Planview PPM Pro Reviews

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.

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 were looking to centralize our project management practices, specifically within the IT organization for those that we manage on behalf of the college. We had been using various different tools and it was difficult to get an idea of the resource usage across all of the various projects. This tool has allowed us to have a central source of truth with respect to resources on projects, the status of those projects, and kind of implement our methodology in a centralized fashion.

For resource managers, it's given them the ability to see when they have staff that is over-committed. Rather than react, we can work to mitigate that before the overcommitment actually happens, as in cases where somebody has a deliverable that's in conflict with something else.

With respect to the integrated product portfolio transforming our strategy, I think that this solution has helped us to achieve what our institutional needs are. I think that we're still working on that transformation journey. It's created a platform for centralized management of these initiatives versus disparate data and a lot of manual work to pull it together. I can have a dashboard that provides that information at a moment's notice.

With respect to the integrated product portfolio transforming our delivery, I wouldn't say that this has happened yet because we are not a centralized PMO, institutionally. We have a small portion of project management within the IT organization, but I would suspect that as people who we work with can spread the word about what we're doing, that may take foot elsewhere in the organization.

I think that we have better collaboration, but not necessarily with PPM Pro. We are integrated with another tool that gives teams the ability to work collaboratively and see the progress of work.

We have not yet implemented the Lean/Agile Delivery tools.

We are not yet at the level where this solution helps us connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution.

The biggest impact that using Planview has had is that it has created a centralized platform that allows us to better position resource allocation and alignment, rather than relying on people to tell us that they can meet a deadline.

We use PPM Pro with Projectplace, which has been a game-changer for us. Now that real-time integration is in place, it allows our team members to communicate their progress much more in real-time. It's been a change management process where project managers have been soliciting people for where things are at. As people are getting used to working with the tool and finding its ease of use, they're in there everyday updating where their tasks are. So, we're seeing that people are using the tool as it really was intended.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that my team can use one tool that's reliable, scalable, and provides the leadership team visibility to what's going on.

This is a flexible solution. We've had some bumps in the road with some of the product integrations, but overall I think the tool allows us to maximize our business process. We were able to leverage custom fields so that we could capture the data that was specific to our institution. Being in higher education, we have some unique situations that corporate Fortune 500 companies don't have. I think that the level of flexibility was integral in our choice with this tool. The reporting and the dashboarding capabilities have been really, really helpful.

Integrating with other tools should be easier and more straightforward.

This solution is reliable.

Because we had some integration issues, we started out with just one or two projects that a project manager was managing. This was done to make sure that the whole end-to-end process was going to work between PPM Pro and Projectplace. Once that integration started to get stabilized and the Planview organization was hearing what our issues were and working to resolve them, we began to leverage the tool as a whole with all of our project managers. So, all of our projects, the entire IT portfolio is now in Planview's PPM Pro and Projectplace.

This is a scalable solution.

Our footprint on the PPM Pro side is fairly small. That's just where the project managers and the resource managers go, whereas Projectplace is where the teams themselves go.

With respect to the technical support, they are one of the best vendors I've ever worked with. When we had issues with integration early on in our relationship with them, they stepped forward. They own the problems and really worked with us to figure out how we could work together to fix them.

Prior to using this solution, we came from Project Web Access, which is a Microsoft SharePoint-based project management tool. That tool allowed us to centralize to a degree but it's still, from a team member's perspective, a decentralized experience where a team member had multiple different project workspaces or SharePoint sites to go to for each project they were assigned to. Their issues, risks, and tasks were all in different locations.

Planview allows us to have a one-stop-shop specifically for our team members. That experience alone has been hugely impactful. It allows people to see a dashboard of work that they're responsible for, and feel like they're not jumping from one website to another and trying to figure out what's the biggest priority is that they have to work on.

We knew with Project Web Access that we were coming to a lifecycle end. That product suite was starting to be decommissioned from Microsoft and we were forced to look for different opportunities. That, coupled with the IT organization wanting to take the next step in their maturity process and we wanted to marry our PM process with a tool that could support it. So, we did a full product review process and Planview really met all of our needs.

