Planview PPM Pro Reviews

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.

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. 

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.

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.

We use it for project portfolio management in the organization.

We are using the latest version.

We're still finalizing our implementation, but our hope is that it can prove our prioritization process and strategic decision-making.

We are expecting it to connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. For example, we are looking at planned cost versus actual cost holistically for our portfolio projects. That is the objective. We're at a place where we can finally start seeing that, and it's a good thing.

While we are still in the implementation process, the biggest impact has definitely been the visibility into time tracking, demand, and capacity planning.

• Time tracking
• Portfolio management reporting
• What-if analysis

These features create visibility into project planning, resource capacity, and demand planning.

The solution is reasonably flexible. We can do all sorts of customization. We can tailor it to TradeStation.

When I say the solution is moderately flexible, it's really that it takes time to configure out-of-the-box. It takes some work to implement.

Some of the visualization on the reports should be a bit more modernized. I know with the newer reporting module, this might be better. Just a bit more intuitive reporting would be great.

I would like improved integration between PPM Pro, Projectplace, and LeanKit.

It's been very stable to date.

It's definitely scalable. There are a lot of opportunities to customize. It's just how you implement it. That's why we think we have to use LeanKit, because of the agile integration, which is why we're here attending the conference.

The technical support has been good to date.

We use JIRA, but we have had some challenges with using that. That's why we had to implement Planview PPM Pro.

I have a background in implementing PPM solutions and building PMOs. The company knew that we needed a visualization tool to streamline our processes. 

The initial setup was a little complex. There is so much to customize. It'd be good to have some templates out-of-the-box.

We used a Planview consultant for the initial deployment who has been excellent.

Because we're still in the implementation phase, ROI is not at a 100 percent.

We have their Flex plan.

We did due diligence on a multitude of companies that offer solutions, then we narrowed it down to Planview and moved forward with it.

We evaluated six different firms, including CA Clarity, KeyedIn, and Microsoft Project Server. 

The Planview customer service and sales were excellent. Support was really good. We've been very happy with it to date. 

There were other solutions were a bit more cutting edge, but Plainview was more robust. We could actually build it out as we needed, e.g., the visualization, reporting, and integration.

CA Clarity has the Jaspersoft integration for reporting. Its ability to have plugins and integrate is a bit better, but we love the stability and growth potential of the Planview product.

Make sure you do good due diligence on LeanKit and the integration with JIRA. That is something that we didn't look into as much, even though it's part of our offering, and we need to understand it now better.

Projectplace is good for visualization and collaboration. It's a little tricky with how it syncs between the two. However, our plan is to have Projectplace for more of our collaboration space and PPM Pro do more of our reporting. We are looking to implement Projectplace in LinkedIn.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

It's for strategic projects: Work intake as well as management of those projects.

It's taken us from being a very disparate organization around projects to all focusing in now on each other's needs. Before, we would work in silos and everyone would spend a lot of capital on these projects. What we are finding today is those people are more cognizant that the funding is not just for them, it's for the entire organization. We have to share and prioritize the work that we're trying to do. We prioritize based upon return on investment.

We help connect funding and strategic outcomes that work for the future. We will create a strategic request and that request becomes a project. We're mapping from start to finish the execution, work intake, and now we're also doing what we call post-implementation reviews to make sure we get the return on investment that we set out to accomplish.

The most valuable features is probably the request module:

1. The work intake component is why we selected the product. 
2. The resource management capabilities with demand management and capacity management. This is very strong. 
3. We like the fact that now, especially with the new request module, there's a nice colorful Kanban board view that goes along with it. 

There are so many components to it. It is like almost every day that we find some other use case for it. So, it's very flexible.

We use PPM Pro with Projectplace. It is absolutely 100 percent fantastic. Now, we can give people that more collaborative, comfortable look and feel with a Kanban board view. We give them a smart app that goes along with it, essentially not having to worry about using rigid project management. They are very complementary towards each other: PPM Pro and Projectplace. What one is not so strong in, the other one has strengths in it. It is fantastic.

Every time I think of something it's almost like magic, they implement it before I can even suggest it. They're in the walls, right? At this point, everything I've ever wished for has come true with PPM Pro. 

Now that we're just starting up on Projectplace, hopefully I'll see that same type of thing. If I had to make one suggestion right now on Projectplace is the ability to manage more of the roadmap features. You have the roadmap, the portfolio, and then the drill downs into components that feed into that roadmap. They are working on this, and it's coming along.

There are no reliability issues whatsoever. We are pretty close to 100 percent uptime. I know there's been a few hiccups here and there, but nothing of any significance. Whatever platform we're running it on, it's rock solid.

