Planview PPM Pro Reviews

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using PPM Pro for over four years. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate PPM Pro an eight out of ten. 

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

We also use it for:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've never seen any issues with stability. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scalability is great. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think some divisions also use Microsoft Project. 

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

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

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

PPM Pro started out being just an IT application. Within the IT PMO, we needed a way to track our portfolio. We had spreadsheets with project data on them and it was cumbersome. Being able to get some portfolio analytics was important to us, and then our project managers were using all different kinds of tools. They were using MS Project, Excel, and all good stuff, but the templates and everything was all over the place. I liked PPM Pro because we could essentially build out the forms, the fields, and everything to mirror a project charter. The risk and issues log was already in there.

Instead of having to use a bunch of tools, we're able to do a whole lot of it, especially the budget management in PPM Pro. The biggest thing for us was the timesheets because we had a time tracking system that was terrible, it was expensive, and it didn't connect to anything else. Now we've got the time entries, the projects, the reports, and the portfolio all in one system and we liked it so much that the business side decided they wanted to participate as well so it's now the project tool for the entire organization.

We're new, so the goal is for standardization. We want Planview to help us be more consistent across the different themes. We've got several different project management teams embedded within certain parts of the business. By building out Planview, we've been able to standardize within the portfolio world, it's made my life a whole lot easier. I'm not backing everything on spreadsheets and running reports and things. It has reduced a lot of the administrative overhead for us because we do have these external contractors and by granting them access to Planview, they can now go in and do all the stuff themselves instead of having to rely on us. It's saving us a ton of money on licenses too. It's been good so far and I think it's going to get better.

PPM Pro has enabled us to track more in the system than the old system. Just by having Planview and making it so accessible to people in the organization, we're finding that more requests are being submitted and tracked versus people just doing it on their personal desktops and stuff. Previously, things weren't being tracked. 

The dashboards are one of the most valuable aspects of this solution, although, we've only developed a few that anyone's using. There is more maturity there and, of course, we're a month and a half into this, but getting our executive leadership to see these things is half the battle. I think dashboards are going to be critical. 

We're also very interested in finances, with linking Plan B with Hyperion. The plan is to investigate that a little more. The fact that it's scalable was critical for us in our decisions. We weren't quite sure what we would need three years from now, but Planview has so many different applications that we figured we'd have a pretty good shot with it, so that's the plan.

In terms of the time tracking abilities, my company has been about 90% outsourced for all IT resources, which in today's world is not recommended, but we have these people all over the place and all over the world, trying to track their time on projects. As we are gradually bringing our IT back in-house, we need vendors to be able to track their time. We need our local contractors to be able to bill their time. We're starting to get a better picture of what's actually being spent on what.

We took a simple route with time tracking. We have what we call homerooms, it's where one could bill all of their non-project time. So we're able to get a full picture of what our contractors are doing and we get an invoice from their company. The IT accounts payable, who also reports to me, is able to reconcile those invoices against actual time entries in Planview. It's been very helpful.

PPM Pro has enabled us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle. We've created five or six of them which is helpful, not only for our PMs but also for our finance team because some tasks can be capitalized, and tracking CAPEX is very important for us. It's in the templates so then the PMs don't have to try and guess what's a CAPEX task or an OPEX task, it's already in there. That's been very important.

It takes around two minutes to create a new project. In our old system, we didn't really have projects so getting the project in the system was the biggest hurdle for us with the old system. With PPM Pro, the request goes in, and then you just copy and paste everything over to a project. It's just taking the basic request data and then turning it into a project. It is very, very easy in PPM Pro.

The process of building a team within a project makes sense to me, but I've been doing this for a long time. Some of our PMs are getting tripped up in the difference between the staffing section, the team section, and the task section and which one of those does what. We've spent a couple of weeks now trying to explain that if you add the person to the staffing section, it gives you demand, and if you add them to a task, then they can enter a timesheet. Getting the initial team set up is a little cumbersome, but once it's up, then everything just flows really smoothly.

In terms of its test management features, PPM Pro is a lot like other tools. There isn't really anything with the tasks that stands out as being spectacular. You can import tasks from MS Project, but you can also do that in other solutions as well. It's nice and some of those things are convenient but nothing really jumps out as a great feature within that section.

