Planview Portfolios Reviews

Currently, we're building out a model for managing work for timesheets in Enterprise One, and then syncing that work to LeanKit for teams that want to use LeanKit. This would include test agile costing functionality, as my organization shut down that feature before I joined, and now I want to run it as a test case due to the fact that I believe that we need it.

I can't provide any specific metrics at this time, considering the infancy of the project, and my joining the organization. The company's go-live was as of August 8th this year. 

However, in the short time I've been here, and since they went live in August, the people who may have been naysayers, after closing on the first month of financials and then comparing actual data, actual timesheet data, actual work performed to forecasted dollar amounts, have had a light bulb go off. They're seeing now where our money's going, why it's going there, and how it's going there. Now, it's prompting the right type of what-is-the-status questions. I'm seeing that. I just don't have any data to provide other than hearing people profess that in meetings.

We use E1 to track scope, schedule and financials for R&D projects. Some R&D teams even use E1 for RCCP. 

E1 used to be used to track Transformation projects.

E1 have a very useful tool to bring accountability back into projects, make it very easy for us to assign teams and resources to activities in project and track the progress effectively.

It has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives, the leadership has been using E1 for Strategic alignment of Projects.

It helps us keep track of the salary/ hours spent on R&D projects using the time tracking feature, which enables project managers keep track of salary charges as we have hourly labor rates associated with BU's.

But  an issue that we are facing currently is most of the engineers have to submit their time sheets on multiple tools and since planview E1 is being used for only R&D project, the engineers opinionate that it is counter productive to enter timesheets, we are also not well versed with Lean costing to implement in the Org. 

We also track various project metrics which makes it simpler for Leadership to view the details.

Lifecycle management for projects is also commendable, where we have multiple types of projects. 

It is primarily used for project and portfolio management within the technology department. Only our technology department is using it. It is what we use to manage our technology work in terms of resource assignment, timesheet submission and entry, and work schedule.

We're on version 18. They do monthly versions, so we are just a couple of months behind at this point. We're using the June 2021 version.

Enterprise One's view into resource capacity and availability helps us in managing work. We are able to see the capacity of the team and the capacity of the resources. Once you're aware that a team is above and beyond its capacity, you can go back and look at the work that they have scheduled and try to reprioritize any work if need be. If Enterprise One is showing us that the team is over capacity, then it is likely that some of the work that they have scheduled and is in the backlog won't be completed within the indicated timeframe. For example, if we're looking at a forecast through the end of this year and it is showing that the team is above their capacity, then it allows us to go back and at least start talking about how do we reprioritize the work that's scheduled for them, what can be pushed away, or what can be deprioritized.

With Enterprise One, we can see the end-to-end work management. It provides 60% to 70% capability for the end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work. 

We have it lined up against our strategic initiatives, so we're able to see underneath those initiatives what work is being completed and get at least a high-level view of when that work is scheduled to end. With Enterprise One, we have the ability to see that alignment clearly in one view or in one source, and it is a source that is maintained more frequently. In the past, it was typically done in spreadsheets, and because different versions of spreadsheets may have been passed around, you wouldn't know what the true reflection or the true status was. So, it has helped us in terms of being able to align the work and the strategic initiatives clearly within one tool or within one source. If any adjustments are made, those adjustments are visible to anybody who has the necessary permissions and access to see them. So, it has probably helped us in terms of accuracy for work and strategic alignment, but it is hard to put data around that. It has definitely helped us with being able to clearly see the big-picture alignment. Knowing that any changes that are made are instant, and we have one true source of this visibility is very helpful.

Enterprise One has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. It is used to help with those discussions at a senior leadership level. So, it has been helpful because the visibility of how much work is being done and the potential cost of the work helps people make that decision. They do use data out of Enterprise One to come up with how they need to prioritize it. So, it is a contributing factor, but I wouldn't say it is the only thing that is used for prioritization determination. It may be has made us 25% more efficient in terms of knowing how to prioritize. That's simply because we have that visibility and a true source or one source where we can see where work is and where resources are. So, at least, that's a contributing factor, and there has been an impact there.

