the information down into manageable pieces.

It definitely improves the change process when things are running behind. When we didn't have a tool or when we didn't use Planview necessarily, data was more or less the opinion of the project manager or the program manager who would then say that we're just going to push this date out. Because there was nothing locked in stone, it was just reported that we're going to make a little change here and a little change there. They moved dates, and everybody agreed verbally. There was no question of you didn't complete on time, whereas now, the system asks about your target date. If you change that target date on a huge project by a couple of days or two or three weeks, it is obvious. Previously, where you wouldn't notice it because there was no real firm tracking mechanism, today, it stands out. When the date goes from January 1st to January 29th, the system shows that as a variance or a change. Now, it is obvious when things move, and you know when things aren't completing on time. With the reporting that we're doing to the leadership team, they can see when things aren't going as planned.

I am part of the admin team that uses this. So we kind of help run it behind the scenes, but company-wide, we mainly currently are just using the project management system for our IT projects. We have a few business projects that have started using it, but it's still mainly only with our IT organization. And in planning for next year will be the first time that we have used it for our annual planning purposes. That seems to be working really well.

We really like how it ties into Projectplace for the annual planning. The integration has been really helpful in terms of keeping the business case files together. Once a project is created in Enterprise One, it shows up in both places and that's been really helpful. It's also a really good place to pull data from. In addition, it helps us better manage our people and get better insight into their hours.

We just started using the planning tool and it has been an improvement from each team running projects individually in different Excel spreadsheets.

Enterprise One has been helpful with prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. This is because sometimes we have upper management expecting more work than our team has the resources to carry out. Being able to use the tool to give them insight into our capacities has helped make decisions. It gives us the proof we need to show higher management how something will or will not work in terms of our team's capabilities.

The solution allows program managers to group work together and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. Setting up portfolios has worked really well for us. We are able to drill down into details the underlying consolidated information.

We are using Enterprise One to track our epics and the hours worked on them and related work items. In that effort, we have implemented the task top to bring in both import and export data into our Jira instance.

We are also just now getting into the investment capacity planning features. In the past 18 months, we got Enterprise One set up and now we're getting into investment and capacity planning. Eventually, we want to move more into portfolio management and then road mapping and some of the other features that the software has.

It has certainly helped us in upgrading or modernizing how we report our financials in the sense of our CapEx and OPEX hours. It is a great system of record for that. It also gives us insight into the work that's being done and allows us to follow up with our application development teams on how they're spending their time and whether adjustments to prioritization and such need to happen. It has helped us in both of those areas.

We've been using this product for prioritizing work across our Organization and also demand and capacity planning. 

Work that gets added to Planview captures all the key information like t-shirt sizing, key stakeholder names, financial information, and, most important of all, resource allocations and role requirements - all in one tool.

It becomes really easy for the Project Managers to keep an eye on the progress of their Projects, and on the other hand, for the resource managers, it's really easy for them to identify what's in flight for their resources and what's in the pipeline, also do we have enough capacity to fulfill that demand.

Really happy with how Planview keeps transforming its capabilities to meet customer needs.

We are able to take up the right work and invest in the highest value ideas.

The challenge was that we were doing a lot of work without identifying what work has the highest returns. With Planview, we have that visibility across IT, and all the work that gets entered into Planview is surveyed and prioritized to make sure that we start with the highest valued investments. 

Not only that, we have visibility of all the resources as to where they are spending their time and how they can be utilized to better meet the vision and business strategies of the organization.