I liked what I saw for viewing projects and timelines from the demos. I think it's pretty great. We don't have enough data in ours yet to get any good views on things but I liked the Gantt button where you can toggle that on and off to get the view right in the system. I have a little more work to do as far as viewing timelines and things in the reports. I've got a few basic ones set up, but after watching the reports and data dashboards, I know that's going to look a lot better, especially after we get some data in our system, but it's pretty standard and straightforward.

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

From a usability standpoint, the part where there are people on the tasks section on a team is a little challenging. Then for some reason, the in-demand reports are embedded in the resource section and to run them is just completely different and separate from the reports entity which is a lot. When we did our setup with the implementation manager, he said, "Well, that's just legacy but you can create the same thing over in reports". And so far I haven't been able to figure that out. I would like to see capacity demand reports, right up front in all of the report's sections. As far as accessibility, changing passwords, and people being able to get to mobile devices and all that stuff, that's just been phenomenal.

We got our licenses back in March but we did the implementation and a rollout across the organization, so the main body of people who use it started using it on August 3rd. We are brand new.

I haven't seen any glitches at all.

It's being used broadly across the company and I think we will continue to need to work on the adoption of it from some of our senior directors and VPs. We need to build out the parts that they can see, like reports and dashboards, and make it useful for them.

I submitted several tickets and support was very prompt and very responsive.

We use Teams across the entire company, SharePoint, Project, Word, Excel, and a lot of us use Visio. They are pretty integrated. We run on Office 365, so once you get that license, you have access to all.

Microsoft is definitely not a project solution. Planview is much more consolidated and everything talks to each other. I was listening to them talk about single sign-on, everything for Planview products, and I know we've got access to Projectplace and LeanKit, but we never really set those up. I'm still not really clear on how those all work together, but at some point, I will spend the time to do that.

I came to the realization that I needed a tool like this the first week that I came to work at my company and realized I was going to have to manage a portfolio on a spreadsheet. That's when I knew.

The initial setup was complex. We got tripped up in some weird cycle between being able to attend some formal Planview training and being able to go to implementation workshops. For whatever reason, they would only allow two people from my company to attend Planview, and there are six of us admins. I had to forego my training to let my employee go because she needed it more than I did, but then I ended up being the one who set up the entire system on our side, and for what we paid for the implementation, I really thought Planview would have done more to help us. I was learning on the fly while building it and Planview was pushing us through these workshops and it was hard. I think it was harder than it should've been.

We started early April and rolled it out on August 3rd but we're still missing pieces and parts of it. We never got Projectplace. We never talked about LeanKit, it was too much. There was too much that needed to be done, and I'm not a technical person. I've been a project manager my whole life so I understood that I was building what a project manager would want in the system. But from a technical standpoint, like uploading data and importing data in it from our old system and all that stuff, it was very painful just because I had no idea what I was doing. I think we could prep staff better on our side if we had known that this was going to be so much work.

I built it, so I made a bunch of the decisions on the configuration like what the lookup list would be, what all the templates were going to look like, and all that. I had a project coordinator who really didn't help much at all, and then I had my peer on the business side who got into it, but she kind of struggled with some of the data too.

For management, we've got one lady on the business side and then two of us on the IT side, but we have 40 full users. The adoption of it has been great. We also have two people on the external side that are not admins but they're full users and we have to work pretty closely with them. So, altogether it's five of us.

Across the organization, there are 40 full users, 50 stakeholders, 300 time-users plus 50 users. We will definitely need more full users and stakeholders. So I would expect it to grow to probably 60 full users and 100 stakeholders here pretty soon.

PPM Pro is saving us around $7,000 a month.

Pricing was fair and I thought it was comparable to the other ones that we looked at. Other than ServiceNow, it was the most expensive, but we knew we were going to get a lot of value for it, so we went with it.

We paid $40,000 for the implementation and for the workshops.

We looked at Planisware, CA Technologies, Upland, and ServiceNow. Planview was a perfect mix of usability and sophistication or rigor. It would be challenging for us, but it would still be easy enough to use and give us the data that we needed. I chose it because of the way it was sized and priced.