Enterprise One allows program managers to group work together and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. It makes everything more effective because you're able to see where work is aligned. The way we've configured and structured it, work has to be aligned under a particular initiative. So, the program managers can certainly see all the active work that is going underneath their program. It definitely makes it more effective for them to manage their work and be able to make certain decisions.

With Enterprise One, you can drill down to the individual work items and the resource assignments from the high-level program. It did affect the ability in a good way because program managers can look at it initially from a program manager's lens. They'll see the high-level status of where everything is aligned, and then they can start to drill down. If they think that one project might be overburdening or spending more than what was planned, they can drill down to see where that impact is.

We have a smaller organization than some of the other organizations. We have 10 project managers. We manage it for the customer experience division for electronic arts. Therefore, we do only projects wrapped around how to improve our customer experience. Anybody who plays our games, we want to manage those projects to make life better for our customers.

We are able to organize work. Prior to Enterprise One, the organization had no visibility in the projects that we were doing. We had people doing random projects, and we didn't know if they were benefiting the business or harming the business. The fact that we have visibility into the work that we're doing along with the status of the work that we're doing has been incredibly impactful.

The solution’s integrated product portfolio has transformed our organization’s strategy as we continue to roll out different products. We started with Enterprise One. We now have Projectplace and are looking to use Spigit. We are also looking at all the different integrations with JIRA and Workday. It really has transformed the way that we do panel work and approach our work and company.

We use Enterprise One for the formal things in our organization that have been gated. So, we go through our fiscal year roadmap and we have X amount of things approved. All of those things are required to go through Enterprise One. There were some required to do phase-gate exits and all of those principles. Then, we have the Projectplace that is more task-oriented, and we have a ton of users on that. That is more task, activities, and people looking at doing agile work or combined work. We found a way to use these tools together. Hooking them together, we will do some great reporting. There are some cool things that we're trying to do with those two that will really change the way that we will work.

These are two different teams. The people who are on Projectplace were never Enterprise One candidates. The fact that we were able to get them to use one of our Planview tools and see that there is potential in it, maybe in the future they will be the ones who are running these projects and programs. Or, at least they'll have an idea of what the Planview tools can do. So, we feel like we're in a better starting place with them.

They have the PRM portion and the CTM portion. We predominantly use the PRM portion. We have installed the CTM portion, but we have not put it into production. We concentrate mostly on the PRM portion. Within the PRM, we use the Strategy module, the Planning module, the Work module, and the Resource module.

Our production has the July 2021 release. We typically take two to three months to upgrade. We are in the process of upgrading to the October release at the end of the month.

Its view into resource capacity and availability helps us in managing work. It helps our management team to see where the demand is and whether we have the capacity, which allows us to ramp up and ramp down so that we do not have any constraints. Even if we have the budget, we might not have the resources to fulfill the demand. So, that gap has greatly reduced for us. 

It allows us to create summary reports across multiple projects. They have provided reports, and we also develop our own reports for certain specific needs of our business. Because we are on-prem, we have the ability to create those custom reports within our own environment. There has been no issue with what we want, and we're getting that information. These summary reports help us a lot in sharing the big picture with the management. There is visual and graphical information that we can drill into. We can see how things are happening and dig into the raw data that is feeding the charts.

It has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with our strategic objectives. We use the Strategy module, the Planning module, and the Work module to get that visibility. About five or six years ago, we used to do all of this in spreadsheets. We had to maintain multiple versions of those spreadsheets, and we would miss things. The result used to come to us, and then we had a huge amount of work at hand to replicate all of that into Planview where we were only using the Work module. Planview has replaced all those spreadsheets, and with the additional improvements that Planview is making and where it is right now, we can bring into place both agile and hybrid models of project management. In a short time, we were able to wean our users away from spreadsheets. The system is supporting them. So, there is one source of truth.

