OpenText Project and portfolio Management Reviews

The use cases are mainly around project delivery and managing the whole project control and governance at a project and program level. We are using it for investment management or the whole demand management pipeline prioritization. We also use it for:

• Resource management and capacity and utilization 
• Value and benefits management to assess business cases or initiatives
• Reporting management

So, we use it across the whole life cycle.

PPM provides a single place where our teams can track and measure progress toward their goals. This consolidated view is important for our organization because we are able to see what's coming through the pipeline, what's in-flight, and what's our current resource capacity, as well as the financial burn rate. When it is all in one place, we are able to slice and dice information and look at it in different ways. That helps in the real insight into what's happening. It also helps in shaping our decisions to make sure we achieve the goals and outcomes of the organization.

When you start doing things in a structured way, you get consistent reporting. With that consistent reporting, you get things that are not working properly in a much more time-efficient way, which helps in decision-making to pick up things that are not working as per expectations. Whether it is a project, whether it is a risk, whether it is an issue, or whether it is a financial burn rate, it is all about getting the right visibility at the right time, which helps in the right decision-making to avoid any pitfalls.

PPM’s portfolio management dashboard provides the flexibility to have a list view or even a financial view. It has standard views, and on top of that, we have configured other views based on our needs. The standard views are good to start with, but when we have more information, we want to look at the information in different ways. We can configure dashboards and views, which is a plus point. We're not restricted to just what comes out of the box.

It comes with a Kanban view, which you can configure. It also provides the flexibility to create a backlog by having stage gates. So, we can do backlog management, and we can configure Kanban boards. The good thing about it is that we are able to capture that information. Once we're able to capture that information in a simpler way, then we can report it. What we have seen in some of the tools is that capturing information is not that easy, or they do it a standard way, and that's it. You don't have the flexibility to change them in a certain way or in the way the organization works. PPM allows you to adapt to best practices. Every organization is unique. If that flexibility is there, then you can have best practices along with some of the good things that the organization does. That's where the flexibility of PPM is very good.

Every organization, small and large, uses the whole portfolio structure for the hierarchy or the whole organization model. With the flexibility of having portfolios and sub-portfolios, you're able to model a hierarchy. Once you do that, the roll-up can happen from the bottom, and you can also have a top-down effect. This flexibility is good to come up with a portfolio hierarchy. This capability is good in PPM.

It has been helpful for resource consolidation. It does give us a picture of resource capacity and utilization. It has been absolutely helpful in managing our resources.

It has helped accelerate our organization’s delivery. 

Generally, we use all the modules and all features. So, every module has its own merit. Overall, they have a very strong workflow management capability. That's a very strong feature because then you can model any process easily. Whether it is a demand management process, a pipeline management process, or your project delivery methodology, it is much easier because of their workflow management capability.

They can make its UI better. Currently, the UI is a bit clunky.

The portfolio management dashboard is good, but more work needs to be done in that space. You can capture the goals and objectives, and you can also have KPIs. How they're all linked and how they all roll up is something they need to look into. They can make some enhancements to the product to close that loop.

They have made a good start when it comes to the built-in capabilities to support Lean Portfolio Management and be aligned to Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) initiatives, but there are still gaps, which they are probably going to cover in future releases.

I have been using this solution for almost 14 years.

I would rate their customer support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I've used other solutions. We used CA Clarity in the past. It was a good product, but with the Broadcom acquisition, the overall focus on CA Clarity has gone down. So, overall, you don't see a lot of traction in the way the product is being developed. Hence, we made a switch.

It is software as a service. In terms of maintenance, it is all managed by the Micro Focus team. From time to time, we do enhancements, but that's something that we do ourselves. 

We did scan the market. We evaluated Planisware. There were products like Planview or Clarizen. There were pretty good products from the top tier that we looked into.

Product-wise, Planview was very good. Even Planisware was very good. Planview was a bit better than Micro Focus, but one of the key things was the capability to deliver and come up with innovative solutions. That's where the flexibility of Micro Focus is quite good.

I would advise looking at your internal processes. The maturity of your processes and the behavioral or cultural aspect are important. If those two aspects are not looked into, then even if you get the best tool, it won't give you the outcome you want. So, before you get into the tool, make sure you have a bit of maturity in your processes. You can mature it further, but you must have some level of maturity. Also, make sure that the organization is ready. If the organization is not ready and the leadership is not aligned, there will be a lot of roadblocks.

You need to have a strategic plan and link your strategic pillars, alignment goals, and business objectives. PPM enables the organization to translate strategic plans into actionable investment strategies, but it also depends on how you configure the tool. Once you have the right flow right from your strategic plan to your pillars and initiatives, that information can be reported to various stakeholders. So, it is important to have a dynamic flow.