It's very comparable to ServiceNow but ServiceNow doesn't offer the training, resources, and materials, so you have to figure it out as you go. Planview has an extensive learning library, presentations and conferences, and things that we can do. Resources, I would say, are just as huge for us.

I would have changed the project team that implemented this and I would have found someone much more technical if I had known that Planview wasn't going to do it. I'd probably try to find somebody who knows more about reports and dashboards because that's where the real bread and butter of it is. Right now we're getting by with some reports. Having that resource, which we just don't have right now, would have been helpful for us to really knock it out of the park when we went live with it.

My advice would be to find someone technical to build it and then I would rearrange some of the implementation workshops. It felt like we did things out of order a little bit with going to admin training and setting them up. I'd want them to do a much more thorough assessment instead of relying on Planview to tell us how it was going to go. The way that they said it was going to go and the way that it went was completely different. I think having somebody that maybe had been through an implementation like this before on the team would have been helpful. 

I would rate Planview PPM Pro a nine out of ten. It's good for now. It's the right stuff for us for the next three years. We may evolve and grow into something bigger, but right now I think we're in a good spot and it's been deemed a success and a successful project so far by our leadership. 

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.

My primary use case for this solution is for research and development projects.

PPM Pro is really great at the portfolio level like seeing what projects are in flight versus complete, or maybe not started. The portfolio level view is good for stage-gate management specifically.

The most valuable features are: 

• Projects 
• Portfolios
• Reports
• Dashboards

We track all of our development projects in the system so it's good to have visibility across multiple projects instead of just having Microsoft projects being used on local computers. And then the reports and dashboards allow us to have more flexibility or more consolidated views for different types of users.

It enables us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management life cycle. It has made our project management process a lot less manual.

PPM Pro is good for viewing projects and timelines. You can see a Gantt Chart, but again, there's no visual, so we have to export the project and get a visual or use an office timeline or other forms of a timeline visual. That's a really manual process.

To an extent, it provides managers the insight they need to empower decision-making. The lack of robust resource planning is not good and that's difficult to manage.

It has helped to reduce project delays by roughly one to three months.

It doesn't help us to increase the number of projects in my company but that's not a bad thing because we were doing too many before. 

It takes more time than it should to create a new project because we can't bulk edit things very easily. That is definitely an area that has room for improvement. 

I would like to have the ability to edit items in bulk and save drafts. It's one or nothing. You can't save drafts.

Another area of improvement is the system's slow for projects with more than 600 line items.

There is also no timeline visual, it's only a Gantt Chart.

Resource management and planning are difficult at the headcount level. In the next release, I would like to have better scenario planning for resources and portfolios.

The process for building a team within a project is manual and difficult. The system doesn't provide recommendations. Creating a new project can take a week. 

I also find their task management features to be poor because we don't have the ability to bulk edit or scenario plan. You can't save drafts. The spreadsheet editor doesn't allow you to edit all of the fields, only a subset of fields. And the spreadsheet editor is the recommended workaround solution, but it's not robust.

I have been using Planview PPM Pro for about two and a half years. 

Stability is not great. We often find a lot of issues and the timeframe for issue resolution is longer than is ideal or to be expected.

I am neutral about the scalability. That's not something we really have spent too much time diving into.

I would rate their technical support a six out of ten. It's slow. Oftentimes it would be faster to just speak with somebody in the technical team, not an account manager. I would give their technical team an eight out of ten. 

The initial setup was straightforward. We had a really good implementation team but unfortunately, our account manager who started with us is no longer with Planview.

It was really fast, it took around a month. We had a full project plan for it that we worked with Planview on creating.

Three hundred people in our company work on PPM Pro. You could call them the development team, project managers, portfolio managers, executive leadership managers, and cross-functional teams. It's just myself and a partner who work on the maintenance. 

In terms of the number of projects that we use PPM Pro for, it's adapted 70% and we do have plans to increase usage. 

I have seen ROI but I don't know the amount.

We also looked at CA Technologies and Daptiv. 