It provides various types of resource assignments for assigning work to people. We do demand management for when a project comes in and there is an ask for funding and different types of resources. So, we make use of both the requirements and reservations. 

It increases our on-time completion rate. When a particular project extends or crashes, it gives us visibility on the demand within a particular month, which helps in managing our teams. If there is a requirement for an additional resource, they can bring someone in. They can also move someone out. Projects are not an island. There are multiple projects, and a task of one project may be dependent on another task or other projects. Planview gives us the ability to link tasks from one project to the other project. Their Dependency Management module provides visibility to the program managers and the project managers who are managing those individual projects. They are able to see where the demand is and their bottlenecks, which helps them in better management. We have seen our project teams having more success. We have never seen any kind of surprises and delays. People know in advance if there is going to be a delay because of its features. When some task gets finished sooner, other project teams get to know that they can start their task sooner. This way, our time-to-delivery has actually improved.

We use it for contractor and associate contracting which reflects directly to project resource, "our spend". We do a calculation based on the vendor that the contractor is through, as well as each associate has a per hour rate that is applied to the project to attract the spend applied to that project from the resources. 

We also track the number of hours spent per application. Every application in our bank has the application code that we tied back to Planview so that we can track and see how much time is spent within the application, either with upgrades, maintenance or break-fix type of situation and also to report. It's primarily for tracking reporting.

Enterprise One has improved my organization with the ability to look at the hours that people track. Prior to Enterprise One we didn't have any estimation model. As we grow within Enterprise One, we're able to pull reporting to see how much time it takes for each individual person or a team to perform a task to complete a project. So with that, we're able to start building that model to estimate the approximate number of hours for each task so that when we provide that to project managers, it reduces the amount of time building the project plan because they've already had that base model to use for each of those tasks. It's created our ability to forecast how much time it would take to perform specific tasks that are very similar to each other. 

It also improved our communication. Prior to Enterprise One, there was not that much communication between project managers and resource managers. So that when a project manager went out to Microsoft Office or to Microsoft Project to schedule a resource for a task, which they actually didn't, they have to have a separate spreadsheet. They would put down a number of hours and it was just a guess. A resource manager would then come back and say, "They can't do that." It was very back and forth. It wasn't like a synergist, a single point of information where everyone looking at the same thing, it was back and forth. So with a project manager entering just random hours and just guessing to get a specific dollar amount or to fit a specific dollar amount it was a lot of work on the project managers to try to adjust it to fit in with that dollar amount.

Now, with Planview, with them being able to see as soon as the project manager submits a request for some hours, the resource manager can communicate with that project manager instantly and say, "It won't do that. It's not going to take that much time". And then when it comes back where the resource is actually entering the hours on the task, there's an exact number. So it's hard to put a number on how many hours were saved or how accurate it's going to be because we're still growing. But prior to this, the accuracy was really, really off. It was terrible, but now we're getting more and more accurate where we're in the, I would say, closer to 70% accurate on the estimations. So it's getting really close to being very accurate.

Enterprise One helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. We use what we call Roadmap, Roadmap items under the planning and capacity section. We're the best at the capacity section. With the Roadmaps, our department heads are able to categorize the project by rank. By ranking those we're able to, especially during this COVID period, we've seen so many projects get pushed down to the bottom or completely removed due to the inability to complete those or the return on investment not being there. It really helped a lot with that planning, investment, and capacity planning.

In terms of the flexibility of configuring assignment, my other administrator and I actually came up with that solution. We decided that was the best way to go primarily because at the state that we are in our company, the project managers weren't mature enough to utilize allocations and the resource managers weren't mature enough to reject or approve those allocations. And that was causing people to be over-allocated because they weren't charging time. Because it the estimation on the number of hours needed was completely off. They were just putting however numbers in there. The resource would show over-utilized 1,300%, 1,300% and it would just throw off all of our reporting.

