Planview PPM Pro Reviews

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.

We have been using the tool for portfolio management with the resource allocation piece being a big part of it. We are using it to generate data to try and get a real-time report out of all the information needed to prepare for our quarterly reviews, etc.

It gave us a clarity of purpose. Everybody knows what they are doing and that they are all aligned:

• Managers know what employees are doing. 
• Employees know what they are doing and the managers think they should be doing. 

That is the clarity which really helps in efficiency. 

When you look at your organization, and what everybody is working on, you now know what capacity you have to take more things on.

The biggest impact was making sure that people were aligned on what they're supposed to do. This has really helped us because we're all going in the same direction and we know it.

It makes clear what people are working on. It is not just for managers but it is also for the people themselves. They are able to see and say, "I am on this project, and it's official. My manager knows it. Everybody knows it." That helps them with their motivation.

Anyone can go in and jerry-rig it. We would like the tool to be more locked down.

We found that sometimes when they have monthly rollouts that there might be some unintended consequences. However, the program is so flexible that sometimes we're not sure if the issue is because of the rollout or because we did something wrong.

It should grow with us for now.

I don't interact with the technical support of Planview that much. We have our own IT department. Usually, we interact with them first. Then, if they have issues, they contact Planview.

We were using something called PDWare. People hated it. Then, we had a team that went out and looked at the other things out there. I'm not sure of all the things that they considered but when they showed us what PPM Pro could do, it was such a big difference from what PDWare was doing, we said, "Let's give that a try."

Before we started using a tool like this to track what people are assigned to, we would have people who the managers thought should be on certain projects but they apparently had never heard of them. They didn't know they were on those projects and they would be working on some other projects that they thought they were supposed to do. The managers were like, "No, you're supposed to be on this one." So, there was a lot of miscommunication going on. 

Now, everything is clear. They can go through the tool, look at it, and go, "I'm on this one." Or, if they see something that they don't agree with, they say, "Hey, I thought you told me..." and then at least those conversations are happening and clears things up.

The setup is pretty straightforward. 

With upgrades, we have had Planview come in and talk about what they're thinking about with the new features coming in. Some of them we see that there is a use for them. Others, we are not at a stage to really see the usefulness of them.

I would rate it at about eight (out of 10) only because we've been using it for two years but there have been some growing pains as we are learning how to use it and getting the team adopted. I definitely see that adoption has happened and people like what they're seeing. However, I also see some areas where they could make it stronger.

Some of the things that we are looking at seem to be maybe in Enterprise One. So, a lot of the talks are now on Enterprise One. We are saying, "Oh wow, they are pretty similar." Then, we start to talk with people, and they're like, "Yeah, we can do this there." So, we should maybe be looking at what the differences are and what exactly they can do

We are not using Projectplace. We have been using JIRA. A lot of our technical teams is still using JIRA and most of the type of stuff is happening in JIRA, then we do a lot of the PMO stuff on PPM Pro.

• Project data
• Reporting: My job involves data analysis, so the reporting feature is the most valuable feature for me.

• Project data is used to make business decisions. It is used for objective analysis of project delivery, in terms of the project being on time and within the budget.
• Prior to implementing this solution, there was no centralized system for project data, either collection or reporting, in the organization.
• As the organization previously had no centralized PPM tool or a method of reporting on projects, having this data available via reporting assists in business analysis and decision making.
• This solution has provided a tool for consistent reporting and for the information from which decisions are made.

• Resource management
• Planning: My organization has to plan manually using multiple reports from Innotas. This means that planning is neither “real time” nor efficient.
• Visibility: The tool allows visibility to what resources are working on. However, there is no meaningful method for “What If” planning if the organization has more than a handful of projects and resources.

