Planview PPM Pro Reviews

We use PPM Pro within our IT department to manage enhancement requests that are small, medium, and large.

Our request process for how our users request enhancements from IT has been the driver for us. We have a lot of people coming in to request enhancements who are using Planview and we customize those fields as we see fit. For example, if you're in a pandemic, you need to track different things on those requests. It's easy to add those fields to build a report on those fields which has been a nice feature for us.

PPM Pro provides managers the insight they need to empower decision-making. The data is always in the tool. It's just making sure people are using it correctly. We track the requests as they come in. We track our demand by each of our teams within IT and then estimate that effort so that we can see if we are getting a lot of requests to certain teams. We check the demand versus capacity as those items come in. Then as we plan out the coming year, we're doing a lot of that demand versus capacity and also looking back at historical data. We check how many hours it took us the last time we did something similar. That's where the tool has been helpful for us.

It has also helped us to reduce project delays. I wasn't here before the tool. When I came on, the tool had already been in place, but I think our utilization of the tool has changed a bit. I think it will be changing again based on the enhancements that are coming out as well. Overall, we've seen some improvement and I think we'll see more.

I really enjoy how easy it is to get to data in the system like when doing searches with custom filters. EasyBuild reports are one of the best features, it gets what people want to look for.

We have several templates that we use in the system depending on the type of projects that we have. That really quickens the pace of getting tasks set up for a project.

It only takes minutes to set up a project in PPM Pro. We use the templates and then just put in the details for it, so it doesn't take too long to set it up.

The process for building teams within a project goes pretty smoothly. I find it pretty easy to use. You can build your team at different levels, either at the overall project level or by building it up through the task level. It has good flexibility.

This flexibility really does help our project management process because every project is unique and we have different kinds of project processes or techniques that we use and the way we structure the project may be different. It's nice to have that flexibility in the tool to be able to handle that.

Overall, its time-tracking abilities are good. One of the things we've looked at is potentially Projectplace to help out our users with their timesheets. It would be nice to be able to track more while we're in the work rather than having to go to a separate timesheet. From a timesheet perspective, it works fine.

PPM Pro is good for viewing projects and timelines. Some of the items that they're working on will make that even better and I know those are hopefully coming out in the near future. The whole timeline view and the ability to select and show what you want to have on a timeline will be a really nice visual component for showing a project.

Reporting and dashboards need improvement. I know they're doing a major revamp of that. We're really looking forward to that because that's something that is really being requested by our customers to give them better visibility, reporting, and dashboards that are easier to understand. 

They're looking at moving the spreadsheet editor into other areas of the system. Those have been key updates. They're not available on all the screens yet and all the locations of the system but that will be a nice add-on when they get that because we can have one screen, but when we go to the next screen, that won't have the same editor.

It hasn't increased the number of projects in our organization because that's more based on the demand of our customers internally, rather than the tool. It really hasn't changed our throughput overall with projects.

I have been using PPM Pro for over four years. 

Overall, we've had very few reportable issues on PPM Pro so we've only had to submit a few tickets. I usually submit the tickets within Planview, so I know personally that we've only had to submit a few over the last couple of years and that speaks to the stability quite a bit.

It's definitely very scalable. We've seen growth in our business. I know we've seen a lot more users using it for requests. As our governance structure has changed over the last couple of years, we've used it quite differently and scaled it to a lot of different users and a lot of different uses. It's done just fine.

We have our request users who are submitting requests for enhancement-type items. There are over 6,000 request users. Then for full users, these would be folks who are doing more than just requests, they might be tracking time, working in this system, providing updates, or doing approvals. For those types of things, we have over 250 users.

For maintenance, we have several of our project managers, including myself, that are administrators of the system.

PPM Pro is being used quite broadly in our IT department and for requests coming into our IT department. We use it for all of our enhancements as well as projects. It has a 100% adoption rate. We have to use it. That is our IT tool for tracking time and handling new requests. We use it all the time with IT.

What we've used of their technical support has been good. We hit some technical issues with an API that we utilize and we got the right people on the phone with us to work through it and get it resolved. Overall, we've had a good experience with their technical support.

I've used MS Project at previous employers. Compared to Microsoft Project, PPM Pro is quite a bit different. We used Project previously just as a standalone to build a project, put in our tasks, do our work breakdown structure, and that was it. We didn't use it for a server or enterprise base where we did any capacity, demand planning, or intake like we did in PPM Pro. We do enjoy that functionality, that there's a lot more going on in PPM Pro and a lot more use cases that we can use it for. It's served us well, and we're looking forward to seeing what else we can do with it.

I was not involved in our initial setup. We are moving to the new request process, which is a pretty major revamp for us and I am involved in that. That work is currently underway.

For the revamp, we have a lot of historical data and custom fields in the system, so there's a little bit more thought process we have to do around what we set up in the new request process and then how we migrate or what data we migrate over to that new process. And then also communicating that out to our request users, which we have a couple of thousand of, and making sure that they're aware of the updates that we're doing to it. I'd say it's a little bit complex just moving into the revamp, but I think overall the help we've gotten from Planview has been really helpful in mitigating some of that.

I'm really not familiar with the pricing structure that we have. We do like the fact that we have all those requests users for the licensing. Our default for our users across the enterprise is to set them up as request users so that anybody can submit a request to IT. The fact that those requests users are a free license is definitely a key item for us.

My advice would be to have multiple administrators involved in your teams. Learn about the capabilities of the tools so you use it to its fullest. Involve other areas in developing those processes and procedures around it so you can get buy-in and utilization.

Solutions always have a lot of capability. It's really how you use the solution and then how you show the value to the main users of the solution as well, so that they have that buy-in and that they're not working around the system, but rather working in the system. That gives you the best data for tracking, and it gives you the best utilization and reporting capability across the board if you have that buy-in and utilization.

I would rate PPM Pro an eight out of ten. 

Our primary use case of this solution is to capture all corporate business demand across the organization then to visualize that demand in a way that can be used by the senior management team to make decisions. We use it to collect a portfolio view of all projects that were in flight and various stages of the delivery lifecycle. We ride risk and issue management capabilities, capturing lessons learned, dependencies, plans, schedules, and resourcing. 

We also use it for:

• The ability to manage and review resource information around availability, demand, and schedules. 
• The ability to report on that information.
• The ability to visualize our portfolios, that is key.
• Finally, we're using that information in order to generate meaningful reports.

PPM Pro has improved my organization through standardization. The big thing for us is that we came from a very immature state of play. Everyone had their own risk and issue management capabilities and their own different impacts for risks. We've been able to standardize that within the program delivery arena. That for us has been a major thing. We're all speaking the same language about the same things and using the same metrics in order to capture statuses.