We have only been live on this tool for about eight months, and with the new integration that we've had, it's been live for about a month. I suspect that true ROI will be seen in a year or two.

Because we have PPM Pro with Projectplace, we transitioned to the Flex model. It was necessary because our adoption rates, specifically on the Projectplace side, is growing. People want to use the tool versus communication through other forms, such as email.

We did evaluate other options before choosing this solution. We looked at Microsoft Online, Clarizen, and some of the smaller tools like Wrike and Smartsheet. There are a few other tools, as well. Overall, we felt like we did a pretty good review of all of the major players in the area.

In the end, Planview stood out.

We have heard about some of the upcoming features and we are looking forward to them. For example, we are interested in more detailed card management within the Projectplace arena.

We're still in the infancy stages of using this tool, so we're still learning a little bit about the features and functions. I am interested in learning more about LeanKit and hope to do so in the future.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is not to be afraid to change your business processes. We thought we had optimized our project management practices but when we implemented PPM Pro, we realized that we needed to make some adjustments and for a bit of time it was a struggle. However, leveraging best practices from an industry perspective is really starting to pay off. It was necessary for us to take a step back and think about what the best practices are and how can we use a tool to enforce them. I think that it will pay off enough in the long haul.

From a portfolio manager's perspective, right now, I'm getting what I need.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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. 

We use the solution to help us run a project management office (PMO). 

Planview integrated well into our Agile framework and methodology by adding an Agile process and features. 

The status reporting is the most valuable feature as it's easy to use; it's simple for project managers to enter their information, and the reporting features are very flexible.

Planview PPM enables us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management life cycle. We were able to garner some best practices by using Planview templates, but they are also flexible enough to modify without having to customize the solution. The distinction between ''customize'' and ''configure'' is important here. 

When it comes to viewing projects and timelines, the solution is excellent. The views are easy to access and highly configurable. 

The solution provides managers with the insight they need to empower decision-making and help them manage risk, as it allows them to see when projects are over budget and behind schedule. 

Planview helped to reduce project delays because we can see when they occur and take proactive steps to remedy the situation.  

Additional Agile capabilities, including integration with the Agile development app, would be welcome features.

I've used the solution for around seven years. 

In terms of stability, the solution is powerful, flexible, and highly configurable.

Planview increased the scalability of its product over the years, so it's very scalable now. It used to be an issue, but they've addressed it. Our whole IT department uses the solution.

The technical support is excellent and responsive. Planview has a very active user community that they promote.

Positive

I've used every leading PPM solution, and I was contracted by a client of Planview.

The initial deployment was straightforward, and there was a lot of functionality out of the box. It took three to four months. 

I was the consultant for the deployment. I was the product owner, and I also managed the PMO. 

We have seen an ROI; there's no doubt about that.

My advice is to pay attention to integration opportunities to reduce your licensing cost with Planview. There are additional costs for consulting services and advanced customer support. 

I rate the product nine out of ten. 

Creating a new project using the solution takes five minutes. 

Building a team within a project is flexible using the resource management features as long as the hierarchy is built ahead of time. It's relatively easy.  

The product's task management features are pretty basic and work fine; there's nothing uniquely special about them. They affected our project management process in that we can simultaneously have a single source of truth for all our projects.

Planview's time-tracking abilities are flexible, providing it can easily integrate with the financial system of record or a separate time-tracking solution. The key here is the integration with other systems.

Integration between Microsoft tools is not one of their strengths, though the solution integrates well with MS Teams and not so well with MS Project. I prefer to use Planview versus the MS PPM solution for many reasons, not least because the MS PPM solution requires a lot of customization and doesn't have many out-of-the-box features.

The biggest lesson I learned using the solution is that it would be a good idea to reach out to Planview's R&D department to coordinate planning with their future releases.

We use PPM Pro mainly for resource tracking and project/program management at present. Resources are tracked from the time of joining in Organization/Division until they exit. Projects are getting tracked from the conceptual phase until completion. Projects are tracked and managed through the gate mechanism. In addition to the project information, we also capture resource staffing, health, risks, status, and project stages; all of this gets updated periodically. We also use it for certain aspects of financial details from a project management aspect.

