Micro Focus Software and Solutions

QTP is a functional and regression automation tool originally developed and marketed by Mercury Interactive which HP acquired in 2006. In 2012, HP released UFT (Unified Functional Testing) version 11.5, which combined QuickTest Professional and HP Service Test into a single software package along with newly designed IDE (Integrated Development Environment).

Before UFT, QTP and Service Test were two separate downloads. So essentially, UFT has bundled QTP and Service Test into one package along with several other add-ins. It is also important to note that on February 28, 2015 End of Support Life for QTP 11 was reached which meant that a company had to upgrade to UFT to get technical support and access to patches, documentation, etc.

For clarity, I have pasted screenshots of QTP (Figure 1) and UFT (Figure 2) below.

Figure 1 – QTP 11.xx

Figure 2 – UFT 12.xx

Note, UFT came out with a feature called InsightObject that has the ability to identify any object by taking an image of the object. Furthermore, by using the GetVisibleText the user has the ability to get the text off of the InsightObject even though it is essentially an image.

The InsightObject feature is so helpful that I thought it was worthy to dedicate a special section with screenshots along with an explanation of how the InsightObject feature works as shown below.

InsightObject Select learn mode feature shown above

After selecting the object that you want to add to the Object Repository, notice how the perimeter surrounds it.

How the InsightObject appears after being added to the Object Repository.

UFT is on top of the AUT (Application Under Test). Notice the small image in the code of UFT that represents lower left image with text "70 microns."

The actual VBScript Code is pasted below. Note how after the code was executed the text "70 microns" was extracted from image as shown from Print Log.

Browser("Space Images | Circumstellar").InsightObject("InsightObject70_microns").Hover
strGetVisibleText = trim(Browser("Space Images | Circumstellar").InsightObject("InsightObject70_microns").GetVisibleText())

print "strGetVisibleText = " & strGetVisibleText

Print Log

strGetVisibleText = 70 microns

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Review for UFT 14.00 added here.

In January 2017, HPE released UFT 14.00. The previous version was UFT 12.54, and HPE omitted using number 13 as a version. The most probable reason for not using version 13 is that the number 13 is still perceived by some as a superstitious number.

New Name Changes in UFT 14.00

The new UFT brand includes UFT Ultimate, UFT Enterprise, and UFT Pro (formerly LeanFT). The following are the new License names and the associated products included with them.

• UFT Ultimate – includes UFT, UFT Pro (i.e. LeanFT), Sprinter, BPT (Business Process Testing), and Mobile Center (functional testing only).
• UFT Enterprise – includes UFT, UFT Pro (i.e. LeanFT), and Sprinter.
• UFT Pro (i.e. LeanFT) – includes UFT Pro only.

Test Combinations Generator

When developing automated test scripts, getting data can be time consuming because almost every company uses data indigenous to its propriety systems. Furthermore, to develop an effective automated script, you need data for both positive test cases, and just as importantly, data that will throw an exception or error (i.e. negative path) so you can build exception handling into your script to prevent it from stopping unexpectedly. The Test Combinations Generator makes this task significantly easier by utilizing a Regular Expression to generate the type of data you want including the specified format. For example, you can now quickly generate dates, URLs, passwords, confirmation numbers, shipping numbers, etc., that would be time consuming to do manually. The data created for a positive test case is labeled “HAPPY PATH” and the data for a negative test case is labeled “ERROR PATH.” Also, this feature can be used to help the whole QA team because you can generate data for the manual testers as well which helps free-up their time that they otherwise would be using to get data. My key take-away of the Test Combinations Generator is that it lowers Opportunity Costs for the whole QA team. By this I mean that the time and cost previously used to generate data is now minimized, so the QA team now has more time to focus on testing versus having to generate data.

Significant Changes

In my opinion UFT Pro is the tool that has the most significant enhancements. With the rising popularity of Selenium, HPE did a good job of making changes and came out with UFT Pro for Selenium. This tool includes a Java Library that extends the WebDriver API and also has additional locators and utilities. UFT Pro also has an Object Identification Center that helps speed up the time to develop a test.

Another significant change is that UFT Pro (i.e. LeanFT) is now supported on a Mac OS and Linux, in addition to Windows. Furthermore, it supports the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome, which was expected.

New changes for UFT 14.03

Screenshot of UFT 14.03 IDE (Integrated Development Environment)

New Object Spy functionality allows UFT's Object Spy to compare two objects.