It is important that the portfolio hierarchy is well-defined. If you don't do that well, then the information doesn't flow from the bottom. Whether it is epics or agile, or your projects or initiatives, it is important to get the hierarchy right. Once you have the hierarchy right and you also are very clear about what's in your agile tool, what's in your PPM tool, and how the information flows, it definitely gives you the outcome that you need. So, a bulk of the work initially goes into setting up the right hierarchy. If you don't get that right and your information flow is broken, that definitely causes problems. It took us one or two iterations to do that, but we got there.

For integrating your agile tools and synchronizing the execution layer back into PPM, they have a base connector. The good thing is that they have provided an SDK. So, we can enhance the connector by doing some coding. That's a good thing, but the agile life cycle is something that we are learning as we go. The challenge is not about the tools. The challenge is more about the behavior in the organization because every team does it in a different way. Standardizing a way so that everyone does it in one way and having some taxonomy in the agile tool and integrating that with PPM is a challenge. It is more on the people and behaviors side, not specifically the tool side.

Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten.

It is user friendly. The product has a neat and clean user interface. It serves the purpose of what we are looking for. It's a great tool for portfolio management and project management.

In our organization, we use this tool for portfolio management.

It gives a more organized approach for managing the projects and helps us since many things can be automated using this tool, which were previously done manually.

We have automated our entire project delivery mechanism using this product. It's a workflow based on end-to-end delivery. From the demand till project delivery, we can manage the complete flow using the HPE PPM tool.

Features such as the chargeback mechanism as well as managing various partners and cloud service providers needs to be improved. If these can be integrated into the product itself, it will become a single source for all IT information.

We would like to have more features where we can manage the changes in cloud services as well as the chargeback system to different departments. If these things are automated, it would help us better.

It is quite stable.

The product is scalable.

Whenever there is an issue, our team contacts technical support. Their response is positive. It is better than the average service. We get prompt responses as such; if you are at the receiving end, it's easy to convey if you have good knowledge. This is more or less a configurable tool, so rather than fixing bugs, it involves understanding and providing clarification of issues.

Initially, we were not using any other solution; for us, it was a manual process.

However, we have been using this product for the last couple of years and have not switched.

I was involved in the setup process. It was good and straightforward. It was configurable and we benefited from it.

We had evaluated various products such as Microsoft EPM and Oracle Project Management solutions, but we found this tool to be more user friendly as compared to others. It also has a straightforward implementation.

It's a good solution and definitely I would give it a thumbs up. Go for it.

We use it for project and portfolio planning, and for resource management.

It helps our organization to plan our resources exactly and to support the billing process as well.

The most valuable feature is resource planning or resource management.

Micro Focus Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) has a very strong workflow engine.

The functionality is really good with a lot of modules, and there's almost nothing missing.

The user interface is very, very old and is missing some functions, such as, for example, re-do, follow, and share functions. The UI is not good.

I would like to see different databases supported. There's only one database available at the moment, and it is very expensive. I would like better database support.

On the functional side of the product, I would like to see an enhanced and improved project management module with HR components in it.

I've been using this solution for 21 years.

It's a very stable solution with almost no downtime.

It's very easy to build up and is very straightforward.

We have 30 users in our company.

I would rate technical support services at five on a scale from one to ten.

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward.

We implemented this solution through an in-house team.

We have an annual license, and it is fairly priced in comparison to that of other solutions.

Use it out of the box in the beginning, and don't change it too much or make it too complex.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Micro Focus Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) at eight.

The portfolio management and the resource management are the key features.

When we're doing it the most successfully, we do not over-allocate resources. We schedule projects in such a way that they do not clash on resources. Instead of executing all projects at the same time, we put up a schedule. And when resources were needed, they were available as was previously agreed upon. It's difficult, but you can do it with a good planning tool.

Support and license management are two hurdles for us. Every time we purchase new licenses, it has taken us half a year to implement those. We've had to use HPE technical support to get the right licenses. We needed a cumulative license file and that took HPE forever to get right. We go through this every time. If you want to grow, there are no technical issues with stability, but the license bit is a pain.

Ten years

There were things that had to be customized to meet expectations.

Stability is great. That's 100%.

By US standards, we're a small company with about 1100 users. We have no issues. We don't need to change the scale much. We're using an on-premises solution and that's been without issues.

We had bad experience with technical support. They don't do their best to try to help us solve the case. They tend to point away from the product to other possible problem sources. These are things you don't want to hear as a customer.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I know that the project involved a lot of consulting that took a long time. But the maturity with the organization was not very high either. We didn't have the process in place and we had to learn with the product. That's why it took a bit of time. It's a maturity thing.