Eventually, it is supposed to become a one-stop-shop or a source of data for project information. That is what we are aiming to achieve.

Project Management requirements evolve based on how the project data is getting utilized. PPM Pro is getting updated continuously for such requirements. Through such changes, PPM Pro has evolved in my organization over a period of time.

Our stakeholders evaluate project information from PPM Pro periodically. Stakeholder's need for capturing additional data or information processing is also continuously evolving. When it is observed that additional project information would be useful for decision making, it will get added to PPM Pro. Or sometimes, the processed data will be useful to get a summarized view, we achieve this through calculated fields.

It is slowly evolving that way. The way the system is able to capture all this information is really impressive.

The project entity in PPM Pro gives a lot of options for us to capture information, manage, and control it in a very detail-oriented way.

The timesheet management features give us visibility to the overall capacity planning and how much actual effort is going into the programs monthly. The risk and project status information gives a helping hand for stakeholders to understand how the programs are progressing. We have only explored a portion of it so far. The other features that we are exploring right now are the what-if features that seem to be helpful for future planning and project program management. We are aiming to get that rolled out as quickly as possible.

PPM Pro enables us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle. This includes many factors like fields used in a particular type of project, information captured in selected fields, tasks, attachments, dashboard links, calendars, risks, roles, team members and staffing information, etc.

When a project is running, there are several aspects of this that come into the picture. Gate structure, task structure, resources, roles, and settings etc. Also, the information we capture varies from project to project. When a project is completed, if we see that something is a potential candidate to be converted as a template, we extract the necessary information/setting from the existing project and create that as a template asset, so that in future, projects can be created based on that template. Multiple templates can be taken from one project. It takes hardly a minute and a half, maximum, to create a project in PPM Pro with the system defined mandatory fields. When it comes to a project, each customer will have a set of requirements (mandatory fields) in terms of what they need to capture for it.

Building a team is tricky. There are two ways I look at the team in a project. One is based on the staffing aspect; another one is just as a team. For building a team, if it is just a team grouping into a program, it is very simple and straight forward. You can add the members directly into the team. But if it is a staffing-based team, it is a bit complex because we deal with the role demand as well as resource planning. So, we need to plan it out first before it goes into the system at present.

In terms of PPM Pro’s task management features, we have not created any complex structures yet, but recently we have identified that it is more suitable in terms of complex structure management. And also helps to roll-up the information from tasks to project to Program to BU level. As of now, we only use around 50% of the potential from a task status. The structure we currently have is very straightforward and simple from a task point of view. It is possible to capture a lot of details in the task structure. It is really impressive that task structure can capture that kind of detail.

The time-tracking abilities like timesheets and allocation of hours are good. It is efficient and practical. PPM Pro gives a comprehensive insight into projects and empowers project/program managers to make informed decisions. We create reports and dashboards in PPM Pro that show the overall status and progress of each Business Unit with the details of projects with required KPIs. Please note that these KPIs will differ based on requirements from each BU/Customer.

Stakeholders also get a view of the timesheets at a high-level and are also able to drill down to the necessary details. This helps them to see whether the team is spending more or less time compared to the original plan and they can revise the planning, which will become more efficient for further project execution. We have set a platform for stakeholders in the system with dashboards and reports based on the KPIs needed for them to evaluate. This helps them to make decisions and also helps us to improve the system to get more out of it.

If you had asked this question a year ago, I would have pointed to the reports and dashboards. We had to create a lot of reports and dashboards outside the system (like Power BI). Planview is launching the new reporting and dashboards now, which is supposed to give us better results compared to what we have now.

The calculated field section has a lot of room for improvement. There are a lot of formulas and functions available to make calculated fields but are still not comprehensive. We do a lot of processing of the data in PPM Pro through these calculated fields to represent them in reports/dashboards. It is much easier to do such calculations in excel/Power BI. That kind of flexibility or gap is still there in the calculation field aspect because we cannot create that kind of structure in the system at this point. That is a key area for improvement. 