Suppose we want to compare properties of "MARS" and "EARTH."

Now we can use the Spy Comparison Tool to get properties of both objects and compare at the same time as shown below.

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On September 1, 2017 the HPE testing tools officially became Micro Focus. It is too early to see how the transition to Micro Focus will change things. I am keeping an optimistic view that Micro Focus will continue to invest in R&D and place a priority on customer support. I believe a lot of long-time customers would like to see things run like they were back in the Mercury Interactive days, which was one of the most innovative software companies of its time. If Micro Focus develops the right strategy, they could become the dominant player in the software testing market.

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Author’s comments added 6/07/2016: Here are some interesting actual business cases at companies I worked at where automation (i.e. QTP/UFT) has been used to add productivity other than in a QA capacity.

1)   QTP/UFT can be used to send large volumes of emails to intended customers along with attachments. At a previous company we actually used QTP to automate this process that took an Excel input file with a field for Customer Name, email address, the text verbiage for the body of the email, and an indicator for which specific documents to attach and send using Outlook. We placed the documents in specific directories to be uploaded depending on the indicator in the input file. This automated process was very efficient and time-saving by sending out a large volume of emails with respective attachments with minimal problems. Eventhough at the time QTP was being used, UFT has the same functionality to execute the same process.

2)   At a previous health care company where I worked, when one of the clinical legacy systems was being decommissioned in place of a newer system, we were able to use an automated script to take the data from the legacy system and enter it into the respective fields of the newer system through the GUI (Graphical User Interface). This entailed downloading the data from the legacy system and importing the data into 12 separate Excel input files and running on multiple computers. This is an example of an unconventional but cost effective use of a QA automation tool.

3)   At a mortgage company that I worked at where previously a person or persons would have had to manually enter data into several fields while navigating through several screens, we were very successful in fully automating this process including logic and the specific values to enter into specific fields based on the conditions. For example, if one pre-populated field had a certain code, the script would use logic to programmatically enter the corresponding data into other fields. This saved the company time and resources by not having to hire people to enter the data manually. This one automated process saved the department sixty hours per week or 3,000 man hours per year.

Author’s comments added 12/26/2016: I originally wrote this product review for UFT 12.02. I updated this product review for UFT 12.54 to make the product review current along with the updated versions of technologies UFT 12.54 is compatible with.

Author's comments: This review has been updated to include UFT 14.03

If your concerns go beyond automating tests to providing evidence that specific tests were executed, what the test pass/fail status was, the user who executed it, the date/time of execution, UFT is top notch at providing test results because it has built in reporting features as well as allowing for customized output files showing exactly where a test step failed along with the timestamp. This is especially important for providing evidence that healthcare, insurance, defense, financial services, and mortgage companies might need, especially to furnish proof to auditors. UFT has at least one distinct advantage over Open Source tools. That is since UFT is an Enterprise tool, you do not have to download anything from the Internet which is good for Security reasons. Most Open Source tools that I am aware of require some form of download from the Internet which results in being less secure.

UFT has improved our organization because when we have regularly occurring releases of an application, we can have any QA team member execute a set of tests (i.e. regression suite) stored in ALM/Quality Center, let the tests run unattended and then examine the results after test completion. We are also able to determine if any of the Web page links are broken by using an instance of MSXML2.XmlHttp. We have a script that does this by retrieving all the links on a page and then reporting the Status for each link. For example, if the Status returned is 404 we know that the link is broken.

With certainty, the best feature of UFT is its compatibility with so many products, tools and technologies. It is a challenge currently to find a single tool on the market besides UFT that will successfully work for so many projects and environments. For example, UFT supports GUI testing of Oracle, PeopleSoft, PowerBuilder, SAP (v7.20), Siebel, Stingray, Terminal Emulator, Putty, and Windows Objects (particularly Dialog Boxes). Furthermore, UFT has the built-in functionality to import Excel input files.

For Web browsers, UFT 12.54 supports IE9, IE10, IE11, Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome (versions 31.0 to 54.9), Firefox (versions 27.0 to 49.0). Besides GUI testing, UFT supports database testing and API testing (Docker, WSDL, and SOAP).

For the first time ever, HP started to expand the testing capabilities of UFT (QTP) beyond Windows beginning with UFT 12.00. A UFT user can now run tests on Web applications on a Safari browser that is running on a remote Mac computer.