We are exploring its ability to provide decision-makers with the insight they need to empower decision-making. The big thing for us was just to get our projects moving and delivering. We've historically been through a number of challenges and organizational changes within our area and effectively, Planview has enabled us to get a really good picture of where we currently are. The biggest challenge we had initially was that our executive leadership team didn't know how much change was going on. With Planview, we've been able to capture that and provide the metrics in order to see what they want to do and what needs to be reprioritized. 

PPM Pro has also helped to reduce project delays by 50% in terms of highlighting common issues and risks. We hold monthly project reviews where everything is captured and we go through the project managers to highlight those high-level and high scoring risks and we are then able to take corrective action. The key thing is that we're using it as a tool to help support project managers. We're not using it to beat them up because they're not delivering stuff. It's really a tool to be able to surface those issues that wouldn't necessarily get surfaced.

The most valuable feature is that it's highly configurable. It's a highly configurable solution. We can design and build stuff quite readily ourselves. It's also very flexible. We are also using it to help identify pinch points within the organization. As in, we can identify where people need support and additional help.

PPM Pro has reduced the time it takes to generate reports. That for us is a big thing. Instead of us spending our time doing collation and presentation activities, we're actually doing more value-add activities in terms of analyzing the data and trying to interpret what the data is telling us.

PPM Pro absolutely enables us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle. It enables us to quickly establish and build projects as and when they've moved through the governance lifecycle or parts of the early stages of the governance lifecycle. We're also able to configure the ability to print a standard type of project or program in some of the cases we've started exploring. In terms of the benefits, it's given a visualization to our senior management team of where things are at any particular time and they have the ability to drill down into the detail where necessary or keep it as high level as they need.

It's literally just the click of a button to create a project in PPM Pro. It's a very quick process. The key thing that we have is the governance processes and the approach for capturing enough information. In terms of that, the lifecycle is about two or three weeks, but actually being able to get a project into the system is exceptionally quick. You can build workflows to help support that. We don't use it at the moment, but it has the ability to build workflows.

I would say it's quite straightforward to build a team within a project. It's very easy. It comes back to data and I think it's the same with any PPM tool, the tool is only as good as the data that you've got in there. We did a lot of work initially to make sure that our resources were in place. It's just a case of project managers being able to select who they want on their teams and vice versa. If they're not sure, we also have the ability to set up resources as well and then our resource managers to select people that they want to start based on their availability.

In terms of viewing schedules, I would rate PPM Pro's ability an eight or nine out of ten. It's a very similar interface to Microsoft Project, which I'm sure a lot of project managers are very used to in terms of the details pages. It's a very nice layout in terms of navigation. You can select your ability to view different timeframes and you can view a purely word-based view of your plan. There is the Gantt chart availability as well. It's very easy and quick to switch between the two. You can also drill down into specific details at a task level summary task and you can bulk upload or update tasks. 

At the moment, we don't actually use timesheets or its ability to allocate hours. Integrating and using timesheets is on our roadmap but we don't use it at the moment. From the exposure that I've had in terms of playing around with it, it seems pretty fully functioning and it gives us the information that we want to be able to capture. And then it's how we then suck that information out to then push into our external systems or corporate systems.

We always had a very high number of projects. We have around 30 going at the moment and they're quite significantly sized projects. In terms of the number of projects, I think the biggest challenge we have is getting resources on board in order to manage them. We can certainly capture them and we can identify where the pinch points are. It's just our recruitment process is quite a slow process. In terms of being able to run projects, we can actually identify what we can run based on the constraints that we have at the moment, whether that be financial or resource-based, and we use the information from PPM Pro in order to provide that.

Reporting and dashboards need improvement. They've got the new beta coming out now and I've been playing around with that in our sandbox environment. I'm very impressed with the flexibility and functionality. In fairness, I was speaking to my senior management team and saying that we should go ahead and enable it in our production environment because I think it is actually now in the position where we can start getting it in place. 

Another area for improvement, realistically, is regarding the financials, but it's been addressed as part of Planview's focus. That's one of the things that drew us towards Planview, that they're actively investing in developing the tool and making it best of breed. We can certainly see a lot of new enhancements coming forward that we're going to be taking on board.

We have been using PPM Pro for over two years now. 

I've never seen any issues with stability. 

We've had no issues with scalability. Being a software as a service, the amount of power that we need is determined by the number of licenses that we have.

There are 30 to 40 project managers. We have business partner managers who are the key interface in the business. We also have a number of resource leads. There are around 20 resource leads who are responsible for ensuring that resource demand can be met with the availability of their team members on that side.

Maintenance purely happens in the background. If we're developing new configuration changes, we'll do that ourselves in the sandbox and release it at an appropriate time. It's very minimal impact.

Technical support is excellent. We've had some issues that have been dealt with very efficiently. There's a very quick response time and the consultants themselves are very capable in terms of responding to our questions, not just about tool configuration, but also best practices in the wider industry, specifically for where we work.

We use Microsoft Project and Teams as well as part of this process. It's been a while since I've used the Microsoft Project tool suite. Microsoft Project has a lot of different types of applications to store different types of data within the project. For example, for risks and issues, we'd have to create a team site in SharePoint, for example, whereas in Planview, it's an all in one application. I'm very quick to be able to jump around to individual areas within the system. We're at the very early adoption stage of Teams at the moment. 

There are pros and cons to each. In terms of speed, because it's on-premise, the local application is very quick. The downside with Projects is that it is very difficult to aggregate that data together. With Planview, bearing in mind that software is a service, it has so many opportunities to configure the system and also lock it down as much as you want, as long as you can get that standard configuration. With Microsoft Projects, it's very difficult to get that standard. You'll have people managing projects in the way that they're used to, which then becomes a big issue for us to translate that into the standardized reporting. Whereas with Planview, we can lock that down. We know exactly what our project managers need to enter when they're not entering information that we need and it's just a click of a button to get a report out when we need it.

Before PPM Pro we were using Microsoft Project desktop with Excel PowerPoint. It was a case of 90% of our time was spent collating information and presenting it in PowerPoint rather than actually doing the value-add work, which was to do the analysis on what data is actually telling me.

I was involved all the way from product selection through to delivery and handover. The initial setup was fairly straightforward. As an organization, we had some challenges internally in that we were a brand new department delivering programs. We hadn't really got our processes set outright, but certainly, with the support and help from the Planview consultants who were working with us very closely and regularly meeting on a weekly basis, it was certainly a very straightforward piece. Once you get your head around how things are set up and the different terminology, it is actually quite a straightforward application to enhance yourself in terms of how you want to build it forward.