PPM Pro has not helped to reduce project delays directly, but it has helped us improve decision-making. If hundred-plus programs or projects are running simultaneously, there could be multiple reasons why the projects are getting delayed. It could be either because of improper planning/improper fund management/lack of risk prioritization. The system allows stakeholders to make an informative decision, to see that we are putting the people in the right place or if we have too many efforts going in the wrong direction. Or to give priority/attention to the right program. That is how the decisions are taken to pause/accelerate a program. This way, stakeholders are given the right amount of information to make decisions at the right time and thus helping to reduce project delay. Thus, the decision-making process becomes more efficient.

PPM Pro was implemented in my company around four to five years ago. We are still learning and getting more familiarized with the system as we go further along.

It is 90% stable. At times, we have seen that some of the releases break some of the existing functioning features. We had problems with some of the reports and dashboards, and another issue was that people were suddenly unable to log in. 90% of the time it works fine, it is available. Performance-wise it is really good compared to the data it is holding at this point.

It is really scalable. The kind of information that was getting captured and the level of projects have significantly improved as of today. Scalability is not a challenge, but there is a catch. There is a limit in terms of how many fields you can introduce to the system on an entity, the more you add it may affect the system performance. This will be one challenge when multiple BUs shares the same implementation instance. If you have many fields coming into the PPM Pro, it tends to slow down. Any team that is implementing more user-defined fields, it is better to ensure that it is analyzed thoroughly and does not have many junk fields. 

We have a team responsible for maintaining this application in good shape. This team has representatives from each division. We also have an IT department to gives us advice in terms of IT aspects. Every division's requirements are different; so, we come together as a team to share inputs and take a collective decision for a system-level change.

PPM Pro has a 60% adoption rate as present in my division. We do have plans to increase usage. There are multiple types of projects we are running in our company. The R&D team uses PPM Pro for project management. It is slowly growing to adapt all the views into the system for R&D projects. And slowly other groups are also coming into the system, like the operations team. PPM Pro's horizon is slowly expanding here.

The decision to move to PPM Pro was done a long time back (before my time in the company). I am sure that stakeholders would have evaluated many options before they took a call to use PPM Pro.

I have used Microsoft Project for project management in the past. Though MS Project helps to capture tasks, it does not have an extensive capability to hold timesheets and to capture project/product information. PPM Pro is way beyond on that aspect from what we have in Microsoft Project.

During the horizon event, Planview introduced the collaborative environment and Coffee Break area for the brainstorming aspect. This is something we use in different platforms currently (like MS Teams). I believe that such features will enhance the adaptability and improve the acceptance of PPM Pro for more stakeholders/users.

We are seeing the ROI of PPM Pro as it is helping us to manage the projects/programs effectively. This is the reason we are continuing with this application. It is not a direct monetary return, but it enables the business decision-makers to make a call based on reliable information on a day-to-day aspect. That gives a lot more value and it has a large impact. So, if a decision-maker has been given the appropriate information on where each program stands and what the upcoming challenges are, etc. With this information, stakeholders can decide whether they want to stop the program, continue it, if they want to invest more into it, or cut down from it. It is an indirect enabling system that enables the business decision-makers to make a call and then commit to it.

Pricing is on the higher end. But, when you look at the system's robustness, continuous support, and its dependability, I think it is worth the price we are paying.

When we look at the budget, people, or administrative structure that we have in the system, it is too big for a single person to chew from a system administration point of view. If a system like this one is getting implemented, you need to have a workforce to manage it. Do a detailed analysis before you jump into any functionality implementation aspect because there are several underlying aspects that need to be evaluated thoroughly before a particular feature gets updated or rolled out. Once we start using a feature, it is difficult to go back and change.

I would rate PPM Pro an eight out of ten.

We use it primarily for the resource management function. From a use case point of view, we use it across all our initiatives, such as projects, agile teams, etc. We also use the portfolio management function to provide us with our top-down, bottom-up planning. 

On the resource management side, prior to Daptiv implementation, most of our projects were running late causing a issues with the delivery of our products due to the limited number of resources we had available at any given time.

It provides us the means to optimize our resources by role and match them to the appropriate piece of work at the right time, without the overcapacity for that individual.

The scenario planning option provides us with the means to be able to evaluate our work in a variety of different situations. 