The fully integrated solution that PPM Pro said they had between PPM Pro and Projectplace was not a true statement after implementation. So we've been working with them on making that happen. Other platforms were very stale and out of date. The visuals that we were shown for PPM Pro were actually, Enterprise One, not PPM Pro, so that was a bit misleading.

We also use Microsoft solutions for project management. They are doing far better than Planview is doing right now.

For individual projects, I would give a nine out of 10 for Microsoft versus Planview being a six or seven out of 10. And then for portfolio analysis, it doesn't really provide much of an option there. Planview has got that, PPM Pro is better in that regard.

My advice would be to know your business case and make sure you test that in the sandbox environment.

The biggest lesson I have learned is that the current editing capabilities and the task list are really difficult and arduous and that it's much easier to build out a project plan in Microsoft Project first and then upload it once it's completely finalized. So it's not really somewhere to build a project.

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

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 mostly use this solution for high-level project planning and resource management. We're looking to expand that using the integrations, such as LeanKit or Projectplace.

We do not have LeanKit, yet, but we are looking to move towards Agile, so in my opinion, LeanKit fits well for our use cases.

This solution is valuable because it saves us a lot of time from having to consolidate. Before PPM Pro, we didn't have a good way to consolidate our actual costs from an IT department. This has made it possible to capture all of those, plus mix in outside costs just by putting them in manually and then have that be able to be displayed in a dashboard.

We have projects that we work on, but we also have smaller work in there that is related to our own business. We use reporting for all of our prioritization with the business and the order of when stuff will be released. It's saved us a lot of time and it has been a huge boost for communication between IT and the business side.

From my perspective, our strategy has changed in that we have become more transparent, and Planview was part of the solution for that. Aside from transparency, I don't think that the integrated product portfolio has been part of transforming our strategy.

With respect to transforming our delivery, I would say that this solution has definitely helped with that. We have an on-premises version for all of our change requests, but that was always just on the IT side. With us being able to have it where both IT and the business can easily go into one place is helpful. The way that we have it set up is that it gets prioritized by our business relationship managers. From a delivery perspective, we can actually have them have more of an input and more transparency on costs, hours, what's coming next, and what the timelines are.

This solution is flexible in some ways but not others. There is a decent amount of configuration that we've been able to do to control the different categories of projects. On that side, I would say yes, we can have multiple different requests or project types that have their own fields. Then, on the other side, it's kind of limited. You can configure it, but then you can't take it to really make it into a task management system. It's very hard to expand past just what the basic tasks are. That would be one place that I'd like to see a little bit more. It looks like they are trying to do that by introducing the backlog and putting more Agile context into PPM Pro. It looks like that's on the roadmap for Planview.

Collaborative Work Management has helped a lot by having everybody on the same page and allowing us, within IT, to be able to manage our work resources. It has helped a lot.

This solution has helped us connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. A lot of our dashboards are built around the financials. We're looking at buckets for how much each department has and we roll all of that up into dashboards that allow us to keep track of where everybody is, the actual expenditure for the year, and who has what left. We definitely use all of that capability.

The biggest impact that Planview has had on our organization is related to resource management. It was really helpful, because before we were so siloed into project teams that it was hard to get an idea of who is available from other teams if I need a resource. This has made it possible for us to actually get capacities and see what the schedules are going forward. This has been a huge benefit.

The most valuable feature of this solution is reporting. It is one of the biggest things for PPM Pro because we do all of our resource management within it, including the timesheet tracking and financial tracking, and a lot of that all rolls up. We have lots of dashboards built out, and we definitely use the reporting capabilities a lot. From IT to the business side, we use the actual projects to report statuses and do all of that kind of management as well.

Managing a project at the executable level is very difficult using PPM Pro alone, so it is necessary to use one of the integrations such as LeanKit of Projectplace.

This solution does not work well as a task management system because it is very difficult to expand beyond just the basic tasks, and this would be a worthwhile area for improvement.

The dashboards are very blocky. You can get all of the information but they just don't look great.