I have no concerns over the flexibility of the combination of PPM Pro and Projectplace. The product will grow with us.

I've been in this industry for 30 years. It is extremely responsive, not only from a time frame of responsiveness, but going above and beyond their recommendation or whatever suggestion will remedy the problem that I'm having. They typically go above and beyond. It has been an excellent experience. If I had to give it a rating from one to 10, I would give it a 10.

It was pretty straightforward. We knew what we wanted and what our requirement was immediately. Where other folks that don't know their requirements or use case, I could see it being a bit of a challenge. 

One thing in particular I'd suggest is that we used the fast track service to implement PPM Pro. While it had a lot of value to it, people may be expecting a different experience. An experience where maybe an entourage of consultants come onsite to help you do the implementation, as opposed to working over the phone with just one resource. This might be an option to offer later down the road where there are complex implementations.

$6 million has been the return on investment so far, and that was because of work intake. Now that we are scrutinizing the work intake and asking questions like, "Is there an alternative to your $10 million project?" We had one project come in for $10 million, scrutinize it through our gate review process, and wound up with the alternative, which was $3.8 million. So, a $6 million savings.

We did look at other products. We looked at Primavera, which is Oracle's product. At my previous job, I was with Hewlett Packard for 20 years, so I looked at HPE's product PPMC. Then, we wound up on PPM Pro for a couple of reasons:

1. It's cloud based.
2. The cost was in line.
3. It was going to scale as we grew. We could add more users and so on.

Primavera were extremely cost prohibitive. They wanted to sell a complete solution out-of-the-box. We talked about doing it on-premise. This means you need the data center to get involved. You need all that technology to evolve. We just didn't have it and needed to get going quickly. 

The speed was with PPM Pro. The power of the applications were with PPM Pro. The passion of the people that I met with Planview was just the clincher for me.

I would give PPM Pro a rating overall of nine (out of 10). What would make me feel like it were a 10 is a simple, silly thing, but if the application had a little more color to it. It's very monochrome. With the advent of a Kanban boards, especially with the new request module, there is some color. I greatly appreciate that, but there needs to be a bit more color added to it.

We are not using the solution’s Lean/Agile delivery tools.

The product feels like a toy. The tool needs to improve its roadmap. It needs to improve things on a project management level which includes communication as well. 

I am working with the product for two to three years. 

The product is not scalable. We have around 15-20 users for the product. 

My experience with the support is not good. 

The product's deployment is straightforward. However, the solution is very difficult to customize as per customer requirements. 

I would rate the solution a four out of ten. 

Our primary use cases are for capacity management, resource management, and time tracking.

Previously, a lot of activities were done using Microsoft Excel and they had to be recreated. There were a lot of formulas and stuff like that, with a lot of manual work that resulted in a lot of errors. With PPM Pro, we don't get any errors in terms of the calculations. We get the right picture in terms of the dollar amount being spent on each and every project.

It helps from a historical perspective. In 2020, we sometimes go back and refer to 2017 for some of the projects or some of the work that was done. 

Based on our usage, capacity management and resource management are the salient features. The challenge that we have in terms of managing the portfolio is arriving at the different projects within a portfolio and ensuring that the capacity what we have meets the need. When we do the portfolio planning, the tool helps us a lot in doing so, and from the reporting perspective, it provides a good overview of where time is spent as compared to what was planned, which I feel is key for a standard project and portfolio management.

PPM Pro enables us to create usable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle. I think it works beautifully for the waterfall-based project, though Agile-based implementations have challenges in defining such templates. The level of detail is a bit different when it comes to Agile as compared to waterfall projects.

We have customized the templates for our needs, based on our definition of waterfall and Agile. If it is a waterfall template, then you're defining your activities, you're defining your time, and the schedule. So when people report back to these specific tasks or a specific area, the time gets captured according to the phase and work that they have been doing. This works out pretty well when you take a report and compare it to say, "Okay. Where are you? What was planned?" If the design was planned for 1,000 hours of work we can see how much we have spent, where we are, and how much more is needed. It is pretty well documented.

Once the task gets completed or closed, you can't expect people to go back and report any time on it, so it's locked from that particular perspective. In terms of the Agile template, it's a different thought process altogether, specifically when a project might use different teams to work on the same project. It becomes a bit challenging, because two teams might do the work at two different times, and you may still want to keep the task open for a longer duration. It's a bit of a challenge and we are learning what the optimal way of moving forward with the Agile process is.