Their PPA (Predictive Portfolio Analysis) module is extremely cumbersome and does not readily offer a method to move projects in/out/delay to see the impact on role availability. There is also limited reporting on which roles are causing staffing issues. The What If Dashboard in Innotas is also EXTREMELY limited, and does not permit all projects to be included in an analysis. When we attempted to include all active projects and all upcoming projects, an error was received that our data set was too large. When we limited it to only our active projects (those currently being worked), the “too large” error was again received. If “What If” planning cannot accommodate all projects, and if Predictive Portfolio Analysis cannot offer a method to adjust schedules and see the impact, the tool is not useful for resource management.

We have had to develop our own methods for resource/portfolio planning, using information from multiple reports from Innotas joined in an external workbook. Since we have to work outside of the system (Innotas) to get all of the data we need in one place, the data must be refreshed manually, thus it is never real-time. This also means that users cannot refresh this information on their own, but must rely on specific employees to pull, compile, and analyze the data.

I have used this solution of over three years.

There were stability issues. There are monthly releases for this product. Following most releases, the system is either not available, or has major issues.

The new features in the release occasionally cause other functionality to break, making one wonder how extensively the new features were tested prior to release.

There were some scalability issues. Our organization is too large/complex to use the planning tools (Predictive Portfolio Analysis and What If workbench) with this solution.

Other than that, there were no issues with scalability on day-to-day project management and reporting.

I would give technical support a rating of 4/10.

Technical support is requested via case submission, and Innotas rarely contacts you to discuss the issue.

The first response to a case is often “standard” and indicates that they did not read the description provided, or did not understand the case.

The first response is often “clear your cache”, which any user with experience with this product always does first before submitting a case.

Cases can take months to resolve, and occasionally remain unresolved. Sometimes Innotas cannot determine the cause of an issue or provide a meaningful solution.

This is the first PPM solution used by my organization.

My organization purchases a block of 500 licenses. We have flexibility to add and remove users easily. I am not aware if there are other licensing models available with this tool.

I was not part of the decision to implement this tool, but it is my understanding that there was no evaluation of other products.

We are currently evaluating other options, as the organization has matured and we need a tool that provides resource management and planning capabilities beyond what Innotas can provide.

If you are relatively immature in your project management journey, this is a pretty good tool to start with. Your in-house administrators can do much of the customization that you want. Reporting is quite easy and straightforward with this tool.

If you are a small organization with only a few project resources and projects, this tool could likely provide you with what you need in a PPM solution.

I appreciate the project and timesheet tracking for our staff.

It has brought our organization to using one tool for requests, project management, and time-tracking.

Innotas is revamping their UI. They need to focus on their request management area. I believe it is scheduled for 2017.

We would also like to utilize their budgeting process, but they need to match how we do budgeting.

We have used it for two years.

We only encountered the usual web application anomalies and slowness at times. But this could be due to different behavior when using different web browsers, such as IE or Chrome.

We did not encounter any stability issues, as we are a fairly small shop.

I would rate technical support as very good!

We previously used various tools that didn’t map to our processes very well.

I think it is worth the price

We evaluated ServiceNow.

Do it in phases if you can.

I particularly appreciate the Timesheet and Resource Management.

It has helped to improve our resource forecast functionality and identify resource availability.

Financial management and workflow process setup could be improved.

I have used it for two years.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

I would give them 9 out of 10.

Initial setup was straightforward.

We previously evaluated Epic Clarity.

It’s a very intuitive product and easy to use. If you are a young and developing/maturing organization, it is a good first product to implement for a PPM solution.

This solution is cloud-based and that is most beneficial.

It allows the leadership to pull out the project status whenever they want to.

There should be another option for capacity management, besides entering of the time sheets against the tasks.

I have used this solution for one year.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

The technical support has been great, although sometimes responses can take up to three days.

Previously, we were using Basecamp and Microsoft Project. We needed a global solution that would meet with the leadership project reporting expectations.

The fast start process was straightforward. There were some opportunities around the unique requirements.

Make sure you understand the licensing structure, i.e., full verses T&E.

We looked at another solution namely the CA Clarity tool.

You must understand the needs of your organization and as to what you are trying to resolve with this product.

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.