The dashboard and analytics function helps our executives and our directors in understanding what's going on across the company from a portfolio management point of view.

The resource management feature is certainly the most valuable for us. It is the supply and demand. Like most companies, one of the hardest nuts to crack is understanding where your people are and getting them to do the right thing at the right time. So, certainly, out of all the functionality, this has been the saving grace for us because it now provides us with the insight to do future planning and stop taking on more work than we are physically capable of doing as a company.

I've worked at many different companies in the past, and the customer service and the support from Daptiv are unlike anything I've encountered before and far excel any other company I've worked with. I always say to people that Daptiv is like another department in your own company as you do not realize they're a vendor.

The agile functionality can be improved. The tool was definitely built around the waterfall PMBOK PRINCE2 methodology, and although there are great functions within the tool for agile, it is often compared to dedicated tools like LeanKit or Jira. At the moment, the only integration we would have is to Jira itself, not to another Planview product. I believe that's coming in 2022 at some point.

There should be the ability to store historical functions, but this is not just for this tool. It is applicable to many tools. It would be great if we were able to store specific historical data, such as risk management.

We have been a user of Daptiv for about four years, but prior to that, we were also a user of the Changepoint system for two years. Planview bought Changepoint and Daptiv at the same time.

The solution has been pretty stable since implementation in 2018, with no real downtime due to issues out of our control.  That being said the few time we have encounter issues they have been dealt with very quickly and professionally by the company. 

A minor negative would be the time it takes to refresh data, but that could be attributable to our network traffic as much as an issue caused by the solution.

In terms of the project waterfall methodology, the scalability is there. We are seeing improvement around the agile side in the software, but it's not at a level we think we can reach in the timescale we have. However, with the Planview products on the market, we are looking potentially at something different to help us with that element of our work.

We have 250 licenses at the moment, and 80% of them are basic users. They are time-keepers who are just updating projects, etc. Probably 15% of them are in the management category, such as project manager, capability manager, and portfolio manager. So, they're the ones maintaining the workspace and the projects, and then, of course, we have about three or four users who are administrative. So, all in all, we only have three types of users in the system, and they are basic, management, and administrator.

At the moment, it is being extensively used in the IT department, which probably covers about a third of the company. We are currently trialing the software in other departments with the view of expanding out across the whole company at some point in the near future. What we are looking at is an end-to-end deployment. So, with it now joining the Planview family, there are other options we're looking at potentially to help us provide end-to-end functionality; for example, Spigit being the upfront or the idea-generating piece of tool to maybe LeanKit being with us for the agile element.

We find the platform to be very stable. The few times we've had to contact them have usually been after they had done a software update. We had encountered a couple of issues after that. Because we're a government department, and we deal with the gaming industry in British Columbia, we have a lot of firewalls and cybersecurity. So, one of the things we sometimes have problems with is their techs being able to get access to our system, but that's more a fault of our own because we lock down the system so tight. 

We have reached out to the techs a few times, and the work has been done pretty much straight away, depending on what we've asked. Any time we have encountered a problem, the customer service and the techs pretty much responded straight away, and most problems have been fixed within that 24-hour period. Those that couldn't be fixed are being worked on until they are done. So, there is nothing outstanding. The support from their side couldn't get any better. The fact that they have their own dedicated call center, that massive triage, and the queries going in also helps as well. You deal with the same people. So, when you have a problem, that individual stays with you from start to finish. I would definitely rate them a solid nine out of 10.

Positive

Before Daptiv, we used its sister product Changepoint. We switched because of the usability side. Changepoint, although a really good product, was too complex for our needs, and at the time, we were having issues. The Changepoint company had been bought out by the Daptiv company, and we switched over software at that point, which helped us with the adoption on our side.

I have, personally, used several different pieces of software from different companies: PowerSteering, Open Plan Professional, COBRA, Microsoft Solutions, et cetera.

For us, it was straightforward because we had the right people on our side to implement. We also had a customer service manager in the team supporting us. If the customer service manager wasn't able to work with us to understand what our business challenges and goals were and hadn't provided that customer success roadmap view of how we're going to get there, the implementation would've been longer than what we would've liked it to be. We became a test case for the company, and it only took us 90 days to implement the tool from start to finish, and since then, we've had a 94% adoption rate.