From the start of actually signing the contract, the deployment took around about three months, to the point where we had the projects in Planview and us actually using it practically.

Our strategy was originally going to be a big bang but we thought that there's only so much change that our project managers can manage. We took a few key elements and the first pieces were to get the demand requests in place so that we could see what demand we've got coming through. Then the next part was getting the projects and programs into Planview, and being able to start reporting on those projects. From there, we then started introducing the resource management side of things. More recently we've been looking at portfolio management and prioritization. Looking into the future, we're talking more about enhancing that portfolio management and demand capability and bringing the two together. That's more of an organizational thing rather than Planview. We've got the basics in there to get us where we need to be.

I wouldn't be able to quantify ROI in terms of the work that we're now focused on. We're doing many more kinds of value-add activities. Rather than having to go around and aggregate information together and then try and report it, we can make those recommendations now. We are also able to highlight those risks and issues before they actually become a true challenge to the company and to the delivery of that project.

The key thing is to really get a good understanding of your stakeholders that are going to actually use it. It's differentiating between those that are going to be physically updating Planview information, versus those that are reading it and then just building your models around how you're going to use it because then you can effectively build your licensing models to support that. In some cases, you can save some money there.

We evaluated Planisware. In terms of maturity, PPM Pro was a much better fit for our organization. It was also highly configurable, so we could do a lot of it ourselves. It gave us the opportunity and a roadmap that as we mature, we can mature with Planview and still maintain our data. Whereas, some of the other tools were coming in right at the top end. Cost-wise, it was certainly one of the better value products that we had assessed the amount of functionality and flexibility that you got with the tool.

My key advice is to standardize your terminology for projects and programs in portfolios; create a roadmap. Don't be afraid to say no, because  you'll get different project managers with different experiences. Everyone will want to say, "Oh yeah, this is what I've done in the past and what I've done in the past," but don't be afraid to say no.

One of the challenges with any PPM tool is that if it's not Microsoft, then people aren't normally interested and I think the other side is that actually by centralizing this stuff, you're exposing weaknesses of project managers that they may not feel comfortable with. Try and position it as this is here to help you and to help us identify where we need to give further support. It's not there to question your ability or capability. It's here to give us that information that we can then help you to deliver.

We spent far too much time aggregating data from many different data sources. Having it in a single central place, we get one version of that truth. Everyone's aligned, everyone's standard and it makes it a lot easier for us in our management team to be able to visualize and view the data that we're capturing.

I would rate PPM Pro a nine out of ten. I think there's still room for improvement but there's a very active roadmap.

We have a multitude of divisions, big, small, and cross-functional. We have five different groups who use PPM Pro and they have their own instances. Within one, there are five or four different divisions and they all have different uses for utilizing PPM Pro. Some of them use it to manage staff, some use it for direct staffing and we have a process in place to segregate those processes or the approach they're using. It's huge. As technical support, I support all of those five instances with my team. There are two other members of our IT team. 

PPM Pro is cross-functional. When I started, one of the instances was a mess because people had a different approach or different mechanism in place. For example, they were just going ahead and creating available fields for projects without anyone's permission. We did an event where we established that only the admin should be able to create the available fields. For example, if you're creating a field under one division, the nomenclature should be BID completion methods. We established that process. After that was established, it took a while when we changed the whole approach, and now we are able to utilize it more effectively. Only the admins have the access to create the available fields. We also put the description and when it was created by the field so that we have clarity on those fields as to when they were created.

After we utilized that approach, we are in a much, much better position. Earlier, it was around 4,000 available fields that I could check. It was reduced after the cleanup by 20%. We are in a much better position right now than we were before.

PPM Pro absolutely provides managers the insight they need to empower decision-making. Especially with project managers, we focus a lot on the permissions. We don't give permission to everybody to edit anything on a project. Even if you know you're a project manager, only the project manager or the admin has all kinds of necessary access to the projects. Not everybody on the team or on the staffing can edit it. Once we established that approach, it has helped the project managers a lot in executing a successful project.

The most valuable features are project management, reporting, dashboards, and time management. In terms of reporting and dashboards, we have stakeholders who are really interested in how the R&D business users are doing. They are interested in knowing which projects their resources are allocated to and what the resource allocation looks like. 

They're also interested in the financial summary, how the resources are involved in the financial aspect of the tool or in the division. I think every division has different reporting and dashboard users. There are different kinds of users who use them very differently. Reporting and dashboards are one feature that we really use a lot. We have a huge team of Power BI and PPM Pro integrates really well with Power BI.

PPM Pro absolutely enables us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle. We had a good customer session on this, where a team utilizes portfolio management and project management of the tool very intensively. We follow all of the templates but having said that, we have so many divisions and we have so many users and project managers utilizing the tools. They have a different bunch of templates. We're not just following one or two templates. We have a number of templates that the teams are using.

It doesn't even take a minute to create a project using PPM Pro. It's very quick.

The process of building a team within a project depends, it varies from different person to person or different project managers and how they want to utilize it. I think the most important thing is the staffing person. Resource workbench and staffing are the two most utilized features under project management.

There is a feature under the project where you can add team members. We have the permission profiles which give the team members permission to edit or modify the information on the project. For example, if you're adding a resource as a team member of the project, you give that permission to the team member and you can also limit that to the permission providers. If you don't want that team member to be able to edit the key information on the project, you just give them the view-only permission. 

The task management features are really good. A few of the divisions are using the time management part of PPM Pro very intensively. They use timesheets and allocate hours. 

PPM Pro for viewing projects and timelines is absolutely great because we have the task view and we have the spreadsheet editor. You can view projects, both the status of the project, what we're doing, and what the timeline target date is. We usually build out a report and then a dashboard and then view it collectively as a team, as a division, or as a group.

When I joined this team, I was really interested in the dashboard because earlier there were only four or five kinds of dashboards available and now we can create 14 or 15 different kinds of visualization reports and dashboards. That was an area for improvement, if you would have asked me last year. But since then, we have the reports and dashboards coming out or already available in our Sandbox. Because of that, we were using Power BI a lot, but I think now that we have different regulations, different reporting features, and dashboard features in our PPM Pro, we have enough to do a lot of stuff in the instance itself rather than using different tools.

Under projects, there are available themes that you can create based on your convenience that are limited only to the admins and project managers. That was the approach we have utilized from last year to this year, and that has helped us a lot. Also, we are very focused on utilizing the permission matrix and we utilize the standard groups a lot.