Because most of these Agile teams work with the task breakdown or they plan with Azure DevOps, we have a whole gamut of activity that breaks down within the Azure Boards stating the Epic's features and the task level detail. With PPM Pro, we define a high-level Epic or a feature so that the team can report the hours. There's a bit of duplication of effort there because the team has to update their activities on Azure, as well as come back and do the time reporting in PPM Pro. One of the initiatives that we have engaged with Planview is to see how to integrate both the tools.

It only takes a few minutes to create a new project. It's just a copy and paste to create a template.

In terms of the task management features, based on the parameter of the project, we have the standard tasks being defined. They would have been mostly waterfall-based projects. Then we do the phase-wise tasks, the initiation, elaboration, construction, warranty, kind of a thing. But if you take a modified Agile project then the task is derived based on the higher level Epics. It has brought a positive impact to the project management process, mostly in terms of planning financial controls or budgeting process. We rely on the tool itself to let us know the overall plan, as well as the dollar amount that is forecasted and spent.

The solution's time-tracking abilities are one of the strong points. The only challenge is enabling it to the minute-level task. It's not at a project level but it's at an organization level. If  I want it to be at a higher level as compared to some of the other projects where I want it to go to the nth level of a task for the time reporting, I cannot control it at a project level but it's controllable at an organization level. That's the only big challenge that I have.

The leveling of time reporting is centrally controlled as compared to the control at a project level. For example, if I create a task and I create a task as a phase of initiation, elaboration, or construction and if I enable the time reporting to be at a task level, these tasks would be seen by the timesheet report by the user, to say that this project has an initiation task assigned to him and he can report the task. But if there are multiple levels of those tasks, it has a folder with three or four tasks. If the time tracking is enabled at a task level, the number of steps that you would have defined in your task shows everything to all the users.

It provides managers the insight they need to empower decision-making. When we look at our portfolio and when we want to work around either increasing or reducing that portfolio, we do use a lot of what-if analysis. That helps us in making very meaningful decisions to say whether we would be switching or investing in something else, whether that would be working on a specific system or diverting diverse posts to a different system, which would have a better return on investment. 

The integration with some of these other tools that we use, like the Azure DevOps needs improvement. I heard there are few things coming within Planview or PPM Pro itself, but I think it's still future dated. These integrations are key for us from an organizational perspective. 

We're looking forward to the new dashboards and some of the capabilities.

I have been using PPM Pro for five years. 

It is stable. It has matured a lot since the time it was called Innotas. I find the solution to be stable and robust.

We have around 200 users in my company, including portfolio managers, project managers, and two admin. 

We are at an optimum level right now so we don't anticipate more users at this point in time.

Support has been great. Last year we engaged with Planview to help us with some of the apps that we've been doing, specifically in terms of the forecasting, and how to manage the contingency. We did have one of the consultants engaged and working with us, but unfortunately, it was not of much help. In most of these cases, I think consultants revert to saying, "Okay. We are coming with the new financial tab and the functionality." So our problem didn't get resolved at that point in time last year. But we are hoping that the new features that are being rolled over right now will help us in what we are looking for.

I would rate their support a four out of five. There are gaps in some of the work they do but they are responsive and knowledgable. 

When we purchased it, it was still called Innotas. The organization hired a PMO manager who had worked in a different organization and he had experience working with Innotas.

We use MS Project and MS Teams. We never looked at any integration with PPM Pro, since we worked the process to a different aspect of work. Microsoft and PPM Pro are two different things. From the project management perspective, you can't do any time tracking in Project, and you can't do any capacity management across your portfolio. PPM Pro is focused on complex projects.

The initial setup requires some work to be done, but it was not complex. You have to setup the organization, have customized reports, and customization. It was more of a standard process, but it was not so straightforward.

From the PMO perspective, I've written off 30 to 40% of the effort from my PM constitutes to a good amount of savings at the end of the day.

We have different models, some are user-based, some are a license for all the tools underneath it. It's a different combination and capacity based on the user's needs. It is optimally priced.

You need to have a very clear understanding of what your requirements are, the use cases that you want to implement, and what is that you would like to develop in the tool. Based on that, you need to ensure to put the right configurations in place so that the right kind of data can be populated. Doing a thorough analysis of that requirement is key for putting up the right design and right configuration for the tool.

I would rate PPM Pro an eight out of ten. There are still features that the product needs to deliver. The standard project management, in terms of the capacity of the use cases related to the portfolio, capacity, refills, time-tracking, is all good. Other features that are key from a project at a portfolio perspective in terms of auto-calculation, managing contingencies at a project level and the portfolio level need improvement.