The actual prework, before the tool was turned on, probably took about two months. That was working ourselves to understand what we wanted and then converting that to a sort of roadmap and how we were going to turn the system on. When we turned the system on, it took about four weeks for us to get fully up and running at that point, so it took 90 days from start to finish.

We had an implementation strategy. We have our own internal strategy in regards to what we want to deliver and when and how we want to deliver it. So, from the tool point of view, it was about turning on the functions, and we did not want to boil the ocean. So, we decided to sit with our own internal stakeholders to understand the "why," that is, why we wanted this, and that was then converted into, "Okay. Then we're turning on this function first, and then 90 days later, we're going to turn on another function." The biggest problem that we encountered was when we changed our methodology from waterfall to agile, it, of course, changed our strategy and how we were delivering the tool.

We did it ourselves. We had the right people to do the job internally, as well as the support from Daptiv itself. The customer service manager and the team were there 24/7 with us along the way, and without that support, I don't think we'd have deployed anywhere close to 90 days.

The deployment and maintenance are normally with our portfolio team. They are administrators. When we do deploy, we work with the company, and the timescale could be a day to months, depending on what we're actually deploying. From an administration point of view, it's probably half a person a week on the administration itself. It is not a time-consuming piece of software for administration as compared to some other ones we use.

We've seen the drop in the time it takes to deliver a project and the amount of money it takes to deliver as well. We've not done an ROI on that, but we have seen that reduction. So, we are seeing savings.

The pricing for me is more about understanding your own needs in the company because it is one license for one person model. So, you have to really understand how many licenses you need and what may be the influx of your staff. The good thing about Daptiv is that we just need a quick telephone call to our customer success manager if we want to increase our licensing and we can upscale very quickly. We've never downscaled, but I'm guessing if we had to, we'd have to wait till the contract completes or renegotiate a different licensing cost. 

There are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. We have the reporting functionality for which we pay separately for 10 hours per month. To help us design and build our customized reports, we require the system. There are hundreds of out-of-the-box reports and dashboards, but we have some very specific requirements, so we bought that extra functionality.

We're also a premier customer. So, we do have the customer success manager and the premier support from the other staff within the company.

It was just a straight swap because it was a sister product. It was in the same company. Before that, we went out to RFP, and we looked at several different solutions that were certainly in the top 10 of the Gartner, Forrester Magic Quadrant. The Daptiv/Changepoint company won hands down on all the different asks we had.

I would advise understanding your requirements and asking what the "why" is. The very first time we implemented a piece of software in the company before I got involved, they failed because they didn't understand what the end goal was. It was all about trying to get a tool in to provide support to the PMs. The reality is that a company has many different facets, and for me, it is definitely about understanding what your north star is and what you want to deliver. You then work backward to understand how you're going to do that. Once you've done that, the implementation becomes very quick and easy with the tool. I've been at many companies where they've implemented and tried to do the "why" at the same time, but it doesn't work. That's where the support from the customer success managers in Daptiv is helpful. They provide that roadmap at the very beginning to help you get there. We spent two months prior to even turning the tool on in doing all the prework so that when we did turn the tool on, people knew what to expect, they knew what the tool was, and they knew how to use it.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Daptiv is to utilize the company's experience, and when you do your implementation, in the beginning, try and use as much out-of-the-box functionality. The more you customize, the more chance you're going to fail initially. So, for me, the biggest thing is just to use the ability that you've got in the Daptiv and do a phased approach. Try not to turn everything on at once. It doesn't work. You should also get your senior managers involved straight away. You should get your executives on board and then fill that down for the company.

Overall, its rating has to be a 10 out of 10. 

Right now, we use it mainly for project tracking to create our task list and go through the entire project life cycle to be able to provide dashboards and report in real-time to our senior leaders.

We also just started last month being able to submit project requests for the upcoming year. Those can go through the gating system in order to be approved and prioritized prior to starting any assignments on the projects.

The product is providing more visibility by providing real-time dashboards so that you're not seeing incorrect information. It's all live within the system and their ability to drill down and view real-time events on a project is great. The visibility really makes a difference.