I think PPM Pro is going to release a resource self-service admin which is going to duplicate the standard groups. I think that will help us a lot because right now a standard group has their own permission and we don't know what permission is getting out to the users. After the resource self-service admin will be in place, I think we will be in a much better position in terms of the formation profile.

I joined as a technical support lead for PPM Pro in 2019. Within the organization at Thermo Fisher, we have been using PPM Pro since 2015. 

We don't have any stability issues. It's good. 

Scalability is great. 

We have 1,026 full users and time and entry users for one instance. We have five other instances so we have close to about 2,500 users. Every division under the group has their own admin. If we have five divisions in one instance, we have an admin for each division but we also have IT teams, which I am part of. We are a team of three people, me along with two of my colleagues and we take care of all the admin needs for those five groups and for those five divisions. If somebody wants resource or user access for PPM Pro for a particular division, only the division admin or IT admin can do that. We are the IT admins and then we have the division level admin. 

R&D users use it immensely. They use it for timesheet management, reporting, dashboards, and project management.

I use their technical support all the time and they're absolutely great. A few of them aren't.  

I also use the community forum where I just go and ask questions. With community discussions, I just go and ask questions and they are capitalized in terms of financial management or portfolio management.

If I see a bug or an issue or something I am not able to do under my admin capabilities, then I reach out to the customer care support. They're pretty responsive.

We also use Micro Focus PPM for project management in our organization and we are trying to migrate all the users from that to PPM Pro. We see the value to it and we have a huge team working on that migration. 

I think some divisions also use Microsoft Project. 

A project management tool can be this intuitive and this customizable. PPM Pro has great customization capability, which makes it suitable for any product or any business. It has scalability, flexibility, and customization. I can customize it the way I want, especially for the projects or the permission analytics. I think it has an intuitive interface and customization capabilities.

If you have a cross-management team or a bigger team that has great project management capabilities go for PPM Pro. If you're also into reporting, dashboards, and visualization, I think PPM Pro is a great tool. It has great customization capabilities and is very flexible. 

I would rate PPM Pro an eight out of ten. It's highly customizable and flexible. That makes it a little bit difficult also because we have a lot of divisions and a lot of users who are utilizing PPM Pro and they go ahead and customize something based on their liking, but the other divisions don't like it. Then it becomes a little bit of a challenge. You have to call a committee and establish a process that is the process everybody is going to utilize. That makes it a little bit difficult. The customization is good but also a little bit difficult. That's where those two points are lacking. Otherwise, it's great.

I'm with the Wake County government and PPM Pro is our project portfolio and application portfolio management tool that is used enterprise-wide throughout the County.

Wake County government recently received a second place in the Center for Digital Government award. A lot of the information that was provided during the application process was an easy export from our system. We were able to provide lots of very valuable and invaluable data with a couple of clicks.

PPM Pro provides our managers with the insights they need to empower decision-making. I don't think it's utilized enough. We make the information available and give access to those that need it. They've seen the benefit of the system. But I don't think it's utilized to its capabilities.

It has also helped us to reduce project delays by 50%. A little over a year ago, we implemented a new process for us whereby we no longer change dates within the system. We put in more processes in place for baseline tracking and held project managers and teams accountable. We've seen more accurate estimating and projects when they do miss their deadlines, we have substantiated reasoning behind that.

We're staying at an even rate with the number of projects. The projects that we do are based on the board of commissioners, elected officials, and revenues within the County. When revenues are down, the number of projects are down. So, we can't really put the two together like a private industry would.

Just about everything about the solution is valuable. I can't pinpoint one specific thing. The tool has helped us mature as an agency, has taught us to collect better data and the benefits of having good data.

It enables us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle. We utilize many different types of templates from intake forms to review processes, to standard status reporting. There are very different use cases. It's streamlined the project management process. My group is not an official PMO. We're referred to as solutions development. We are the project managers and business analysts for the organization and so, it has helped us to understand the work where it's coming from and how to organize it. It also makes the necessary information available to our higher-ups within the organization.

It only takes a few minutes, depending on availability, to create a new project. We use a standardized template to collect the information. The project request initiator fills out a short form through automation within the system and the approvers are notified. They go through the process of determining whether the project will be added to the portfolio or not. And if it's approved through workflow automation, the requester is notified. It gets added to a series of reports which get updated on a weekly and monthly basis.

It's always been an easy process to build a team within a project. The users are familiar with the system. It's not like we have to do training every time a new project is spun up. It's pretty intuitive. There is not a lot of hand-holding necessary. The tool gives us what we need and we get what we need out of it.

The task management features are very robust within the system and the other platforms like Projectplace, for example, offer more variety for task tracking and task responsibility and so forth. We don't really utilize the system from that perspective for tracking at the PPM Pro level. We use that more as high-level portfolio management.

It's very good for viewing projects and timelines. The reporting is getting better. It was good before but now, with all of the new improvements to reporting and dashboards, it's improved quite a bit.

Integrations need improvement. We have the ability now with the FLEX licensing to take advantage of the different applications. But if you want them integrated there's a really large cost associated with that. The integration should be included in the cost per license. We shouldn't have to pay these really high fees to get the systems to talk together.

We've been with Planview before it was Planview so we were actually originally Innotas customers. We originally implemented in 2015.

It's very stable. We've had less than a handful of issues over the years with the system, as far as uptime. Whenever we've run into a problem, customer support has always been right there for us.

I definitely believe that it's scalable. Just listening to where they're going and their ideation is exciting. 

We have 53 licensed users currently and they range from a project manager to system administrators, to stakeholders and senior-level management.

There is a staff of two for the deployment and maintenance: myself and one other. We are portfolio managers.

PPM Pro is primarily utilized in the IT department but we do have representation in most of the departments, not all of the departments. There is at least one licensed user per department.

Technical support is on top of things. They really know the system and we've stumped them a few times over the years. It's taken a little bit of time for them to research things and get back to us. But for the most part, we feel like we're given adequate support.

I have used other Microsoft solutions. I don't think they're on the same playing level. I see Microsoft Project as a heavy tool when it comes to project management. I think Planner has similar features to Projectplace and it's the same thing with Teams. Teams has the functionality for the cross-collaboration and they integrate seamlessly because they're all Microsoft tools. With Microsoft, you have one license and you're integrated with all of those things. You don't have to pay a fee to integrate one tool to the next. It would be nice if Planview did the same thing.

I don't think we could do what we do with Planview with Microsoft. We've tried. Planview has more functionality within one application than multiple applications in the Microsoft world. You can do everything in one place, which is a benefit for us, speaking from our experience, not having to go from Excel to SharePoint, to Planner, to Project. Having to do all these functions in different applications rather than having it all in one place is the key benefit.