Sometimes it appears that UFT takes a while to open and sometimes will run slower than expected. Also, UFT uses a lot of memory. On this note, if you are running UFT on a virtual server I would add more RAM memory than the minimum requirements especially when using multiple add-ins. HP is pretty good about coming out with new patches to fix known issues and it pays for the user to check for new patches and updates on a regular basis.

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Author's Comments 9/29/2022: This review is an older review and I have since written a newer product review on 9/28/2022 about UFT One 15.0.1 that reflects the newer features of UFT and should be considered a replacement for this review.

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In my 10 plus years of hands-on experience using QTP (QuickTest Professional) and UFT (Unified Functional Testing), I have observed that there has been a lot of confusion among the testing community on what the difference is between the two tools. Therefore, I thought it would be beneficial to clarify what distinguishes UFT from QTP because it is important for the reader to know.

When considering UFT for your organization, I would first evaluate how large your QA department is and if you will have a business need to automate your functional and regression tests. HPE recently extended the demo license period from 30 days to 60 days which was a very wise and popular decision to give potential customers more time to install it and try it for free. Even if your company has a salesperson come in and demo UFT, I would highly encourage at least one of your developers or automation engineers to download and install it to explore for themselves the functionality and features included during the demo trial period. If your IT Organization can afford it, I would encourage the company to buy both ALM/Quality Center and UFT. The reason being that UFT is very compatible with ALM/Quality Center in several ways. First, the user is able to store the test results in ALM/Quality Center. Second, ALM/QC has a built in scheduler that can launch a suite of regression tests initiated by the user scheduling a particular date/time to run.

If your company is going to invest in UFT, I would encourage the company to do their due diligence in making sure that they hire an Automation Engineer well experienced with the HP tools. This person must be very good at writing VBScript and knowing all of the advanced tips and tricks in getting UFT scripts developed so they will run without stopping unexpectedly. The QA Automation Engineer must be able to write functions from scratch and know the difference between passing a parameter by Value and by Reference.

I would also encourage the company to use a Citrix Server for UFT to be installed on. The reason for this is that it is much easier to maintain the Citrix environment with respect to patches, Browser versions, etc., versus every user having to make sure their laptop or PC is up to date with patches. Also, Citrix can have multiple sessions and be accessed remotely.

AWS cloud SAP ,Java and MQ

able to identify exact root cause

HP Diagnostics is a very good monitoring tool especially for transaction level monitoring -- it shows hot spots which can be drilled down to DB level, table, query, SP's, record and field level and also at Object level, Classes level,method or Augment levels instead of pinpointing bottlenecks at layer level it goes deep inside for information. It has very good tracing capabilities despite being an agent based tool compared to other agent less monitoring tools. Overall a very good tool for monitoring application diagnostics for quick and easy resolution with help of thread information.

Drills down from slow, end-user transactions to the

bottle necked component, method, or SQL statement,

helping to solve memory, exception, and other

common problems

Key features and benefits

• Automatically detects all components touched by a business process and traces them with no user intervention

• Provides complete application visibility across the application lifecycle, enabling higher application quality when applications go live

• Reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR) in your J2EE, .NET, ERP, or CRM (SAP, Oracle®, PeopleSoft) environment

• Integrates fully with HP Business Availability Center software, HP LoadRunner, and HP Performance

Center.

Price is little expensive for number of license points and HP Diagnostics trainers are not available in market and no proper support from HP for any diagnotics level queries or issues.

8 years

no

Advantages:

• Find and solve more problems earlier in the life cycle

• Achieve higher quality by finding the most common application problems before applications go live

• Collect concrete data to support decisions to go live with an application

• Manage and monitor applications after they have gone live with role-based visibility to solve problems quickly

I am using Vertica for aggregations and dashboards.

The most valuable feature of Vertica is the ability to receive large aggregations at a very quick pace. The use case of subclusters is very good.

I have been using Vertica for three and a half years.

Over the last few months with the new release of Vertica, there have been stability problems. The performance should improve.

Vertica seems to scale well, except for one use case where you are on a multi-node cluster. For example, if you had a nine-node cluster, one node goes down, then the eight nodes don't scale, because the absence of the node is very apparent, which is a problem. If you have nine nodes or multiple nodes, the whole idea is that if one of those nodes goes down, then you should not see an impact on the system if you have enough capacity. Even though we have enough capacity, you can still see the impact of the one node going down.

We have approximately 25 people using this solution in my company. Most of the users are developers. We have been increasing usage of the solution.

