Planview PPM Pro Reviews

We use the solution to help us run a project management office (PMO). 

Planview integrated well into our Agile framework and methodology by adding an Agile process and features. 

The status reporting is the most valuable feature as it's easy to use; it's simple for project managers to enter their information, and the reporting features are very flexible.

Planview PPM enables us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management life cycle. We were able to garner some best practices by using Planview templates, but they are also flexible enough to modify without having to customize the solution. The distinction between ''customize'' and ''configure'' is important here. 

When it comes to viewing projects and timelines, the solution is excellent. The views are easy to access and highly configurable. 

The solution provides managers with the insight they need to empower decision-making and help them manage risk, as it allows them to see when projects are over budget and behind schedule. 

Planview helped to reduce project delays because we can see when they occur and take proactive steps to remedy the situation.  

Additional Agile capabilities, including integration with the Agile development app, would be welcome features.

I've used the solution for around seven years. 

In terms of stability, the solution is powerful, flexible, and highly configurable.

Planview increased the scalability of its product over the years, so it's very scalable now. It used to be an issue, but they've addressed it. Our whole IT department uses the solution.

The technical support is excellent and responsive. Planview has a very active user community that they promote.

Positive

I've used every leading PPM solution, and I was contracted by a client of Planview.

The initial deployment was straightforward, and there was a lot of functionality out of the box. It took three to four months. 

I was the consultant for the deployment. I was the product owner, and I also managed the PMO. 

We have seen an ROI; there's no doubt about that.

My advice is to pay attention to integration opportunities to reduce your licensing cost with Planview. There are additional costs for consulting services and advanced customer support. 

I rate the product nine out of ten. 

Creating a new project using the solution takes five minutes. 

Building a team within a project is flexible using the resource management features as long as the hierarchy is built ahead of time. It's relatively easy.  

The product's task management features are pretty basic and work fine; there's nothing uniquely special about them. They affected our project management process in that we can simultaneously have a single source of truth for all our projects.

Planview's time-tracking abilities are flexible, providing it can easily integrate with the financial system of record or a separate time-tracking solution. The key here is the integration with other systems.

Integration between Microsoft tools is not one of their strengths, though the solution integrates well with MS Teams and not so well with MS Project. I prefer to use Planview versus the MS PPM solution for many reasons, not least because the MS PPM solution requires a lot of customization and doesn't have many out-of-the-box features.

The biggest lesson I learned using the solution is that it would be a good idea to reach out to Planview's R&D department to coordinate planning with their future releases.

We're using Daptiv for project portfolio management.

The company finally has software to track projects. We didn't have that before that. So now we're able to measure and track our projects at a portfolio level. It has substantially improved our ability to meet deadlines.

Daptiv is a project management tool, so it's pretty straightforward. The ability to manage projects and programs has been beneficial for us.

The resource management tab is clunky, inefficient, and slow. And from a portfolio manager perspective, it would be nice if there were an easier way to view enterprise-wide resourcing to manage my team more effectively. Still, looking into other teams, I had to build my own tools.

The company has been using Daptiv for about two years, but I've only been with the company for a little over a year.

I think Daptiv is a stable platform. We've had some performance issues every once in a while but nothing noteworthy.

We're a small outfit. We don't have a lot of people logging in at once, so I don't think we're a good use case for that. Our entire IT department has fewer than 200 people, and I'd say we have like 30 people tops in the system. They're resource managers for the most part. I've got six project managers that are in there regularly. Then there are other people who are not within the PMO doing some project management. They go in and do some updates maybe once a week. It's very few people, and it's mostly my team that's using the platform. So it's a tiny group who are heavy users. We're constantly trying to get people to log in. It's not that extensive, but I'd like to try and make it as extensive as possible.

Our Daptiv admin mostly handles support, so I haven't had much personal experience with that. However, I will say that we've had a good relationship with Planview customer service. I heard it was somewhat of a disaster before we got a dedicated customer service representative. Our client manager has been great. I don't know who her predecessors were, but my predecessor was on the verge of trying to switch solutions. That's how bad it was. So I've had an extremely good experience.