We started out when it was Innotas and I would say that the setup was very complex because we built the system from the ground up. It wasn't what it's like today. We've heard from newer customers that it's a lot easier today than it was before. When the company was switched, it was like relearning it all over again. We implemented a system and then we had to relearn it 14 months later.

The deployment was started in November and we were live in February so it took about four months.

Our deployment strategy was to take baby steps. We bit off small increments. We started with creating the project portfolio and then, once we got that up and running, we focused on the application portfolio. 

We didn't use a consultant for the deployment, we did it ourselves.

We've seen the benefit. We've put a lot of work and a lot of effort into cleaning up the data, maximizing the functionality and we've seen the benefit. Our executive management has seen the benefit. It would be easy to jump ship and go to another product but we have that background. We've made relationships with the company. We know everybody on a first-name basis. They support us and they're willing to work with us. The main reason why we stay is because we get that support and we feel cared for. The only area that I wish that we could come to a better understanding is with the pricing,

PPM Pro is pricey. We've been with the company for a long time and the main thing is that if you're a government agency like we are, funding is an issue. If we want to expand this on a larger scale, they really need to come up with a pricing model that will benefit us, as customers. We can't afford 200 licenses. We have to really think about how we expand when we purchase new licenses because of that price point. It's constantly increasing and we have to think about how we can expand it and roll it out to the enterprise on a yearly basis.

We also looked at Captivate, Adaptive, and Innotas. At the time we were very immature in the capability and maturity that Gartner put out there. That's where we started. Those tools were for very mature project and portfolio management offices. We were just beginning and we were looking for a tool that would grow with us. That's why we chose Innotas at the time because it gave us that flexibility. 

We had a homegrown tool in the past that crashed and burned. The reasoning behind that was due to the fact that the users were given too much upfront. It just became one more thing that they had to do. We took a different approach and said that we were going to do this step by step. We had the flexibility and it worked for us. 

My advice would be to take your time, learn it, and understand it. Know that what you put into it is what you're going to get out. Just like anything, you want to nurture it so that it grows, matures, and really shows the work.

For myself and my team, it has helped to foster our reputation for accuracy, for estimating, for being able to produce or anticipate what our management's needs are, and having that information there. It helped with being able to help project what things may look like with predictive analytics.

I would rate Planview PPM Pro a nine out of ten. 

Our primary use case is for IT project management. We're slowly rolling it out to all of our divisions. We have six divisions and some of our divisions are using it to start with IT projects M&A and then I have one division that's using it for a little more than just IT projects.

We have 60 users right now and eventually, we'll be probably close to 150. Our initial release for our divisions was going to be back in April, but we had COVID hit and a couple of our divisions had to have a reduction in their workforce. There's additional training going on. I've got one group that's going to go live by the end of this month and that's going to be another about 30 people.

There are PMOs that manage their projects, but as far as supporting the application, it's just me. Right now it's full-time maintenance only because I'm the one that has to work with all the divisions to get everything set up as far as what they want to see in their grid and their details. I do all the training and if there's a field that they need that Planview doesn't have I'll create a UDF. It's full time, but it's not like where there are issues all the time. It's still just rolling it out to the division.

The reporting and dashboards are the most valuable features. For most of what we're using it for almost all of it is pretty valuable to us.

One of our M&A projects are acquisitions.

I don't want to say that they do enable us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle because some of our IT PMOs that are using it, I don't know if they're creating templates and stuff yet to go that far. I am planning to utilize it in the future. 

The time it takes to create a new project in PPM Pro depends on how many tasks are within the project. Currently, I have one group that has 191 tasks. That took them a while to put in. The biggest downfall right now for us is loading all the tasks in there. Some of them are not using Projectplace so they can't import from it.

The average time it takes to create a project is ten to forty minutes. Before PPM Pro it would have taken five minutes. A lot of our employees have Microsoft Project. On the PMO side, one of their concerns is that it takes them a little bit longer to input a project and tasks than it would in Microsoft Project. I have a couple of PMOs who are still on the fence, just because of the amount of time it takes them to put in projects compared to Microsoft Project. With Microsoft, you can copy and paste because Microsoft Project is basically Excel. That's about the most that I've heard their biggest complaint is that you can't just copy and paste into it and you copy task and things like that from Project. I've got one PMO who isn't hip on Planview, just because she can create a project in her task and project within five minutes and it takes a little bit longer in PPM Pro to do that.

The process for building a team within a project using PPM Pro is easy. 

I only have one division that is using timesheets right now and we're still testing out in our sandbox site, but so far everything seems to be working great for what we want to do for time tracking. I think there's one little concern, and we're testing that out next weekend, but I think we'll be fine on it.

We've tried a couple of the different settings for the time cards and what projects they can charge time to. It comes back to that they want them to only be able to see the tasks that they're assigned to, but they can see everything now. If a task is in the future, they can still add time to it and they don't want them to be able to add time to it. Just a mistake-proof type thing is the biggest thing.

PPM Pro provides managers the insight that they need to empower decision-making. So far I've gotten good feedback from our PMOs who report and things like that. I would say that's a plus, that's a good thing for us.

I'm not really running any projects and taking feedback, from what I hear so far it has helped us to reduce project delays. It has also helped to increase the number of projects within our organization.

The reporting has room for improvement. I know it's all in the revamping all the time with it, but there are things that I know my PMOs don't like. For instance, they want a pie chart and I think it's a bug in the system. I've been working with somebody on it, but then she thought it was because they were trying to look at negative values, which a pie chart doesn't do, but little things like that quite haven't gotten to what we need as far as reporting, but I think it's on the roadmap.

I have been using PPM Pro for a year and a half. 

The stability is pretty good. I haven't had any issues. 

We have plans to eventually scale it up. Eventually we want to start using the request and the what-ifs, right now we're not using those. We'll probably do so mid-next year.

Technical support is absolutely great. Anytime that I have to actually submit in a ticket, I have a resolution usually within that same day. They're great. Everybody at Planview is great to work with. All the ones that I deal with are great.

We just had to up our license by 25 because with the original quantity that we had it turns out where a lot of people think that their employees need full user licenses and now that they realize the cost of what it is per year per user, they've scaled back and well. That's a big thing with the license type is getting everybody to understand that not everybody needs a full user license. Other than that, it's fine. It would be great if we had something that was less than a full user, but a little bit more than a time user.

Cost-wise, it seems within reason, but I don't know what other applications cost is to see if it's compatible or within the range of what other applications are charging for their licenses and things like that. 