The technical support from Vertica is good, but the fixes take a long time if there is a problem.

I rate the support of Vertica a three out of five.

I have not used another similar solution to Vertica.

We had assistance from Vertica with the implementation of the solution.

I would advise others to try the solution out.

I rate Vertica a seven out of ten.

As an administrator in our organization, I use it for provisioning, configuring different request types, workflows, and making adjustments therein; things on the higher-end side. 

As an organization, we use it for project management and defect tracking. 

We also use it for time tracking. That's one of the reasons we rolled it out to the cloud. We are also starting to get into program and portfolio management, which are things we hadn't done in the past.

The first advantage is that it helped us get away from using spreadsheets for time sheets. Also, many of our request processes that used to be paper-based have now been automated. We're also able to automate notifications to users to take away a lot of the busy work that teams were having to do to communicate with each other. And it has definitely helped our cross-team coordination and the handoffs that we have within our processes. It has also assisted with bottlenecking.

In addition, we have an integration with our help desk that allows tickets to be processed on the front end and in PPM in a much easier way than they would be on the help desk side and it allows notifications and SOAP messages to go back and forth between the applications. As a result, it has really streamlined our defect tracking process, and we're really hoping to see the same as we roll out into the future with the program and portfolio management aspects that are new to us.

On top of that, at a high level, it enables us to translate strategic plans into actionable investment strategies. We have our KPIs and business strategies in PPM and that's the way that management moves forward with our portfolios and programs. They are only willing to move forward with projects that line up with our strategic plans. The solution has definitely helped us flush that out. It gives us a place where everybody can see those things and be aware of what our business strategies are. Within our projects, we're able to see the strategies and end goals that are important to the organization. We can actually track which business objectives different projects are adhering to. That's a really cool feature that our management likes.

It gives me one place where I can do pretty much everything. If there is a project or portfolio, or even a request that I'm working on, I have the ability to charge time to each of them in PPM, instead of going through different systems. Even though we have the ability to integrate with Microsoft Project, I really like that PPM offers a one-stop-shop for everything. It saves a lot of time because I'm not going between different places or using paper forms to get information to management.

With PPM allowing us to streamline processes, get them all in one place, and automate handovers and notifications, it saves us between 15 and 20 hours a week on things that we would have otherwise had to do ourselves in emails and other types of coordination. It's made our processes a lot faster.

I like the ease of customization from an admin perspective. I'm really excited about some of the things that are coming in version 10.0.3 as far as what admins are able to do. 

I also really like how the program portfolio and project management roll up into each other. That's going to be a really good feature for our organization because we have a lot of things that are related, and it's nice to have things under one umbrella where we can go back to them. 

I also like the fact that it's not very difficult to integrate with other applications, as long as you have the right people with the right skill sets on board. I have seen us integrate with a couple of other cloud solutions and that was done fairly quickly. It's the ease of use and the ability to customize PPM that really work in our favor.

Another useful aspect is that the solution gives us a single place where teams can track and measure progress towards their goals. That it is very important from an upper management perspective. Part of the reason that they're using the application is to have a cohesive place for tracking business strategies and organizational goals, and to only implement projects that line up with them.

We have been asking for some enhancements in the domain management module. There are things that we have to ask about, whether they're even possible to implement, but they're more cosmetic, look-and-feel issues, rather than functionality.

We have been using Micro Focus Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) since 2007. We upgraded it over time but, in 2020, we finally migrated to the cloud.

We had a couple of issues with stability or performance degradation about a year ago, around the time of the initial rollout. Since then, we've only had two unexpected outages that were quickly resolved. 

Stability-wise, it's okay. When we were on-premises, we were just on Windows boxes and every month we would have some sort of performance degradation and we would need to clear the cache and restart the app servers, et cetera. We haven't had to do that as often. We're at least 75 percent more stable than we were before.

It's very scalable. That's one of the things that I like about it. You can change it and move around and make it work for you.

We have over 2,500 users.

I expect our usage will increase. Right now, it's being used by all of our IT department. Our usage has already increased from when we initially rolled it out. Prior to us moving to the cloud solution, it was used by about half of our organization that was focused on our eligibility systems. Then we opened it up to our IT business areas to use for time tracking and now it has been rolled out to the entire IT department. As we keep growing and continue to use the tool, we'll find more uses for it and that will definitely increase the number of users.

They have really good technical support. There hasn't been a question that I've asked or posted to our technical support team that hasn't been answered or addressed in some way.