One of the issues that we have is related to capacity, where it is very limited in how you can input the capacity for people in future items. One of the things that we would like to see is the ability to have more control over scheduling. For example, you can switch into a scheduling mode but then it just takes whatever the time period of the task is and it spreads the entire workload for that resource over that entire time period. It doesn't take into account if they are off work, and I can't put them in twice. So if they have a gap, I'm still going to show that they have all of this free time, but really they only have the two chunks before and after their time off that they're available. More control in this aspect is a big thing for us right now.

Performance and stability have been fine. We have not had any issues with that.

In terms of scalability, I think for what it's built for it scales well. It's just whenever we get into the integrations it's something I need to see more because we get to a point where it's hard to track everything within just Planview. I think the integrations that they're doing improve that scalability, hopefully.

LeanKit and Projetplace both have the cards and the actual task-level definitions that can just build into what's in PPM Pro.

The technical support for this solution is good. We haven't had a lot of tickets, but anytime we have had a problem or needed something fixed, it's been great. We have had no problems.

There are changes in the product roadmap that I am excited about, including improvements to the reporting and enhancing the dashboards. I think it will help a lot.

My advice for anybody who is researching this type of solution is that Planview is definitely a good option. Whenever you're setting things up though, try to think of things at the big picture because once you start creating your solution, you're kind of in that solution. It's really hard to backtrack. So, just make sure you're thinking it through. Don't just give everybody access and tell them to give it a try, and then try to work backward whenever you figure out which one you want. Use sandbox environments. The tool works very well, but because it does have the ability to be extended and configured pretty well to what you want to do, you can make a mess of it as well.

This is obviously a leader in the market and there's a reason for it. It does what it's built to do very well. There are a few places where it can be improved, but overall, it definitely seems like it's in a good spot and it's going in a good direction.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is for managing all our products and programs, along with resource management. That is a key. Those are the two main reason: resource management and project management.

In my current company, it provides a quicker ramp up to understand what it can do for people by taking away all their barriers to entry: time, managing resources, and linking projects. It's made it so easy that people no longer say, "I don't want to do this because..." Other than "because", there is nothing else for them to say.

It is slowly maturing the company in the project management space by:

• Understanding the value of the project management as a function.
• The data that comes in and the structure that it provides.
• The predictability that it's providing. 
• The transparency in terms of the analytics.

It is adding to the maturity journey that the company is going through.

From an IT perspective, it has transformed the IT strategy. From an overall business strategy, we are not yet connected there. That's influence we are trying to get. We want to get those things connected.

We are planning start using the lean/agile process, especially on the business side, because they're into waterfall. We are trying to get into agile. We have done a lot of iterative development or fast track development. The issue is not from the IT space. We are trying to more to the business processes.

We're still using it in a sandbox area.

The flexibility is amazing. It is UI driven.

I would like them to improve the reporting and tying in the strategy more easily. Planview has already made some updates, so I'm trying to learn what those features are. 

I would also like to see integration with third-party applications, like the JIRA, Microsoft Project, and financial applications. That is where we get our data. We want to look into these integrations, but I don't think these are there today, but I can see those things down the roadmap.

I don't directly deal with the technical support because I'm a super users. 

We have an admin team for PPM Pro. They are the ones who use the technical support. From what I've heard so far, they open tickets and get good feedback very quickly. We have a dedicated customer rep, Katie, who works with us and addresses all our concerns. So far, so good.

This is the third company that I have used the solution in. I was the one who was instrumental in managing the tool at the previous two companies.

Because it's cloud-based, it's behind the scenes. The setup is pretty seamless since it is done in a sandbox. From a user point of view, we don't feel it at all.

The biggest ROI is the adoption of the tool in the company, not just by the worker bees, but also by the senior leadership. Now you have access to the data at the tip of your finger. It's dynamic data. They don't need to wait on anything. There are all types of the canned reports that we have created and anybody can access the data. There is this huge transparency.

Microsoft project is always out there. Project Server was horrendous. However, for the desktop, a lot of people prefer Microsoft Project for managing their project tasks. 

The PPM Pro tool is where the portfolio program management and the milestone plan of the PM is done, but the detail project plan is still maintained by our PMs in the Microsoft project. 