Overall it's been a great tool to use as far as project management.

They like the tool. I have a couple of PMOs who like MS Project but they're given the PPM Pro. I have other PMOs that love PPM Pro. It's just a matter of taking time to get used to when they're used to MS Project.

PPM Pro is a great tool and you can get it to your needs for the most part. There's not an application out there that you're ever going to find that's going to fit your needs 100%. You can only get the application to your status that far and then you have to adapt to its status as well but overall, it's a great tool. I would support it. I would hype it up to have people use it.

I would rate PPM Pro an eight out of ten in terms of the overall application, what it supports, what it can do, and for me, a project that I have only took me a couple of minutes only because I have a couple of tasks, but for me, this was the first project management application I've ever dealt with. It's fine for me. Especially since I only have to support it and not do projects.

We use PPM Pro for our PMO office for projects that are over a hundred hours externally, $20,000 external budget, or big projects like our SD-WAN rollout. I have a project plan that has 876 tasks.

PPM Pro is forcing us to put everything in one place because everything was SharePoint, Excel, Microsoft project. We have a Projectplace and we have LeanKit, so we're trying to set boundaries around what goes into LeanKit versus what goes into Planview. Projectplace was bought by our marketing department. I don't even know what they're doing with it, but at some point, it's going to force us to assess how they're using it. I don't want three tools. I either want an Agile tool or I want the full PPM Pro. It's forcing us to grow up.

We're getting to the point where it provides managers with the insight that they need to empower decision making. We have portfolios set up and we're recording our first executive report soon.

It has helped to reduce project delays because we had some issues at one of our rollouts and had to back out. I was able to because of the way I had my tasks set up and predecessors, I was able to easily move out the dates without having to do a lot of changes. It's been reduced project delays by at least 25%.

I liked the dashboards because I need to report out on tasks completed in the last two weeks, tasks scheduled for the next two weeks, what the risks and health are. What I've been able to do is create reports based on that and then put those reports into a dashboard. The old reporting was clunky, but the beta reports got better. But then I couldn't add the beta reports to the dashboards so now they released the new beta dashboards and it works great. It does everything I need to do.

PPM Pro enables us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle. I manage most of the ServiceNow projects. I have a ServiceNow template. We buy a lot of companies so anytime I bring on a new company, I just put in the ServiceNow template and I know every task I need to do to accurately onboard that company.

It doesn't take terribly long in PPM Pro to create a project but if I don't know the tasks, that's the longest part. Building tasks is the longest part.

I had a little confusion with how the licensing worked for building a team within a project. I was giving everybody a full license, but our administrator gave us a sit-down and said we can't give everybody a full license, we had to give them a timesheet license.

I personally haven't used the time tracking. We're not that mature yet. Our PMO just started in March, so we've had to develop a charter, recruit the members, make sure we know what the CEO expects from us. We've been managing projects at the same time building the organization so we haven't really gotten into the time management or the resource feature yet.

Its ability for viewing projects and timelines is pretty good. I have no complaints about the Gantt view or anything.

It has helped us to increase the number of projects in my organization by 50%. We actually have an intake process in ServiceNow that if you want to request a project, you have to request it in ServiceNow. It notifies the PMO team. We review it and either approve or reject it. If it's approved, then it goes to our steering committee and every two weeks the steering committee assesses which projects we're going to take.

My gripe was with the dashboards and Planview fixed that so I'm happy with it. 

I would like to schedule reports. I would like to be able to schedule a report and every Monday it sends that report to these people. That circumvents having to give them a license. It's just a way of saying "Okay, this is what's going on this week," and it just happens. I don't have to worry about it.

The only complaint that I have about the test management features is that I would like to be able to copy and paste as you can in Excel or Project. That's the hardest thing for me. I know how to do it now, but I just really want to do control C, control V. The other thing I'm looking for, which I haven't found from any of the sponsors is that I want to integrate the tasks with Microsoft Outlook. Because right now, I have to open up my task list, and then I have to add it to my calendar. I would be really interested in a way to integrate your tasks with your calendar.

I haven't noticed any issues with stability. 

From a scalability point of view, it's not so much the platform as the cost of the license that is limiting. 

We have close to 200 users. Some of the users are global service, delivery manager, project managers, finance, we have a service desk, infrastructure team, and networking team. 

There are roughly 20,000 people in the organization and we have roughly 200 people on the tool. That demonstrates the scope of who's using it. It's mostly folks at our corporate office and IT folks at two of our other companies. Carlisle is made up of four divisions and each division has multiple companies under it. It's a company of companies.

I haven't contacted technical support but the admin has. Support has been responsive and knowledgeable.

I have used Microsoft Solutions like MS Project or MS Planner and Teams. With those tools, you have the ability to add it to your calendar. I think that's the one thing that's missing from PPM Pro.

From the portfolio standpoint, Microsoft isn't as good. It's easy from a Planview perspective. You go in and you can either do it from the project level or you could do it from the portfolio level. It goes both ways. It's pretty easy and you can do bulk edits and bulk deletes. It's pretty flexible.

Projectplace was used by our marketing team. I know some folks were using MS Project, some people were using SharePoint, some people were using Planner, and some people were using Excel. They're being phased out now.

I wasn't part of the team when they implemented but I don't think the seup took a long time. They started it back in December and then I joined in March. By the time I joined it was up and running.

My company worked with Planview for the deployment. Two staff were involved from our end. 

We only have one person for management and they elected me to be her backup. I'm an IT project manager. 

We are able to clearly project the number of dollars that the PML is responsible for and we'd never had visibility into that before.

Bulk volume discounts are a little better. Right now we have to buy in lots of 20 at $200 a license. That's a little steep. For example, with ServiceNow, I pay $48 a seat for a license.

Planview, ServiceNow, Microsoft were the three contenders.

The Gartner Quadrant is always a factor and price is a factor. But the fact that our marketing team went out and bought Projectplace on their own, it drove the company in that direction. We weren't going to win any battles getting them onto something else.

Everyone has their advantages and disadvantages. Within this project, the copy and paste feature and being able to link it to our calendar was their forte. ServiceNow, you could easily build dashboards and schedule reports. To me, that was their forte. With Planview, the portfolio was the best out of the three. It was a toss-up for me, but now that I'm on it and they're making changes to the dashboards, that was one biggest thing.

Always try stuff in the sandbox before you try it in production.