They're doing a really good job with the application overall. It can't be too rigid to the point that you can't make it work for your organization. But they also have to be able to control the changes that go into it. The vendor has been prioritizing deployment of enhancement requests that have been voted on, and the speed at which they have released them has been gotten a lot faster. It fits how fast we need to move and how fast we actually need to make changes.

They're doing a really good job of innovating and updating features in PPM. That process used to be a little slower, but now it seems that when an enhancement request is prioritized or a hotfix is needed, they're right on it. We're getting fixes fairly fast, before the month is over.

Positive

We've always used PPM. We've used different versions and seen it grow up.

We were migrating from an on-premise solution to the cloud so we already had our own instance, obviously. It was a little complex because we already had integrations that needed to remain with us and business processors that would suffer if they had any real downtime. So while it was complex, at the same time, it was very much coordinated by the vendor that we're working with. It was a smoother process than I've seen with other integrations.

We started with training and user stories in April of 2020 and the initial rollout, including an upgrade, was completed around November 1st, 2020. We then had three more phases in the project. We initially rolled out resource management. Then we deployed project management, financial management, and finally program management. Now, we're working on custom reports. By the time we're completely done with the implementation, it will be November of 2022.

We also have an upgrade coming up in September. We deploy upgrades or updates to objects in the tool. We don't use deployment manager though, we just use the built-in deployment package methodology.

It's private, so it has to go through our DMZ. We have a private cloud, but we share data space on the Micro Focus side and we're partitioned off from anyone else.

We're working with Carahsoft as well as the Micro Focus professional services and SaaS teams.

They're very good at what they do. However, with the size of the project and the pace at which we were moving, it would have been better if, perhaps, there were better knowledge transfer and more focus on making sure that we understood all of the ins and outs, as opposed to just rolling forward and meeting timelines. 

There were little things that should have been completed by the vendor, things that we only found after the fact when we were already on another phase of the project. With a project this large, it's easy to lose track of small details. 

Other than that, it hasn't been a bad experience. There have been some hiccups along the way, but that's to be expected.

The jury is still out on whether it will help accelerate our delivery. We're still rolling it out. Having used it earlier on, I believe it will, but I'd really like to see the overall impact once this project is firmly nestled into the ground and we're no longer under the vendor's launching period.

Upper management looked at other solutions before they went ahead with PPM. Prior to using PPM, we had users who were using Salesforce and PMRS and a couple of other applications, but we consolidated all of those solutions and users into PPM.

I've had several other groups come to me about using PPM and the ability to customize it and make it work for them could make it a great solution, depending on what their processes are. I normally push them towards it, if they're looking to automate and get away from any kind of paper-based processes, or to get them out of using multiple systems.

PPM is a great tool, but it's like exercise or eating: You get out of it what you put into it. There's a fine level of detail that you could put into it that can make the solution really work for you. If you're not going to apply that, you're not going to get the most viable solution. PPM is one of those tools where more is better, in the beginning, to allow you to do less once you have everything implemented.

We hold financed data on the Vertica database, and clients use the data for reporting and other purposes.

Vertica provides benefits to our customers and helps with their performance.

The most valuable feature is Vertica's performance and the ease of using the database. Also, it is great for partnering with data.

We faced some challenges when trying to use the temporary tables feature. First, we installed Vertica on the AWS cloud and tried to read the data from Bitbucket to Vertica. We were able to read the data, but when we were trying to transform the data and load it into Vertica physical tables, we experienced performance issues.

Regarding additional features, we are unsure if Vertica has updated its features, but we've experienced difficulty in integrating with third-party tools. Clients use multiple technologies and value that integration. Sharing data with third parties should also be improved.

We have been using this solution for two years and are using the latest version.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. Initially, we had issues with the scalability, but with the new version, Vertica resolved the issues.

Regarding how many users are using this solution, I do not have a specific number, but our organization is large. So, for example, in a unit with about fifteen clients, two to three clients use Vertica.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Snowflake claims to have many more features than Vertica, but we cannot compare both solutions as we have not used Snowflake. However, if Vertica integrates the use of third-party tools, it would be great and more competitive.

Scaling is definitely one of the best features of this solution. There are no issues scaling to 10,000 or 20,000 concurrent users.

This tool gives you a lot of options. It gives you hyper correlation, etc., requiring much lower programming scans. It's very user-friendly.

Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional supports other tools and protocols, such as SAP, Citrix, web services, etc.