It provides managers the insight they need to empower decision-making.

I like that it's so customizable and it's so easy to customize. It's not overly complicated. We can get pretty much whatever we need out of the system. If it's not there, we can add it.

For example, the whole request process was built from scratch. We customized all of the fields that we wanted to capture as part of our initial submission and then the fields that we wanted to add on through the gating process to gather more information before final approval is submitted.

The solution enables users to create reusable project templates that reflect their own project management life cycle. We have only a few templates set up right now, however, that's something that we'll develop further as we go.

It makes our project management process more consistent across the board. We have probably 13 different project managers, from an FTE perspective, and we have a lot of consultants. Therefore, having the template already built-in keeps everybody on the same page.

It does not take long to create a new project using the solution. It's fast due to the fact that they all come through as a request and it's just a matter of adding it to the project and everything is pretty much there. You're just talking about turning a request into a project which takes less than five minutes. Previously, we were on spreadsheets and Word Docs, et cetera. As far as having the template with the tasks already in it, that obviously saves a lot of time for the project managers.

Task management features are so customizable that they're working for us based on exactly what we need. We also can always build as we grow as an organization. I like that tasks can be assigned to specific individuals so they can work on things themselves and update them in the system, as opposed to the project manager having to go in and manually do everything themselves.

With this solution, in terms of time savings, we're averaging a savings of three days per month, if not more.

The solution's time tracking abilities and allows for timesheets allocating hours. Before, we used a spreadsheet where we had to find the project in a list of 100 other projects that were going on at the same time. Being able to pull up a timesheet and only feed those projects that I'm assigned helps me as far as tracking my time. 

The solution is great for viewing projects and timelines. Their reporting feature is so robust and they keep adding to it all the time and the ability to set up your individual portfolios - however you need to - and being able to report on those, is a huge advantage.

In terms of the process for building a team within a project, I'm not a project manager, so I don't really build the teams within the system. I do know that there could be some improvements, on the staffing side, such as adding staff to projects in order for those folks to track time. The way the time tracking works, we miss a lot of that if the tasks aren't set up appropriately which makes it so that the end-user can't track time accordingly. We're still figuring it out. There's a bit of a learning curve.

The downside to the way the solution tracks time is if your project manager doesn't add you to the project, you won't see it on your timesheet, even if you did do work. If that happens, it's a matter of having to reach out and have the project owner add you to the project so that you can track the time. I have a feeling a lot of people aren't tracking time to the appropriate projects due to this. It is a downfall that you can't add your own projects.

The company started the implementation last October. We have not been on it for quite a year yet. We rolled it out to our IT department for time tracking in January of this year. I would say January is probably when we really got started using it for projects and time tracking.

The stability is great. I haven't had any issues so far. The only downtime we've had is due to our own issues as we have our restricted to internal IP addresses. If we forget to add new IP ranges to our setup, then we have issues. Again, that's internal, and not the fault of Planview.

We're a small organization, however, from what I've seen, is that the other clients the product has are a lot larger than us. The things other companies are using it for, it just amazes me how it can accommodate everything from a small organization to something much larger. Having seen its capabilities with other companies, I would assume it's scalable for us in the long run.

Our organization has over a thousand users, however, we have only 130 licensed users. We have our stakeholders, which are our C-suite partner or employees, and that's just basically to approve requests and view dashboards. Then we have our entire IT department and our team users that utilize it mostly for time tracking. We also have our business team members, who also use it for time tracking, however, they can also get in and view the reports and be able to drill down into specific data on the projects. 

We plan to increase usage by adding more users to the system. We've tried to stay focused on the people that work on projects probably more than half the time, however, we want to make sure that we're capturing all project team members so they can record time as well. 

I've never seen customer support like them before. I can put in a case and I usually have a resolution within an hour or, at most, the same day. They're always quick to respond and if they don't, I know where I can go to at least escalate the issue to get a resolution.

Previously, the project managers would use MS Project, which they're now really doing in the PPM Tool. We would also have the Charter and Word Docs and stuff like that we'd be trying to incorporate that into the product as well. We're not having multiple things off-site or outside of the system anymore.