My advice would be to definitely have a charter built. You need to know their processes before they start using the tool. Don't think of the tool as a way to build your internal processes. Have your processes in place before you start using the tool. The reason I say that is because we had people creating a business sponsor when it should have been a project manager. Then, we had project managers that really should have been team members. We had a lot of cleanups to deal with after we got everything in there. I helped document how projects should be entered, how fast should we set up the naming scheme for things. We had a lot of back and forth about what the costs were and how to get the cost onto the portfolio. Know what you want to get out of the tool and know your processes before you put anything into it.

I would rate PPM Pro a seven out of ten because of the little glitches that can be worked out like the copy and paste feature and scheduling reports to run and adding it to the calendar.

We use it to track IT project management and portfolios. It has also been used for tracking time performance on projects by our IT team, getting a better understanding of where work was going, managing resources to those projects, and setting the priorities for the projects.

We have created some reusable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle, though we haven't used that functionality a lot. It has definitely improved our relationship with our business partners. They now have insight into what we are working on and are able to help set priorities across divisions or groups within the company. We are not having to fight to say, "HR is doing this, finance is doing that, and they only have a view into what they want and don't realize that there is a greater picture." When they get that greater picture, they're able to say, "Okay, this is less important than what is going on in finance right now so we can prioritize properly and align resources better to get their projects done faster, benefitting the company better overall."

It takes us minutes to create a new project using this solution.

The process for building a team within a project is relatively simple. I don't use that functionality a lot. I think we're just starting to get into it a bit more with some of the work that we are starting to do with some of our project intake processes in some of our project management disciplines that we're starting to implement. While I haven't used it a lot, it's pretty simple to add a person and build that team out within PPM Pro.

PPM Pro provides managers the insight that they need to empower decision-making. From an IT manager standpoint, we have been able to see the impact of a large 2:1 system conversion that we had coming in. We had two systems converging into one while we had this major project going on. This tool allowed us to see the resources, even though we had a project that was supposedly shutting IT down for a six and a half month period from all other business projects We were able to use the tool to see the resource levels and fit in a lot of other smaller project work within that major initiative and continue to move the business forward without stopping work. Previously, we would have said, "We have no capacity. We can't do anything else about this." However, in reality, we can see that there were other things that we could have gotten in and moved through the pipeline to get the work into production.

PPM Pro has enabled us to set up and run a project priority committee (PPC) within the organization. Without the PPM Pro tool, we wouldn't be able to have the project information, updates, and project listings in the pipeline to be able to run the meeting efficiently, give information prior to the meeting, and also run the meeting when we meet on either monthly or on a bi-monthly basis.

The flexibility of the product meets our needs to manage project details of what we are tracking, including the level of detail which we may be tracking. 

It is a good communication tool for our end users. The flexibility of being able to meet the different scenarios for our different customers has been very good. We have come across a few different scenarios in regards to how we work with our customers.

The solution’s task management features definitely have helped to set some of deadlines expectations in a project and have them visible and trackable to know where we are headed, what the deadlines are, and the different portions of a project. These are areas in small projects that we task very lightly, which is good. This is another aspect that is flexible for us. On larger projects, which may span six to nine months, we need to get a lot more detail done on the tasking. However, the product is able to handle both scenarios equally as well.

The solution for viewing projects and timelines is good. There are plenty of reporting and Gantt views within the application.

The solution has helped us to reduce project delays by 25 to 30 percent. Visibility is a big piece of what it is. We are able to see what's going on and react earlier to issues that have come up.

Planview PPM Pro’s time tracking abilities are adequate. It does a fine job as far as within the product managing it. Our users have commented that they would like a little more mobile-friendly aspect of it to be able to do it from their phones. While there is mobile access now, it's not as robust as we'd like to see, though it meets our needs for what little time tracking we do.

I would like a little more training on it.

We have struggled within the product. It has been changing the agile aspect of PPM Pro for us around the task management. This has been a struggle point, but there are a lot of things based on the keynote (in Planview's conference) coming up to address some of this. 

The reporting has some areas for improvement. It is not always as simple as we would like to get the reports we want or the information that we want. I think they are addressing this because there is a new version of the reports in a beta right now. I would assume that some of those features are coming.

Four or five years.

It has been rock-solid. I don't think we have had an issue once in the four or five years that we have been live.

I am responsible for the maintenance of this solution.

It has had no issue scaling to what we do, but we're not a large corporation. Based on how it is designed, I assume it would scale just fine.

We don't necessarily use it for the entire company, just within IT projects. We have 40 licenses right now. We have our business stakeholders in place as well as all of our workers, whether they are developers or system engineers. That level does the tasks within the project.

We typically do about 80 to 100 projects a year. We have done 637 project in four to five years.

The technical support is very good. We haven't had a lot of times that we interacted with them, but every time has been helpful. They have gotten us to the solution by resolving the issue quickly and helping us out.

We were previously using paper, pencil, and Excel spreadsheets.

It was relatively straightforward; I don't think it was a complex set up for us. Their implementation process was well-defined. The person working with us was able to easily gather the information that was needed, then configure the system to meet our needs. Even as time has gone on, and after four years, tweaking the system, whether it's a process change on our side, or maturing in the project management discipline process, it has been simple to do or easy to find out how to do it because the documentation is very thorough.

The turnaround time for our deployment was two to three months.

From a project plan standpoint, that was where we leaned on Innotas at the time to use their implementation strategy to gather the requirements for what we were trying to do and put it in place. We really didn't have that plan before we started. We worked with Innotas (who is now PPM Pro) to put that plan together at the time of implementation.

We have seen in return investment using PPM Pro since we put it in four years ago. We're getting more work done and we have not grown our IT department at all in four years.

My boss didn't balk at the price.

A collaboration of all their tools truly gets the biggest bang for the buck.

We went with PPM Pro after evaluating a few products. We were looking to get visibility into our portfolio and what work we were doing and how it was getting deployed. PPM Pro gave us the tools to be able to get that insight. When you're running things off your desks or out of a spreadsheet, you're not able to get that same visibility as easily.

We evaluated the Jira product, which worked well from an agile standpoint, but it didn't have the portfolio management side of things as PPM Pro, at least not in the way that we were reviewing it.

We have tried using MS Project. We use P6 for our construction projects and I've used it for a few of the larger IT projects a few years ago. We found that this tool did what everything that we needed it to do.

We prefer the Planview PPM Pro vs Microsoft and how it has dealt with the portfolio management. We really couldn't easily get that from the Microsoft stack at the time that we evaluated it. From a project standpoint, for the functionality that we used, it was one-to-one. There wasn't anything that Microsoft could do that we couldn't do within Planview PPM Pro.