Analyses are more in-depth and more detailed, and slicing and dicing is very easy. You can pinpoint load APIs at any point in time. You can know what was happening at a specific minute with regard to your requests, headers, response time, exceptions, etc. It has great reporting capabilities.

In terms of resource management, you need a lot of high capacity boxes if you need to generate a load of 1,000 or 2,000 users.

This solution has AJAX protocol or TruClient protocol, which gives you frontend stats and web vitals with very few details. This could be integrated further to exactly map any other leading tools for frontend analysis. That is, it needs further enhancements.

Easy maintenance would be good because now if you want to upgrade the version from X to Y, it takes a couple of days. There has to be downtime as well. Operation processes should be faster and should not have an impact for more than a couple of hours.

I've been using it for more than eight years.

Technical support is very good. We have a dedicated POC for Micro Focus. Although we have to follow the process of submitting tickets and waiting for a response, if it's a P zero issue, then we can directly connect with the technical person who has been allocated to us.

The SaaS version is quick and easy to set up. The on-premises version has a lot of challenges, especially related to the DB. You need to have a particular DB version to store the user data. Also, you have to depend on additional licensing from a database side. For instance, if you have Oracle, then you would need an additional license for the Oracle user.

The licensing is on a yearly basis and is relatively expensive.

If your team doesn't have much exposure to the development side, this is a good solution because you don't need much customization. You get a lot of automated features.

I would definitely recommend choosing the SaaS option rather than the on-premises option. The on-premises version has a lot of issues. For example, I'm dealing with version 12.63, and very soon, this particular version will be obsolete in terms of support. You will have to keep updating it in order to get the support for your version.

If you're looking for a tool which gives you more insight and you're ready to pay some extra dollars for it, then you should go for Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional. However, if you need a simple, aim-and-shoot tool for load testing and getting stats out, then you probably don't need this tool that has an expensive license.

Apart from the cost, Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional is one of the natural product choices in the industry. So, I would rate it at nine out of ten. If the cost were relatively lower, then I would've given it a ten.

We have activated multiple modules of the solution, such as Demand Management, Resource Management, Time Management, and Project Management. We have done some customizations on the workflows for all of the modules.

Project and Portfolio Management has helped us save on resources and time. For example, we had an old solution for demand management in which we need to get approvals via email. But with the Demand Management module in PPM, we have all approvals in the system itself. Over the course of a week, it saves us two working days or about 15 hours. It used to take a lot of time to get approvals through email and on paper.

Overall, it has helped accelerate our organization's delivery by up to 10 percent.

The ease of customization of the tool means I can support multiple departments in our company.

Our users find it easy to use the service and the forms. And the Project Management module is one of the best modules that they work on.

It is very important that the platform gives us a single place where we can measure progress toward goals, as we have weekly meetings with the CTO. We present these consolidated overviews and dashboards to him so that he has an overview of all the projects and can see the status of all the problems that we have and we are working on.

We are using the Financial Management module for projects and also demands and proposals and it is sufficient. But there are some limitations when it comes to attaching receipts. For example, if we are going to buy some non-labor-related assets such as hardware, we are not able to attach the receipts in the Financial Management module in version 9.41. I don't know if they may have made some modifications to this in later versions.

I would also like to see additional reports for capacity in the Resource Management module.

I have been using Micro Focus Project and Portfolio Management for three years.

This is one of the most stable products from Micro Focus and one of the most excellent products we have.

The scalability has been good so far. We haven't had any issues with it. We have about 200 users who use it for project management, timesheets, and some business resources.

We are using version 9.41 of PPM, but we are working on building our roadmap to upgrade to the next one. We are planning to have multiple instances of the platform, so we are investing in the product. But up until now, we have only been using one instance.

We are going to discover what Micro Focus' ability is to add and update features in the new version. But what we have seen from the demos is that they have added many valuable features for resource management and financial management and KPIs.

We had a support case with them a long time ago and our experience with them was good.

Positive

Before we had Micro Focus PPM, we used Microsoft Project Professional and we had a lot of constraints regarding resource management. It only gave us a project management module, it didn't have other types of management or the ability to implement a lot of customization.

Our management team wanted to link demand management and project management, meaning once we had a proposal or a demand, and it became a project, they needed a link between those two modules in one system. So they decided to move to Micro Focus PPM. We have removed the Microsoft solution from the environment.

The initial setup was straightforward. The actual work of the installation took just one day.