Daptiv was deployed before I joined the company, so I don't know anything about the installation. As far as maintenance goes, we have one person who is our data analyst and Daptiv administrator, but outside of that, we don't require anyone else to maintain the solution. Since it is SaaS, we only have to do a few housekeeping tasks on our end, such as people management and resource management. For instance, adding or removing user accounts when people join or leave the company. Other than that, there is just a yearly project cleanup maintenance.

Our current license is from 2019 to 2022. So for that three-year subscription, it was $60,000 for the subscription, users, platform, and connections. Then there were some add-ons. Connecting to some of our other systems like HR for that period cost us around $12,000. And then for customer service, we paid $18,000 for three years, so $6,000 a year. There were also some additional fees, including $35 annually for portfolio management and $60 for the license renewal.

I'd give Daptiv an eight out of 10. So much of your relationship with your partners is through your client partner, and ours has been fantastic. The sales guy who is assigned to me has also been extremely helpful. Their customer service is great, and the project management tool itself is helpful. 

I had previously been doing a lot of this stuff manually. When I was a consultant, I used Excel on a project-to-project basis. This is the first time I've used a project management tool since 2009, when I used HP's solution. God only knows who owns that now. So I think it's a good tool. I like it. And Planview listens. They're trying to move forward. My concern is now that another company has acquired Daptiv, will I have to move to another solution sooner than later?

For anyone thinking about implementing Daptiv, I would say don't make the mistakes this company has made. There's no need to customize anything. Keep your customizations to a minimum if it's nothing new. I can't emphasize that enough. The less customization, the better. 

The company can only help me so much because of the customization they did. Just don't customize. Customize only if it's absolutely something you'll need in the future. Don't look into the past. Because I wasn't here for the implementation, I really can't complain about the implementation partner or the tool's limitations. However, I'm kind of hamstrung with all these customizations.

I would also suggest enabling the tracking of actuals. For someone ungodly reason, my predecessor and her boss decided not to turn on the tracking of actuals, and it's the bane of my existence. It means flying blind as to what people are actually working on versus just estimates.

We're mainly using this solution for project management. We are customers of Plainview and I'm a project coordinator. 

The solution is valuable because it gives our executives a high level of understanding of what's going on. I like the portfolio aspect that shows all the projects and the budget and you can see the priorities and whether the project is on track or not. It has good visibility. 

Entering day-to-day tasks is a tedious process for project managers. It needs some improvement. 

The solution is solid and pretty stable. 

The scalability is very good. 

Licensing costs are competitive enough. The price is reasonable given that the solution is geared towards large companies. 

We also evaluated Asana which is not quite as robust as PPM Pro. They're both good products but focus on different things. It's difficult to make a decision between them because each covers one area extensively. If you're involved in a team working in product development at a task level, I prefer Asana. PPM, on the other hand, pulls a lot of information at the project level whereas that is complicated if you're using Asana.

This is a solid solution and I think it's well-designed for the executive level, but there's still work to do when it comes to working with teams.

I rate the solution seven out of 10. 

We use it primarily for the resource management function. From a use case point of view, we use it across all our initiatives, such as projects, agile teams, etc. We also use the portfolio management function to provide us with our top-down, bottom-up planning. 

On the resource management side, prior to Daptiv implementation, most of our projects were running late causing a issues with the delivery of our products due to the limited number of resources we had available at any given time.

It provides us the means to optimize our resources by role and match them to the appropriate piece of work at the right time, without the overcapacity for that individual.

The scenario planning option provides us with the means to be able to evaluate our work in a variety of different situations. 

The dashboard and analytics function helps our executives and our directors in understanding what's going on across the company from a portfolio management point of view.

The resource management feature is certainly the most valuable for us. It is the supply and demand. Like most companies, one of the hardest nuts to crack is understanding where your people are and getting them to do the right thing at the right time. So, certainly, out of all the functionality, this has been the saving grace for us because it now provides us with the insight to do future planning and stop taking on more work than we are physically capable of doing as a company.