We switched off MS Project for consistency - so that all of the information is in the tool and we can provide the status of the project schedule on the dashboards that are sent out to the project team members weekly. The added bonus to switching is all of the roll-up capabilities, having it all in different spreadsheets, and having to pull all that together without all the manual processes. Just having the ability to run real-time reports and have those delivered automatically is a huge benefit and offers great time savings.

There's not any direct syncing between the two tools. This product does have the ability to export into an XML file that you can upload into a project. You can do that on both solutions if you need to. I don't know how many of our project managers do that. I would imagine most of them just keep it within PPM Pro.

Overall, PPM Pro is easier to use. It's all in one place, so I'm not having to go locate several different documents to pull the information I need. It's all within the tool. I like the task list so much more than I do MS Project.MS Project has way too much other stuff that we probably don't need for our size organization.

The setup was pretty easy. We had our implementation person from Planview working with us. We really didn't have a good foundation for what we wanted prior to our implementation, so it took us a little bit longer. That isn't the tool's fault. Once we did make our decisions, it was pretty easy to implement.

In terms of deployment, we started in October and we were up and running in a few months. That deployment time also included importing all of the existing projects that we had going on into the tool.

We didn't really have an implementation strategy. We just knew that we wanted to stick to projects, requests, and time tracking. There were some tools that we haven't quite started utilizing yet, such as PPA. They're available for us, however, we just decided to hold off on that. There were some things that we said we would wait and implement down the road.

We also purchased LeanKit and Projectplace, however, we have not really started using those yet mostly due to the change management. We wanted to make sure everybody was comfortable with this PPM Pro first before we started implementing something else.

We have one assigned main administrator for the system and I'm the backup. I do a lot of the calculated deals and some of the more complicated stuff. The other person sets up users and runs the reports and dashboards for our C-suite partners and just handles questions that come through. Our team was only maybe four people making decisions in regards to this solution.

Planview assisted us during the initial setup. Our implementation person (Steve) was very responsive. He helped us set up everything that we needed to. I know we probably asked him lots of questions and he likely contributed more hours than he probably was assigned to, just to help us out as new clients. We were very pleased with his assistance.

From a quality perspective, I've heard our chief strategy officer loves the ability for him to go in and look and see what the progress is on certain projects on his own. He's very tech-savvy, so he's not scared of the system. He goes in and all I had to do was show him how to log in and it's intuitive enough that he could figure out where to go from there. Quantitatively speaking, I don't have any data on that yet.

I would advise new companies to make sure that they really understand the differences between the user types or licensed types as we had a little confusion in that area at the beginning. The mix-up was all terminology. We made assumptions that time users could do more than they really could. Once we realized that, we ended up converting a lot of people to different user types or licensed types after the fact. New users just really need to understand what functionality each user type is allowed to do.

We did look at two other options before choosing this solution. One in particular just seemed a little more intuitive from an end-user perspective.

We don't have a business relationship with the vendor. We're just a customer.

This solution has not yet helped us reduce project delays as we're still a young PMO and we just have a lot of projects going on and the same resources working on all the projects. I don't know if the system is going to help that, however, having those reportable timesheets allows us to really see how long it truly is taking us to complete a project so that if the company plans on adding 50 projects next year, they're going to know that we can't possibly do all those based on the numbers that we have right now. It makes projecting what's possible more realistic.

It hasn't helped to increase the number of projects in our organization, although it's likely going to help the company become more focused and we'll get through more projects once we start putting them into a pipeline, as opposed to trying to complete them all at the same time.

New users need to make sure that they have a good roadmap of what their current processes are, whether they are done within a tool or not. If they're still doing them within Word, Excel, or MS Project, that's fine. Just make sure to have a documented process. It will make the implementation go a lot smoother.

It's a good idea to try everything in a sandbox first as well. Some things don't work as you would have expected. A lot of the gate logic, et cetera, is a little tricky when you work in requests. I play a lot. I'm in the sandbox a lot, just trying out different things before I put anything into production.

Overall, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We've been waiting on some stuff that's on the roadmap. I would say once they get some of the things that are on their roadmap out there, it'll bump up real quick to a rating of ten out of ten.