It doesn't need much maintenance. We don't need to manage it a lot.

We used a Micro Focus partner. Our experience with them was more than excellent. They were very supportive.

We have integrated the solution with Jira and it was easy to do and use the two platforms. We have also integrated it with Micro Focus ALM for application life cycle management and that was easy as well. We are new to the Agile process so we're still in the testing phase of this transformation. But management has embraced it.

My advice is to build your procedures and workflows well from day one so that you don't face any issues with the modules. Changes in the workflows take time.

The bank purchased PPM in 2016 because our system was out of support. We decommissioned that and switched to Micro Focus PPM. We have the full suite covering project management, work plans, risk management, and project issues. We've done a lot of customization to the bank's requirements.

We work with a PPM vendor partner and their developers. When we want enhancements or new features, we work with them to deploy the changes. We work closely with the developers for preliminary testing and user acceptance testing. After it goes live, we do another round of testing. 

We do a lot of financials as well. When we work with the project managers to manage their resourcing requirements, it's built into the staffing profile of each project record that we load into PPM. They translate to a labor forecast calculation automatically. The project managers can also manage their forecasts so they can manually update them directly into their project records. 

Before Micro Focus PPM, we had three separate systems. One held project information, another held resourcing requirements, and a third managed timesheets. They weren't integrated, and we had to support each system. Now, everything is in one tool, improving visibility and integration. Dashboard reporting is also easier. We have another tool integrated with PPM that extracts the data from it and refreshes the dashboards instantly. 

PPM helps us translate strategic plans into actionable investment strategies because our executive committee uses it in their investment decisions. Information in PPM can be used to decide which initiatives to prioritize and which to delay based on the bank's strategy. It helps them determine which initiatives require more funding and which need to be trimmed down.

We added a new PPM feature in the last year or two. For each initiative or project loaded into PPM, the project managers must raise what we call "value measures." In these metrics, they need to indicate the actual value being delivered. It's mandatory. The value measures are used for a lot of the assessments being done. If someone asks for a certain amount of project funding, the decision-makers can do a cost-benefit analysis. You must demonstrate the project's estimated value when you ask for funding.

Regarding PPM's ability to help us achieve goals, I would rate it a nine out of ten. All the project and portfolio management features are in one tool. It provides real-time information to support decision-making, and it's easy to integrate with other tools. 

At the bank, some delivery teams do agile while others still do the traditional waterfall. PPM is suitable for both methods. PPM has helped us save resources by consolidating teams. Before PPM, we had three teams providing support for three systems. Now we only have one support team for the tool the entire bank uses. 

Planning and budgeting are vital to achieving our organizational goals. It's a ten on a scale of ten. Our leaders are focused on resourcing because they want to use the funding for projects that matter and are aligned with the bank's strategy. They are looking closely at costs and trying to bring the funding asks for our projects down to a certain amount. 

PPM has sped up project delivery because we have a process where everything has to go through checkpoints. The projects that are delivered are those that have been thoroughly vetted. PPM has helped determine which projects will be delivered. 

I like the automated calculations, especially on the resource side. When project managers enter their resource requirements into their staffing profiles, they are automatically translated into labor forecast calculations. PPM automates a significant portion of the forecast calculations. Timesheets are also built-in. We automatically process time sheets and bill them accordingly. 

PPM provides a consolidated view of our teams and their progress toward goals, which is essential. The bank has invested a considerable amount of funds into these projects. The executive committee must have an overview of the value that these projects bring to the banks. They need to ensure that each project is aligned with the bank's strategy and brings value to our customers, stakeholders, or employees.

All the information decision-makers need can be found in PPM. We've integrated PPM data into other tools that provide real-time reporting to create dashboards. The audience for those dashboards is the executive committee. When they need to know what's happening, they have instant visibility. The bank uses information in PPM to decide on which initiatives to prioritize. PPM has several built-in dashboards, but we also build customized ones.

I haven't worked with the Kanban feature, but we use the other portfolio views. It's helpful, especially now that we are driving the portfolio views. Each portfolio manager uses dashboards to manage the collection of projects in their portfolio. There are many dashboards available that I am still unfamiliar with because I don't use all of them. 

The portfolio structure was set up a long time ago, and PPM allows us to have a wide-lens view of our portfolios, and we can drill down into a specific portfolio and see all the objectives within it. And within each goal, we can also drill down to see particular initiatives that belong to the objective. The hierarchy is quite clear. We also have a portfolio to view financials. 