I've worked at many different companies in the past, and the customer service and the support from Daptiv are unlike anything I've encountered before and far excel any other company I've worked with. I always say to people that Daptiv is like another department in your own company as you do not realize they're a vendor.

The agile functionality can be improved. The tool was definitely built around the waterfall PMBOK PRINCE2 methodology, and although there are great functions within the tool for agile, it is often compared to dedicated tools like LeanKit or Jira. At the moment, the only integration we would have is to Jira itself, not to another Planview product. I believe that's coming in 2022 at some point.

There should be the ability to store historical functions, but this is not just for this tool. It is applicable to many tools. It would be great if we were able to store specific historical data, such as risk management.

We have been a user of Daptiv for about four years, but prior to that, we were also a user of the Changepoint system for two years. Planview bought Changepoint and Daptiv at the same time.

The solution has been pretty stable since implementation in 2018, with no real downtime due to issues out of our control.  That being said the few time we have encounter issues they have been dealt with very quickly and professionally by the company. 

A minor negative would be the time it takes to refresh data, but that could be attributable to our network traffic as much as an issue caused by the solution.

In terms of the project waterfall methodology, the scalability is there. We are seeing improvement around the agile side in the software, but it's not at a level we think we can reach in the timescale we have. However, with the Planview products on the market, we are looking potentially at something different to help us with that element of our work.

We have 250 licenses at the moment, and 80% of them are basic users. They are time-keepers who are just updating projects, etc. Probably 15% of them are in the management category, such as project manager, capability manager, and portfolio manager. So, they're the ones maintaining the workspace and the projects, and then, of course, we have about three or four users who are administrative. So, all in all, we only have three types of users in the system, and they are basic, management, and administrator.

At the moment, it is being extensively used in the IT department, which probably covers about a third of the company. We are currently trialing the software in other departments with the view of expanding out across the whole company at some point in the near future. What we are looking at is an end-to-end deployment. So, with it now joining the Planview family, there are other options we're looking at potentially to help us provide end-to-end functionality; for example, Spigit being the upfront or the idea-generating piece of tool to maybe LeanKit being with us for the agile element.

We find the platform to be very stable. The few times we've had to contact them have usually been after they had done a software update. We had encountered a couple of issues after that. Because we're a government department, and we deal with the gaming industry in British Columbia, we have a lot of firewalls and cybersecurity. So, one of the things we sometimes have problems with is their techs being able to get access to our system, but that's more a fault of our own because we lock down the system so tight. 

We have reached out to the techs a few times, and the work has been done pretty much straight away, depending on what we've asked. Any time we have encountered a problem, the customer service and the techs pretty much responded straight away, and most problems have been fixed within that 24-hour period. Those that couldn't be fixed are being worked on until they are done. So, there is nothing outstanding. The support from their side couldn't get any better. The fact that they have their own dedicated call center, that massive triage, and the queries going in also helps as well. You deal with the same people. So, when you have a problem, that individual stays with you from start to finish. I would definitely rate them a solid nine out of 10.

Positive

Before Daptiv, we used its sister product Changepoint. We switched because of the usability side. Changepoint, although a really good product, was too complex for our needs, and at the time, we were having issues. The Changepoint company had been bought out by the Daptiv company, and we switched over software at that point, which helped us with the adoption on our side.

I have, personally, used several different pieces of software from different companies: PowerSteering, Open Plan Professional, COBRA, Microsoft Solutions, et cetera.

For us, it was straightforward because we had the right people on our side to implement. We also had a customer service manager in the team supporting us. If the customer service manager wasn't able to work with us to understand what our business challenges and goals were and hadn't provided that customer success roadmap view of how we're going to get there, the implementation would've been longer than what we would've liked it to be. We became a test case for the company, and it only took us 90 days to implement the tool from start to finish, and since then, we've had a 94% adoption rate.

The actual prework, before the tool was turned on, probably took about two months. That was working ourselves to understand what we wanted and then converting that to a sort of roadmap and how we were going to turn the system on. When we turned the system on, it took about four weeks for us to get fully up and running at that point, so it took 90 days from start to finish.