The product has grown a lot in terms of the resource management, what-if analysis, and now, in terms of the intake process. I've also seen a lot of Spigit. Planview is now able to integrate with other things that they offer on their platform.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. There is room for improvement but they have come a long way. It's quick to use, but the performance is still sometimes slow because of the cloud or whatever the reason. The reporting also needs improvement. Outside that, I'm pretty good.

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.

It is primarily to manage IT projects. The focus right now is spent on timekeeping in IT, seeing the value-add for the IT department in the projects that they deliver to the law firm.

It's primarily me for the planning side of it.

It has improved our organization because the one thing that we never had before was a single picture of all our IT projects going on. Each group within IT, like operations and knowledge management systems, all had their own list of projects. Now, for the first time, we can deliver to our organization a consolidated list of what we're working on. The portfolio management has been outstanding for us.

I feel like the pace of project delivery hasn't changed much, but being able to explain where we are and the status of our projects has definitely improved since the IT department is delivering projects for a number of other business units within the firm. Primarily, this has been only used within IT at this point. We want to prove the platform, then see where we can push it into the organization further.

It is flexible, because so far we haven't been able to figure out anything that it cannot do. It's highly configurable. We've added custom field design screens to fit our needs, develop reports, and dashboards that give us the ability to deliver much better information, especially to senior IT management.

Connecting funding and strategic outcomes with work execution is a challenge right now for us. Part of what we are facing is we have a couple of drivers of where projects are coming from. One of them is our innovation group. They are just sort of tangentially using PPM Pro for recording the status of projects and not really planning them within there. We need a stronger link between our current financial reporting system and Planview PPM Pro, so we can start to more easily record our external costs in the tool.

There may be Planview products that already fill this niche. I would like a better collaboration platform with a better view at the individual level of, "What do I have to do today?" Some of the Kanban card tools and things like that are definitely next in line for us.

It has more of a classic UI instead of a more modern looking user interface. Especially IT guys are like, "How come I can't just drag my tasks from one column to another column?" We're just using PPM Pro and some of the other products may carry this. We are at Horizons to take a look at Planview's other stuff.

It has been very stable.

The tool can growth with us.

We've only had a few instances where we contacted technical support. The experience has been excellent.

We were using a blend of products. We're using a Microsoft Project, Microsoft Planner, and Microsoft Teams. There was nothing that tied them altogether. We looked at trying to implement some integration tools. They worked, but you're on your own with trying to keep that all running.

So, instead of managing our project portfolio, we are managing the process. This is a much better tool for that.

I thought the setup was quite straightforward. We worked on the implementation for three to four months. One thing that was very challenging is we are really new to project management in the organization. This was not only just putting in a platform to manage projects, it was sort of instilling project management principles throughout the organization. Our implementation manager helped with a lot of those questions too.

We tried other tools, like Microsoft Project, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Planner. What I like about PPM Pro is it puts all of those tools together into one integrated platform. So, you have a good overview of what is going on in the project space of your organization.

It is a solid eight out of 10. 

We do not use PPM Pro with Projectplace.

We provide IT services to organizations. We manage all our customer delivery projects with the tool.

We are using the latest version of the solution.

Before, we didn't have any visibility into the actual task. Now, we have fact tasks and time-on-task, which are very specific to the engineers. We can now look at a task, see what they have done, and what notes are around that task.

We had a strategy, and it just helped us meet it.

With our delivery, our clients can have visibility into what they are doing. It keeps the client updated on where we are at. Before, we would just hold status meetings and do notes. Now, in the status meetings, we bring up exactly what's been done and the client can see it right upfront.

The biggest impact has been the visibility that goes with getting into our task or work.

Flexibility is the most valuable feature of the solution. We're able to do a lot of integrations with ConnectWise, which is another IT services tool that we use. So, we can integrate with that, and it's pretty flexible. We just went live a couple of weeks ago, but already we're able to bring visibility into our resource utilization and project status with clients.

This system is fairly adaptable.

The biggest things are the status notes and internal notes. They have made some great improvements these past couple of weeks, but they are still lacking a bit. There are still a little kludgy. It just needs to be a bit more straightforward with notes, copying and pasting. They've made huge improvements, but it still could do some work. E.g., for some reason, the formatting is still looking a little bit weird on selecting different fonts.