We have "theme backlogs," initiatives that have already been incorporated into the portfolio but are waiting for the funding to be approved. Theme backlogs have their own project information, including staffing profiles, financial summaries, and forecasts. Those are used in decision-making. There's a consistent quarterly review of these backlogs, and the executive committee uses the information inside those backlogs to decide which ones will proceed through to becoming actual themes.

It's easy to integrate agile tools and synchronize the execution layer back into PPM. I work with the support team providing first-level support to all the bank users end to end. When we need changes or a new feature, we raise them within PPM. That's one customization we did. We submitted our internal change requests within PPM and worked closely with the Micro Focus partner vendor, which does much of the development.

We assess which ones we can do, prioritize them, and they roll out the changes within a month or a few days for a minor change. We do a lot of enhancements. There are at least a couple every quarter. The partner vendor quickly deploys changes and new features. It's one of the features we could "sell" to the internal users of the tool. 

We tell them, "If you find something that you think would be useful that isn't in PPM yet, let us know, and we will place a change request." It's one of the most important features because our users are demanding. They want certain features. Micro Focus regularly rolls out significant upgrades and new features, but we don't necessarily use all of them. 

Our boss is satisfied with PPM, and I don't think the bank will replace it with another product soon. It is constantly evolving, and they have been responsive to our customers' feature and enhancement requests. They often come out with features we had never considered, but when they roll them out, we see how useful they are. That's one reason we are staying with PPM. It's adaptable. We're bringing in other departments and customizing it according to their requirements. 

Sometimes features in PPM don't work as expected, or our users request a new feature. Typically, our partner vendor can deploy those changes. But there have been a few instances when we had to raise it with Micro Focus because it's beyond the ability of our partner vendor. When we raise the issue with Micro Focus, it sometimes takes time because it needs support from other customers using PPM, not just our bank. It goes through a voting system. Other customers need to vote for the feature. The features that get the most votes will possibly be added. 

I have been using PPM since 2016, so it has been six years.

After six years of providing end-to-end support to our users, I can say PPM is highly stable. Our vendor partner addresses bugs quickly, and we can discover the cause if there is an outage.

The scalability is excellent. We have at least 10,000 users working with PPM, including employees who use it for timesheets and project managers. We plan to increase usage. For example, only technology teams use PPM for timesheets, but they plan to get the business project staff to use the timesheet features, too. It hasn't been deployed yet, but it's under discussion. The user base will most likely increase. 

I rate Micro Focus support a nine out of ten. The support we receive from Micro Focus and their partner vendor has been immensely helpful. They're highly responsive, and their partner vendor has a high degree of technical expertise. They understand the product. Each time we have a change, they can perform an analysis and provide recommendations.

Positive

We were experts in the old systems, so it was easy to transition to PPM in terms of understanding the concepts. We know concepts like resource management, staffing profiles, labor forecasting, etc. However, we had difficulty supporting the old system while transitioning into the new one. We needed to understand the technical aspects of the new system, but we didn't have step-by-step training. 

It was just hands-on and going with it and then slowly building up our knowledge about it and us defining the process, which was great because we had control over explaining the process. It's just that it was a bit difficult at the beginning because we needed to get the technical knowledge part, and there wasn't really step-by-step training.

For deployment, we had three people from the vendor and two from our support team. The remaining team members were supporting the old systems at that time. The core team had five people, but there were ten people altogether on the PPM project team. 

The partner vendor developed the tools based on requirements from different departments, including finance and technology teams. The support team was there to understand the technical aspects because we were the ones who brought it to the service center team, and we would eventually provide BAU support. We had to understand the system, the tool, and the features. The project team had a business analyst and project manager coordinating with various departments because we had to include people from the finance and technology teams to define that requirement.

We worked with a Micro Focus partner vendor called BPM. They were highly skilled experts with a lot of technical and process knowledge.

I rate Micro Focus PPM a nine out of ten. To implement PPM, you need a dedicated team to learn and provide support. They need to build knowledge and work hand in hand with the partner vendor. In our case, its configurations and other highly technical aspects stay with a partner vendor because they are the experts. We left the development and configuration to them. Our support team, which I belong to, focuses on the end-user experience, and we support them. 

We act as consultants to the end users. I think that's a good model. If we take on the technical part in-house, we would need to build those technical capabilities again when there are changes within the team, like people leaving or moving to other roles. Instead, we rely on the partner vendor for expertise.