We had an implementation strategy. We have our own internal strategy in regards to what we want to deliver and when and how we want to deliver it. So, from the tool point of view, it was about turning on the functions, and we did not want to boil the ocean. So, we decided to sit with our own internal stakeholders to understand the "why," that is, why we wanted this, and that was then converted into, "Okay. Then we're turning on this function first, and then 90 days later, we're going to turn on another function." The biggest problem that we encountered was when we changed our methodology from waterfall to agile, it, of course, changed our strategy and how we were delivering the tool.

We did it ourselves. We had the right people to do the job internally, as well as the support from Daptiv itself. The customer service manager and the team were there 24/7 with us along the way, and without that support, I don't think we'd have deployed anywhere close to 90 days.

The deployment and maintenance are normally with our portfolio team. They are administrators. When we do deploy, we work with the company, and the timescale could be a day to months, depending on what we're actually deploying. From an administration point of view, it's probably half a person a week on the administration itself. It is not a time-consuming piece of software for administration as compared to some other ones we use.

We've seen the drop in the time it takes to deliver a project and the amount of money it takes to deliver as well. We've not done an ROI on that, but we have seen that reduction. So, we are seeing savings.

The pricing for me is more about understanding your own needs in the company because it is one license for one person model. So, you have to really understand how many licenses you need and what may be the influx of your staff. The good thing about Daptiv is that we just need a quick telephone call to our customer success manager if we want to increase our licensing and we can upscale very quickly. We've never downscaled, but I'm guessing if we had to, we'd have to wait till the contract completes or renegotiate a different licensing cost. 

There are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. We have the reporting functionality for which we pay separately for 10 hours per month. To help us design and build our customized reports, we require the system. There are hundreds of out-of-the-box reports and dashboards, but we have some very specific requirements, so we bought that extra functionality.

We're also a premier customer. So, we do have the customer success manager and the premier support from the other staff within the company.

It was just a straight swap because it was a sister product. It was in the same company. Before that, we went out to RFP, and we looked at several different solutions that were certainly in the top 10 of the Gartner, Forrester Magic Quadrant. The Daptiv/Changepoint company won hands down on all the different asks we had.

I would advise understanding your requirements and asking what the "why" is. The very first time we implemented a piece of software in the company before I got involved, they failed because they didn't understand what the end goal was. It was all about trying to get a tool in to provide support to the PMs. The reality is that a company has many different facets, and for me, it is definitely about understanding what your north star is and what you want to deliver. You then work backward to understand how you're going to do that. Once you've done that, the implementation becomes very quick and easy with the tool. I've been at many companies where they've implemented and tried to do the "why" at the same time, but it doesn't work. That's where the support from the customer success managers in Daptiv is helpful. They provide that roadmap at the very beginning to help you get there. We spent two months prior to even turning the tool on in doing all the prework so that when we did turn the tool on, people knew what to expect, they knew what the tool was, and they knew how to use it.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Daptiv is to utilize the company's experience, and when you do your implementation, in the beginning, try and use as much out-of-the-box functionality. The more you customize, the more chance you're going to fail initially. So, for me, the biggest thing is just to use the ability that you've got in the Daptiv and do a phased approach. Try not to turn everything on at once. It doesn't work. You should also get your senior managers involved straight away. You should get your executives on board and then fill that down for the company.

Overall, its rating has to be a 10 out of 10. 

Right now, we use it mainly for project tracking to create our task list and go through the entire project life cycle to be able to provide dashboards and report in real-time to our senior leaders.

We also just started last month being able to submit project requests for the upcoming year. Those can go through the gating system in order to be approved and prioritized prior to starting any assignments on the projects.

The product is providing more visibility by providing real-time dashboards so that you're not seeing incorrect information. It's all live within the system and their ability to drill down and view real-time events on a project is great. The visibility really makes a difference.

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

I like that it's so customizable and it's so easy to customize. It's not overly complicated. We can get pretty much whatever we need out of the system. If it's not there, we can add it.