It is very stable. I haven't had issues with stability at all.

It can grow if we need it to.

The technical support is excellent. They are knowledgeable and quick to resolve issues. The only issue I have is with offshore support: The time difference is a pain. Other than that, everyone knows what they're doing. They are friendly and helpful.

They support you and will be there at every turn. They have very technically competent people who understand the processes.

Matt (account manager), Daryl (integration), and Lena (customer success manager) have been a big help to us.

No one knew what was going on and projects weren't getting completed.

The system itself was straightforward. Our needs were complex. We did an integration with another tool ConnectWise. It is a pretty complex integration. Our requirements made it complex, but the system is straightforward. The consultants helped us with the integration. From start to finish, it took us about eight months.

We used the Planview consultant who was great. They were helpful.

We have gotten what we are looking to achieve on the solution, but we have not yet achieve monetary ROI.

We are looking at Projectplace.

We looked at a whole list of vendors, include Project Server.

We chose Planview because of their support. Another reason was we had the ability to add notes onto time entries. We are different than a lot of their customers with billing. Our notes are how we explained to the customer what we did, and that was key.

I would rate it a good nine out of 10.

We are still working on how the solution’s collaborative work management will affect our operations.

We are not yet using Projectplace.

The primary use case is resource demand capacity planning.

It has helped us make good decisions in terms of what projects to take or how to prioritize projects when we have multiple directors from the business or product. It has definitely helped us prioritize and work on our critical things.

The biggest impact from Planview has been prioritization, planning, and taking on the right things.

I like the resource demand capacity planning module. I don't think we are using it to the fullest potential yet. There is a lot more benefit that we can get if we use it right. I have seen the dial features, which are quick. There are capabilities within the tool that give it a quick read on how the teams are loaded, and we still haven't used them to that extent.

Day-to-day, once we understand what to do, it's very easy to use it.

We don't use their existing dashboard functionality. Hopefully, with the new reporting release that is coming out in November, we will be able to evaluate as to how we can leverage that. What I hear, "Everyone has either a Tableau or something else because Planview doesn't provide a dashboard." We should not need to use another tool. Planview has the data, so it should be able to give us what we want. This would also reduce costs since we are paying licenses for those tools too.

It is definitely stable. I haven't seen any major issues.

We haven't had scalability issues too because we don't have that many entries in regards to performance and scalability testing so far. 

We have had both ups and downs with the support. We have been with Planview for three years. We have the new department that is just implementing Planview. They have been complaining about the support that Planview has provided for them with respect to their implementation. So far, our department hasn't ran into any issues. That's why there have been both ups and downs.

It was pretty straightforward. There is a lot of work to do in terms of setting it up the first time, but once setup, it runs smoothly.

We are implementing Planview for another department right now.

While it has been helpful, we are not taking advantage of the tool as much as we should be.

I was talking to the Planview Chief Marketing Officer earlier about trying to see if there were opportunities where we could pilot this, even if that means getting some licenses that we can use to pilot and show the value before we actually purchase those licenses.

The top contender was CA Clarity versus Planview. We went with Planview because Planview had a lot more flexibility than Clarity. 

Most of the attributes are configurable. We can change it to our own needs, which I didn't see with some of the other tools that I evaluated before starting Planview.

I would rate it at somewhere around a seven out of 10. We haven't used some of the functionalities, so that is where I'm not going too low on the rating. It definitely serves the purpose of what we wanted it to do in terms of resource demand capacity. However, we are still not able to use the dashboard, which we will get onboard. Now, within my team, I have 18 project managers creating dashboards every week. That's almost 18 hours per week, then multiply that by a number of weeks. That's where I am reducing the rating for Planview right now. I'm hoping that will change with the dashboard release. We'll wait to see.

We don't use Planview for strategy planning. We could use the tool a lot more, and that's my takeaway from the Horizons conference too. We still use a lot of spreadsheets because it's all in people's mind. We haven't had the leadership buy-in to use the tool to support us.

We don't use PPM Pro with Projectplace.

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).

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.

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.

• 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.