I'm pretty sure they looked at alternatives. I don't know what products were involved in the pre-study. They chose HPE, which was Mercury back then.

There are lots of project management tools that do a good job, but not so many that can manage portfolios and the bigger planning picture. The key reason why projects fail, is the lack of necessary resources. With this in mind, projects need to be scheduled in such a way that their resource requirements can be met. You can’t just do all of them first.

That’s portfolio management (well, part of it). To be able to successfully execute the portfolio, it is necessary to have the required resources recruited, scheduled and committed to the different projects in due time. That’s resource management. Organizations who fail at either one of these, will find that the necessary resources tend not to be available when the projects need them, causing them to be delayed or fail completely. There are also other downsides, such as inability to project cash flow, ad hoc prioritization (usually at the wrong organization level) and, for the resources themselves, conflicting loyalties (serving the one who yells the loudest?), lack of clarity of what to do next, unclear work schedule expectations (You have to work weekend – surprise!) and just general overload situations.

Lacking portfolio and resource management, you are almost guaranteed that your projects will miss their targets. That is why I consider these the key features of PPM, although there are other aspects that make PPM a very powerful tool, such as being able to define your own request types and create work flows for them. Very neat, indeed!

I have seen PPM evolve a lot over the period of time i.e. since v7.5 days.

PPM has come a long way, since 9.X on-wards it has shown massive improvements both at user end as well as functional end. We are currently on 9.40 and are soon going to upgrade to 9.41 as well.

Most valuable features of PPM are:-

- The data provided by PPM is trusted and is available almost immediately; without trusted data there is very less scope of any tool to be successful.

- It provides real-time visibility into all the projects, programs and portfolios; it provides critical information at the right time and helps in taking the right decision at right time; decisions such as finances, resources etc can be taken on the go.

- The what-if analysis (Portfolio management) gives the organisations a futuristic view of how well the organisations are going to fare in achieving their business objectives.

- 9.40 has a massive improvements in the Program Management module, gives more comprehensive view of the programs running in the organisation. The timeline feature of the program show real-time status of all the projects.

- Seamless integrations into the Jira, Agile manager, MSP makes it more powerful - 9.41 on-wards it has been more easier than ever.

- Dynamic out of the box portlets and reports are other excellent features. e.g. the ability to view the capacity, demand of resources across the organisation via Analyze Assignment load portlet makes it more substantial.

- Compare to work plan feature is another excellent one that can be harnessed for decision making.

- The ability to track down every single dollar spent in the organisation makes it more powerful i.e. you can track down which project spent how much on which resources doing exactly what. The costs can be further classified either capex (capital) or Opex (Operating).

- Web Services, integrations to other third party tool like SVN (subversion) makes it more skillful. This helps in automating a lot of things if needed.

Certainly we have had good impact in our organisation.

We have explored all the features of the tool.. we mainly use it for managing programs, resources, projects and time. We do explore some features of portfolio management.

Our organisation has been able to do effective forecasting, project delivery, resource management and time tracking with the help of PPM.

- The financial forecasts comes out from PPM.

- The projects are managed in the PPM

- Resources are managed via PPM.

- Actual time tracking is done via PPM.

- We have developed many reports and integrations that has helped the organisation to save time and money, thereby automating a lot of things.

There is quite a few areas of improvement

- Reporting; need to be able to provide fancy reporting out of PPM, way it is done in OBIEE etc..

- A lot of pain points in resource management area, that needs to be addressed. Currently we have to follow standard set of instructions to make sure the end results are effective.

- Time capturing should be more dynamic, ie. changing the approvers based on different use-cases.. We have over-ride rules, but that feature is again very limited.

- There are issues with some of the background services running; if stressed, it takes too much time to finish.

Over 5 years.

Nothing major as such ... When it was first installed it was on the Unix platform and there was lack of technical expertise to manage the tool.. we had to then move it over to windows system and since then it looks perfectly fine.

Yes, when it was hosted on a Unix platform; but since it has been moved to Windows it looks all good. Not sure what was the issue with the unix platform.. could be the internal environment.

Nope, absolutely none, we have the right infrastructure.

Pretty responsive and good

Good.

Nope, all PPM.

It was pretty straightforward; no major complications as such.

Vendor team, excellent

At the top of my mind, I can't really tell, but functionality wise and time and effort wise it has done miracles here.

NA

None, PPM as always.

Nope, all covered.

• Time Management
• Resource Management
• Project Management

• Takes input from users on improvements
• Release a product with fewer defects
• Releasing a defect-free product
• Providing useful suggestions for fixing defects

I have used it for five years.