For example, the whole request process was built from scratch. We customized all of the fields that we wanted to capture as part of our initial submission and then the fields that we wanted to add on through the gating process to gather more information before final approval is submitted.

The solution enables users to create reusable project templates that reflect their own project management life cycle. We have only a few templates set up right now, however, that's something that we'll develop further as we go.

It makes our project management process more consistent across the board. We have probably 13 different project managers, from an FTE perspective, and we have a lot of consultants. Therefore, having the template already built-in keeps everybody on the same page.

It does not take long to create a new project using the solution. It's fast due to the fact that they all come through as a request and it's just a matter of adding it to the project and everything is pretty much there. You're just talking about turning a request into a project which takes less than five minutes. Previously, we were on spreadsheets and Word Docs, et cetera. As far as having the template with the tasks already in it, that obviously saves a lot of time for the project managers.

Task management features are so customizable that they're working for us based on exactly what we need. We also can always build as we grow as an organization. I like that tasks can be assigned to specific individuals so they can work on things themselves and update them in the system, as opposed to the project manager having to go in and manually do everything themselves.

With this solution, in terms of time savings, we're averaging a savings of three days per month, if not more.

The solution's time tracking abilities and allows for timesheets allocating hours. Before, we used a spreadsheet where we had to find the project in a list of 100 other projects that were going on at the same time. Being able to pull up a timesheet and only feed those projects that I'm assigned helps me as far as tracking my time. 

The solution is great for viewing projects and timelines. Their reporting feature is so robust and they keep adding to it all the time and the ability to set up your individual portfolios - however you need to - and being able to report on those, is a huge advantage.

In terms of the process for building a team within a project, I'm not a project manager, so I don't really build the teams within the system. I do know that there could be some improvements, on the staffing side, such as adding staff to projects in order for those folks to track time. The way the time tracking works, we miss a lot of that if the tasks aren't set up appropriately which makes it so that the end-user can't track time accordingly. We're still figuring it out. There's a bit of a learning curve.

The downside to the way the solution tracks time is if your project manager doesn't add you to the project, you won't see it on your timesheet, even if you did do work. If that happens, it's a matter of having to reach out and have the project owner add you to the project so that you can track the time. I have a feeling a lot of people aren't tracking time to the appropriate projects due to this. It is a downfall that you can't add your own projects.

The company started the implementation last October. We have not been on it for quite a year yet. We rolled it out to our IT department for time tracking in January of this year. I would say January is probably when we really got started using it for projects and time tracking.

The stability is great. I haven't had any issues so far. The only downtime we've had is due to our own issues as we have our restricted to internal IP addresses. If we forget to add new IP ranges to our setup, then we have issues. Again, that's internal, and not the fault of Planview.

We're a small organization, however, from what I've seen, is that the other clients the product has are a lot larger than us. The things other companies are using it for, it just amazes me how it can accommodate everything from a small organization to something much larger. Having seen its capabilities with other companies, I would assume it's scalable for us in the long run.

Our organization has over a thousand users, however, we have only 130 licensed users. We have our stakeholders, which are our C-suite partner or employees, and that's just basically to approve requests and view dashboards. Then we have our entire IT department and our team users that utilize it mostly for time tracking. We also have our business team members, who also use it for time tracking, however, they can also get in and view the reports and be able to drill down into specific data on the projects. 

We plan to increase usage by adding more users to the system. We've tried to stay focused on the people that work on projects probably more than half the time, however, we want to make sure that we're capturing all project team members so they can record time as well. 

I've never seen customer support like them before. I can put in a case and I usually have a resolution within an hour or, at most, the same day. They're always quick to respond and if they don't, I know where I can go to at least escalate the issue to get a resolution.

Previously, the project managers would use MS Project, which they're now really doing in the PPM Tool. We would also have the Charter and Word Docs and stuff like that we'd be trying to incorporate that into the product as well. We're not having multiple things off-site or outside of the system anymore.