We may be looking to increase our usage by a little bit, because we'd like to start pulling more of the company initiatives into products, but that has to do with the company culture and strategic plan. Moving forward, IT really doesn't have a direct impact on that.

Biggest lesson learnt: The importance of visibility on the work that's being done and being asked of the IT department.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

Currently, we're using PPM Pro mostly for project management and resource management and we try to incorporate last year into this year everything that's related to strategy and program portfolio management. We're expanding for 2021, trying to use the ICP component.

PPM Pro provides us an organized view of the work that is ongoing and resources that are working on those particular projects. It gives us that view.

It hasn't directly helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives directly out of the tool. It's allowed us to gather the information and then take it on the side and supplementing it with additional tools. It could be an Excel worksheet or SharePoint site. That's what we're trying to get to for 2021, to try to use ICP for alignment more and prioritization of work, based on budget planning. It helps us facilitate that, but it doesn't provide the end-to-end solution.

The feature that gives us the most value is the project management with the Warm screen, the work and resource management screen. The strategy financial plan roll-ups also give us a lot of value.

The Warm screen, even though we're not going to the deep levels and deep details of all the projects and trying to assign resources at the lowest level, it gives us a quick visual of what resources are being worked on, what projects, and on what activities they're working on. At least at a very high level, because we're not using all the assignment components to the fullest detail, but at least with what Planview gives us as a tool and how we're leveraging it, it gives us that quick view of who's working on what project and who's booking time to what project at any given time or any given a week.

Then, on the strategy side, it allows us to group our projects based on the strategy hurricane that we've configured in-house. It gives us a nice little look at how those public forecast stacks up and then also how the actuals stack up over time.

We are able to get all the features that we need out of it and it gives us the ability to see what we need to see, understanding also how the tool works and how the tool reacts to certain actions.

It does provide a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people. Although we're only using authorizations and reservations.

The flexibility of configuring these assignments is straightforward once you understand the assignment types. They're very straightforward and easy to use. The flexibility does not limit us. It helps us move the process that we had in place based on how we want and how the tool operates. It just gives us a little bit more control.

PPM Pro is good for forecasting remaining effort. It's accurate. 

It helps us to manage work but I think it also helps us manage our resource's time, and know what they're working on and how we could spread them. I think it's a mix of both. It helps us in both roles. From a project management or a work management perspective, it gives us the ability to know who's available to work on what projects. Planview gives us the ability to have different attributes so that we can group or be able to do a quick lookup whether it's a skill, whether it's a role, whether it's a team and allows us to do that roll up so that we can quickly identify who's the AR of a particular project and if that person is available to work on the project.

It also allows program managers to group work together and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level because it gives us that consolidated view at the strategic level but not at the project level. It doesn't affect project management because here the role of a project manager is just to focus on their project, not to focus on the entire spectrum of the projects that are going on along with them. That's more than the responsibility of the program manager. I don't think it affects them in the long run.

PPM Pro has increased our on-time completion rate. It's above 8 over 10, so 80%. 

It does not provide end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. I don't think it does because that's why there's Agile. It would be too cumbersome to try to go to Planview to the lowest deep down level that you could capture JIRA. Where in JIRA, you could capture pretty much a task.

It does not provide an end-to-end solution. In our case, we're going through an Agile transformation. Where we want to have mostly 90% of our portfolio working in an Agile state. Planview does not provide us the end-to-end solution at this point.

Based on my experience, the financial management screens have gone a long way, but I think there's still some room for improvement in terms of how you model them and the different version controls. 

I would like to see more dynamic screens, most of the screens are static. That has room for improvement.

At my company, they've been using it for almost three years. I just joined the company a year ago, but I have about 15 years of Planview experience across different companies.

It's very stable. Performance-wise in regards to being available, if I had to compare it to the way Planview was back in 2005, I would say it's very stable now.

I've gone from a company that used to manage about 8,000 projects simultaneously. It was a global solution here at LPL, which is more of a nationwide solution. It can handle it. Maybe the one problem on the global side is when you have teams that are working on a particular project all around the world, the whole time zone issue becomes a problem. Sometimes because of how the reporting solution that has been put in place it cannot provide real-time reports for people that are on the other side of the world. It gives them a lag where they don't know what to do or what not to do.

There are 1,500 users in my company. The great majority are just time entry contributors. They are around 75% are contributors, time entry folks. Then the rest of the 25% are between project managers, program managers, and financial people that go into the tool and approve capitalization. 

Right now, we have two dedicated and two shared staff members who work in regards to configuration and ongoing maintenance. In regards to any changes that need to happen in the tool or, and proof of concepts, things that we want to test out. And then we have two that are shared, which are more like admin activities who add remove users, add value to existing structures, and all that.

It's heavily used, it's the project management tool. This is where all project data and financial data is related to a project are being stored. It's a brand new project management and technology. I would say it has a 100% adoption rate. 

Technical support is good based on the level of support level that we get. There are different tiers. Planview provides different tiers. We're in the second from the top, we're not on the top, top tier. The response rate we get is good. I can't complain.

My company previously used Innotas. One of the reasons they switched is because Planview purchased Innotas and then they saw Planview as being a more robust solution than Innotas.

In the past, I've used Oracle PPM, which is the Oracle demand management tool. In creating reports, I think OPPM is very easy. It's Oracle-based so they have a very straightforward database and their reporting capabilities are pretty much a plug and play. That's very straightforward in terms of user interface and the user experience but OPPM is not as great as Planview. They were lagging on that side of the fence.

I've gone through multiple versions of Planview, multiple instances of Planview, and multiple instances of how reporting was done in Planview and there's a lot of human interaction with it as well. You need to build a universe and how you build that universe and what reporting tool you're going to use to be your reporting input, endpoint tool or reporting solution plays a lot into it. Planview gives you a variety of different options to go with. Some are great, some are not, and it just depends on the user experience and the knowledge of the person. Even though pretty much all of them are intuitive and all of them do the same. All of them have to give you the same solution. It's also usability. I'm going to compare that between an iOS device versus an Android device. They do the same thing but the user interface is completely different.

There is a return. It's not a very high-level return because of the cost, but it's a lot better than having an Excel spreadsheet.

The biggest lesson is that it's a three-legged stool. One component of that three-legged stool is the tool. One leg is Planview Enterprise. The other thing is the processor that you have in-house. To the organization, you're trying to compare the culture of the organization and the people's willingness to use the tool and to be able to adapt to changes with Planview as that as a third leg of the stool. It's one of the best that's out there on the market, but it goes along with those other two legs of the stool. If you're missing one, even if you have the best stool, it's not going to work.

I would rate PPM Pro an eight out of ten.