We have not encountered any deployment issues.

We have encountered stability issues. The product releases after 9.3 have many bugs in the Resource Management module.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is 3 of 5.

Technical support is 3 of 5.

It is an expensive tool.

• Better resource planning
• Utilization

Program management was also one of the ways that we planned to use this tool, but we could not make best use of it.

• Project management
• Resource management
• Program management

The workflow and project planning features are good. 

Highly customizable workflow is the best one of them.

Able to manage multimillion projects and resources more effectively.

Though the staffing profile is difficult to manage and update, the enforcement made us create resource plans and do demand-allocation gap analysis much better.

• Better user interface. 
• Usability in terms of better UX.

Resource managers often request the Excel like features for allocation. Though not equal, but almost close features are expected. Buying add-ons for that is not worth it.

Yes, with multi-resource allocation.

Yes, when it comes to resource management and time management, it is very slow.

Average.

No.

In-house

Not applicable.

We generally provide PPM services for our customers, and we use PPM solely for our in-house development. Most of the time we implement and provide services and consulting on Micro Focus PPM.

The majority of the cases are Demand Management and Project Management implementation. Often the main challenges are demand consolidation, prioritization and categorization, as well as visibility on project delivery, manageability within the time and budget, transparency and end-to-end integrity on delivery. Recently value-based delivery became an upcoming trend that points to challenges with the shift from Project to Product Management (Agilization), Lean Portfolio Management and What-if Analysis.

That is not applicable to us. But in terms of customer experience, the usual value of the implementation of MF PPM can be described as follows: one of the main successes is to help the company standardize procedures across business units/geographic spread branches and set up end-to-end lifecycle processes, consolidate all demands, improve visibility, transparency, and control of portfolios of investments and projects, optimize the use of resources, and focus on the investments aligned with their strategic goals. 

There are two key areas where the features are valuable; the implementation perspective and end-user functionality. PPM really has a powerful workflow and form engine that allows us to create workflow complexities and processes. There's a good balance between flexibility and best practice and it generally allows us to implement any kind of requirements a customer might have. It's a good balance of flexibility and functionality for configuration. It's a really powerful tool. I saw the other tools bending, compared to them it's really good. 

UI is user-friendly, it is quite simple and intuitive. It ships with a balanced content of the dashboards and the reporting features. There's a good interaction between modules, that allows organizations to have a full e2e cycle starting from the idea/proposals in the demand management, transform and execute in project management and track and manage grouping into programs and portfolios with out-of-the-box roll up and roll down features and data transparency. Approach management is really very powerful. It has also integrated with Microsoft Project and supports the hybrid projects with ready-to-use out-of-box agents that integrate with the agile tools like ALM Octane, Jira, CA Rally and etc. 

I like the new release approach on the Micro Focus side that turned into a rapid quarterly basis with transparency for the end-users and the ability to impact the content of the future patches and versions.

There's also room for improvement in other areas such as configuration which is a little old from an implementation perspective. There could also be improvements in API which is rarely used but we do use them in some cases. From a user's perspective, it's becoming more necessary in that agile transformation. More of our customers are now looking to have everything in one place and I guess Micro Focus could make some improvements in that area as well as improvements in communication and corroboration functionality in the tool.

On the strategic and portfolio functionality can be a bit more balanced and improved interactions with the other modules. 

I've been using this solution for 13 years. 

The solution is very stable, it fully supports HA and has wide HW/SW platform options. Performance on a very good level.

It is also scalable and has good guidelines and recommendations for hardware sizing. 

Technical support could be improved. Support is a competitive issue in the market with this tool, at least for medium sized customers. 

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward, but it's important to keep in mind that this is an ePMO solution, so it should take some time to deploy. It is based on the maturity level, current challenges, the readiness of the organization, business requirements, professional services, etc. It can be deployed as a fully complete solution or incrementally that can be a good approach to start getting values at the early stages. Complete solution in common case deployment may take around 10+ weeks, incremental deployment can happen in 3-4+ weeks cycles. Any specific case may increase or decrease the duration of the deployment. 

In terms of cost, I think this solution is competitive with others in the market. I like that it has a transparent price without hidden extras like some other vendors.

I would suggest that in the first year of implementation try to keep it simple and keep close to best practices. One of the main mistakes companies have made in the past is to replace the industrial-based best practices with their own technics and this doesn't always work. So, they end up migrating problems and issues, that may be part of their internal culture, to the new platform. I would advise soft adoption and incrementally distributing the use of the tool across the company.

Every solution can be improved so I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.