We switched off MS Project for consistency - so that all of the information is in the tool and we can provide the status of the project schedule on the dashboards that are sent out to the project team members weekly. The added bonus to switching is all of the roll-up capabilities, having it all in different spreadsheets, and having to pull all that together without all the manual processes. Just having the ability to run real-time reports and have those delivered automatically is a huge benefit and offers great time savings.

There's not any direct syncing between the two tools. This product does have the ability to export into an XML file that you can upload into a project. You can do that on both solutions if you need to. I don't know how many of our project managers do that. I would imagine most of them just keep it within PPM Pro.

Overall, PPM Pro is easier to use. It's all in one place, so I'm not having to go locate several different documents to pull the information I need. It's all within the tool. I like the task list so much more than I do MS Project.MS Project has way too much other stuff that we probably don't need for our size organization.

The setup was pretty easy. We had our implementation person from Planview working with us. We really didn't have a good foundation for what we wanted prior to our implementation, so it took us a little bit longer. That isn't the tool's fault. Once we did make our decisions, it was pretty easy to implement.

In terms of deployment, we started in October and we were up and running in a few months. That deployment time also included importing all of the existing projects that we had going on into the tool.

We didn't really have an implementation strategy. We just knew that we wanted to stick to projects, requests, and time tracking. There were some tools that we haven't quite started utilizing yet, such as PPA. They're available for us, however, we just decided to hold off on that. There were some things that we said we would wait and implement down the road.

We also purchased LeanKit and Projectplace, however, we have not really started using those yet mostly due to the change management. We wanted to make sure everybody was comfortable with this PPM Pro first before we started implementing something else.

We have one assigned main administrator for the system and I'm the backup. I do a lot of the calculated deals and some of the more complicated stuff. The other person sets up users and runs the reports and dashboards for our C-suite partners and just handles questions that come through. Our team was only maybe four people making decisions in regards to this solution.

Planview assisted us during the initial setup. Our implementation person (Steve) was very responsive. He helped us set up everything that we needed to. I know we probably asked him lots of questions and he likely contributed more hours than he probably was assigned to, just to help us out as new clients. We were very pleased with his assistance.

From a quality perspective, I've heard our chief strategy officer loves the ability for him to go in and look and see what the progress is on certain projects on his own. He's very tech-savvy, so he's not scared of the system. He goes in and all I had to do was show him how to log in and it's intuitive enough that he could figure out where to go from there. Quantitatively speaking, I don't have any data on that yet.

I would advise new companies to make sure that they really understand the differences between the user types or licensed types as we had a little confusion in that area at the beginning. The mix-up was all terminology. We made assumptions that time users could do more than they really could. Once we realized that, we ended up converting a lot of people to different user types or licensed types after the fact. New users just really need to understand what functionality each user type is allowed to do.

We did look at two other options before choosing this solution. One in particular just seemed a little more intuitive from an end-user perspective.

We don't have a business relationship with the vendor. We're just a customer.

This solution has not yet helped us reduce project delays as we're still a young PMO and we just have a lot of projects going on and the same resources working on all the projects. I don't know if the system is going to help that, however, having those reportable timesheets allows us to really see how long it truly is taking us to complete a project so that if the company plans on adding 50 projects next year, they're going to know that we can't possibly do all those based on the numbers that we have right now. It makes projecting what's possible more realistic.

It hasn't helped to increase the number of projects in our organization, although it's likely going to help the company become more focused and we'll get through more projects once we start putting them into a pipeline, as opposed to trying to complete them all at the same time.

New users need to make sure that they have a good roadmap of what their current processes are, whether they are done within a tool or not. If they're still doing them within Word, Excel, or MS Project, that's fine. Just make sure to have a documented process. It will make the implementation go a lot smoother.

It's a good idea to try everything in a sandbox first as well. Some things don't work as you would have expected. A lot of the gate logic, et cetera, is a little tricky when you work in requests. I play a lot. I'm in the sandbox a lot, just trying out different things before I put anything into production.

Overall, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We've been waiting on some stuff that's on the roadmap. I would say once they get some of the things that are on their roadmap out there, it'll bump up real quick to a rating of ten out of ten.

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. 

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.