What is our primary use case?
Our primary use case is for all of our agency's IT work that will be recorded as projects and/or contracts that we have with our agencies from an IT department perspective.
How has it helped my organization?
We are using Enterprise One to record all the new business-case intakes. Any new project that comes in from my agencies is being recorded in Enterprise One. That gives us a better view of what's out there, what needs to be done, and what the requirements are for my agencies. It also shows us how we can focus on the demand for those agencies.
We are not using strategic objectives yet, but we have a custom prioritization calculation that has been done for each project that comes in. Work is prioritized based on a specific scoring with some markers on each project. It's affected us to a point that we can react to demands.
Enterprise One provides a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people but it's only as good as you've set it up yourself. You can set up Planview in any way you want to use it. The type of resource that you assign is based on your own company's requirements for that. It can be anything that you want. It's flexible in configuring these assignments. This flexibility enables us to look at demand from agencies and with our own productization system, allow us to assign the resources that are needed.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable features are scheduling, resource management, and, from a project perspective, the functions like issues that change orders. They are valuable because, from a project management perspective, we use the workflows that we build for project management and do active risk management and issue management for the projects that we want for our agencies.
We use a phased approach for our projects: plan, initiation, planning, execution, implementation, and closure, and all those processes have their own lifecycles. Then we have some customized cycles in support of that to ensure that if a contract is needed, that the contracts are being signed off by a security organization as well. Any network and infrastructure changes will be reviewed as part of that process. We use this end-to-end process for our project managers.
The forecast for remaining effort is something that we are starting to use. The challenge with that is it is only as good as the resource managers are editing and entering the allocations for the resources. An effort was started to refocus the whole resource management. With that automatically comes the forecasting. We also have some custom reports that allow us to look at our workload.
From the perspective of what's in the pipeline, what is currently being worked on, and what's needing help, we are able to know instantly where we are.
We use custom reports and we use portfolio management to look at it from a forecast perspective like who's been assigned to a process and what the workload is. Then we use it for resource portfolios for each team. They use it to assess the ability to reassign or assign resources to upcoming work. But most of the reporting is done through custom reports and some Power BI reports that I've created.
Its view into resource capacity and availability definitely helps us to manage work. It allows us to react to a new demand. It also helps to provide end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. We use it for resources like hardware licenses, software, and such.
Program managers are enabled to group work together and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. Because we use portfolio management or resource portfolio management, with that setup, we can look at it from a program perspective. If you identify portfolios within a program or projects within a portfolio program and the same with resources, you can classify them by type, by departments, and desk to see where your availabilities are.
We can drill down into the details underlying the consolidated information through the individual resources and we also do that through a custom Power BI report. Then based on time entered on projects, we can see where resources have spent time in the past, up until the current day. We have a statistical overview of where our resources have gone.
Our on-time completion rate has been reduced but it all has to do with the size of the project. When we do our planning for projects we tend to deliver it within a timeline, but there's also external influence that you can't control. From a project management perspective, we always deliver what we tend to deliver.
What needs improvement?
The biggest room for improvement are the scripted dialogues. The scripted dialogues are a logic that you set up to force a certain workflow or process to happen. It's very old in respect that there are no clauses that you can apply to that logic. That definitely can use a lot of room for improvement. The amount of text that you can manage within a scripted dialogue is limited as well. That can use some room for improvement as well.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've been using Planview Enterprise since 2013 and we moved to Enterprise One in 2018 with the latest version.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I'm very impressed with the stability. We are a client that uses the monthly updates. So far, we have not had any issues when it comes to the new versions that have been released. I'm very pleased with the stability of the cloud platform that we use.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability is not an issue because we can always add more licenses when we need to. We have almost 400 licenses that do not impede the workflow or the process. It's able to cope with the amount of users that we have.
There are about 400 users. The majority of those are people that enter the time or are the actual resources working on projects. They may have a section of project managers, then have a section of managers and resource managers. We also have a section for a specific business case.
The deployment and maintenance are all done by me. We heavily use the sandbox environment to prototype changes, then test those changes and then implement those to production. We continuously make enhancements to the system and we use a sandbox and production approach.
For the specific tasks that we do with respect to business case intake and project management, it has a 100% adoption rate. We have plans to expand the number of users in respect to time entry. That'll happen over the next year or so.
How are customer service and technical support?
Their support is great. When I open a case I can always cut the responses within a couple of minutes, depending on the severity of the case.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
My company used a different solution before my time. I think they used a custom solution that was built in-house that was replaced with Planview.
How was the initial setup?
I have been involved in the restructuring of the solution. The initial solution was not implemented by me but I have redone that whole implementation and we were able to downsize the support team from seven individuals to one individual.
The service that was implemented was very archaic. It was complex. The way that we've now implemented it is streamlined, easy to understand and identify how it's been implemented. The process took us six months.
We went through a process improvement process where we identified the process as we would like it to be not as how it was in the system and using that, we identified a workflow in the official diagram for the various processes that we support and use.
What about the implementation team?
We didn't use a consultant, we just did the deployment ourselves. There is an in-house team who worked on it.
What was our ROI?
I can't quantify the ROI because we've been using it for so long that we really can't go back to an older system and compare it.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Pricing all depends on how many users you have planned to use. It's kind of expensive but at the same token, it's worth the investment for the functionality that it delivers.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated ServiceNow but based on the Gartner review of the marketplace of Planview, there really aren't any other competitors that can provide the same service that Enterprise One provides us.
What other advice do I have?
My advice would be to have one or more individuals become experts in the use of Planview, in terms of how to set it up, how to maintain it, and how to create a lifecycle. There are scripted dialogues because the more knowledge you have within your own organization, the easier it is to accommodate change requests from within your organization.
If you have to call a consultant for services it's rather expensive and they might not be able to react to the changes that you want to implement sooner rather than later. So my advice is to create experts within your organization.
Make sure to test a lot. It can be very complex. Have a second set of eyes that can see the pitfalls that you, otherwise, might run into.
I would rate Enterprise One a ten out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.