We cracked down on it. We had people to start utilizing the utilization percentage. Making sure that they had that communication line with the resource manager since we have our estimate as growing. But with the reserve and authorization, being able to authorize an entire team to a specific task and reserve them, allowed us to easily create the schedule that works best for that agile environment. Especially with the specific number of hours used for each person that was really easy to use those types of assignments.

We use it for change control for all IT changes in the organization. It is used to do the project work for anything that is changing from the technology perspective. We also use it for forecasting and planning work on the projects. We don't do detailed planning in Planview.

We are using the July 2021 version. It is a cloud version. We use Planview's cloud. They host it for us.

Having a single source of the truth, specifically with the integration with Power BI, enables us to give leadership more relative content for decision-making. From being just a local project manager and reporting status type of a tool, it is now being leveraged heavily in the executive decision-making process. They meet every month with summary reports that we generate to make decisions.

It has helped with the prioritization of projects. That's a part of the reporting process. From an IT perspective, we've gotten better at the delivery process. We're not, by any means, near great yet, but it is a journey that we're starting. Over the last two years, we've had a lot of adoption because of senior leadership's involvement, and therefore, things are moving more aggressively towards that point where it is more relative to what we do on a day-to-day basis.

It allows program managers to group work together and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. It puts the data that the program managers need right in a single source. However, they don't do capacity planning and capacity management in Planview. So, while they can see their burn rates, the resources that they're using, and the roles that are being leveraged, they don't actually use it for capacity planning.

We use it for high-level milestone management. We use it to see if projects are falling behind. We also use it for change control and financial reporting. Our senior leadership makes decisions based on the data that is reported out of Planview. So, it is used not for detailed project planning but rather for executive reporting and consolidating the information down into manageable pieces.

It definitely improves the change process when things are running behind. When we didn't have a tool or when we didn't use Planview necessarily, data was more or less the opinion of the project manager or the program manager who would then say that we're just going to push this date out. Because there was nothing locked in stone, it was just reported that we're going to make a little change here and a little change there. They moved dates, and everybody agreed verbally. There was no question of you didn't complete on time, whereas now, the system asks about your target date. If you change that target date on a huge project by a couple of days or two or three weeks, it is obvious. Previously, where you wouldn't notice it because there was no real firm tracking mechanism, today, it stands out. When the date goes from January 1st to January 29th, the system shows that as a variance or a change. Now, it is obvious when things move, and you know when things aren't completing on time. With the reporting that we're doing to the leadership team, they can see when things aren't going as planned.

We have historically used it for resource management and project, so, work management. They're maturing different pieces of the resource management and the work management to leverage some of that. Other use cases that we've started with would be planning, strategies and outcomes. We have it initially built out from a beginning use case and continuing to mature that as we roll out some change in the organization of moving to a strategically managed portfolio, not just a tech portfolio.

The more we have access to data and being able to portray the reality of the situation, as long as people are managing the data right, we have more opportunity to make data-driven decisions as we move forward. As we look at what's happening in a project and its execution throughout the lifecycle, its understanding where they're at, what they're doing, what challenges they are having, and what their forecast looks like. Are they going to be able to meet some of those milestones, or do we think that the data says they may have some challenge? And then we can ask the anecdotal and the non-data-driven questions about what's happening. It helps us drive to ask more pointed questions and dialed-in conversations.

Enterprise One has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. That's what we're getting to implement now. We're working through the hierarchy and the alignment piece right now with our executive leadership. And what I'm excited about is we'll be able to show them the alignment in data and reports. As we move through the planning process, it's not just being tracked outside of that and it's not just conversational, it's about understanding what they're wanting to do, how it aligns, and then not only the strategy but the outcome because that's the important part.

We can determine if something is our strategy, what our desired outcome is, then how it aligns, and how it is going to add value. I'm excited about what it's going to bring into our planning as we move forward from here. This was something I've been looking forward to for quite a while, so I'm glad we're turning the corner to implement that.