Planview Portfolios Reviews

We are using Enterprise One to track our epics and the hours worked on them and related work items. In that effort, we have implemented the task top to bring in both import and export data into our Jira instance.

We are also just now getting into the investment capacity planning features. In the past 18 months, we got Enterprise One set up and now we're getting into investment and capacity planning. Eventually, we want to move more into portfolio management and then road mapping and some of the other features that the software has.

It has certainly helped us in upgrading or modernizing how we report our financials in the sense of our CapEx and OPEX hours. It is a great system of record for that. It also gives us insight into the work that's being done and allows us to follow up with our application development teams on how they're spending their time and whether adjustments to prioritization and such need to happen. It has helped us in both of those areas.

Just having one place to put everything is the big deal. Before Enterprise One, we had multitudes of different Excel spreadsheets across different departments, and everyone kind of doing their own thing. The biggest thing that we've been able to do is get a view of all the work that's happening and then see where the hours are going. That is where we are at right now in terms of the features we are leveraging. 

Enterprise one is good for forecasting remaining effort from what I can tell. We are able to see everything from where the resources are requested, to where they are then being allocated and the hours being logged and make decisions off of that.

If I were to assess Enterprise One's ability to enable me to see which stage projects are in, on a scale of one to 10, I would give it a seven. That's partly because I'm seeing plenty of projects that don't have the right status because they haven't been updated properly. We are having a hard time getting people to use the system to keep that information up to date. The system has the right fields there, but we are still learning how to better use the system. We're trying to figure out how to get our processes better so we can keep the system current.

From a PMO perspective, Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for a full spectrum of types of work. It is too early to say how it has affected our project management. We are doing better, but we are certainly not where we want to be eventually.

Enterprise One has helped us with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. It has affected our business in that we now have a lot more transparency. We can see where the work is being done and make adjustments to align where the work is being done to priorities that change over time.

It provides a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people. I've never had any issues there. It is customizable wherever we need it to be and it is doing great.

Enterprise One allows program managers to group work together and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. It has positively affected my project management. We are happy with the selection that we have made, excluding the cumbersomeness of the user interface at times. Enterprise One has been exactly what we need.

We are enabled to drill underlying consolidated information down into details. This certainly helps me see their impact on specific projects. We can view a project both at the top level and dig into the particularities. It's given us greater visibility into the work itself. It is too early to tell if the solution has increased our on-time completion rate.

I would say that Enterprise One's ability to create summary reports across multiple projects is cumbersome. I know that they are making changes to the user interface. It was talked about in the conference they're having right now.

I think the capabilities are there, but it seems difficult for me to even create a report as I am not a Planview technical expert. It is not particularly intuitive. It slows us down in reporting the big picture to management. 

I would say that they should continue to dig into usability and user experience because it can be hard to find things. The system could be made more user-friendly and robust with perhaps a more interactive help section. It is difficult for someone like me who does not use Enterprise One every day to find what I'm looking for. It's just not intuitive.

I have been using this solution for 18 months. 

Enterprise One is very stable. It is slow and less performant at times, but stable. 

We have not had any issues with scalability. 

My experience with their tech support was great. We had no issues. They were responsive and knowledgeable. 

The initial setup was complex. It took 12 weeks. The size of our company made it complex. We have 800 people in IT only. The help that we got from Planview was good, however. We had them on sight for weeks at different engagements. 

We worked directly with Planview. 

We use this solution for managing our application portfolio. We do some lightweight business architecture connecting to our portfolio. We started rolling into the information portfolio and connecting that also to our application portfolio. Those are the primary use cases. It's also to support the bigger M&A activities that we have in our company.

One of our latest use cases is basically onboarding. Our information and risk management team were looking for a system that could house a catalog of information objects. I suggested that that can leverage our platform, and it already had prebuilt configuration screens so they could easily be on-boarded in starting to use it. We configured more elaborate workflows for the use cases, and that took a couple of months. Now, they are rolling it out. Time to market is important and we leveraged it in the existing system.

This solution has not yet transformed our organization strategy. While we have been using this solution for eleven years, our EA department got canned two years ago. We restarted based on the merger and acquisition. So, it's rebuilding and we're still a small team of only three people. It's basically restarting the whole discipline and also getting strategy, business architecture, and information architecture. While we were in IT, we only considered our application and technology. But we are now focused more on business and information. Once that is in place, then we can think about strategies, roadmaps, and the whole thing.

We do not use the Collaborative Work Management features.

We do not yet use the Lean/Agile Delivery tools.

The biggest impact that using Planview has had is the flexibility that it provides, as well as the ability to use the predefined metamodel and the new portal.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the completeness of the standard, underlying metamodel. We can put most of our attributes or information that we want into the standard metamodel. This is important because we don't need to think about what kinds of attributes or objects we need to create because they are already provided. If we stick to what is called the active metamodel, then the UI is on top of that and we don't need to do a lot of UI customization in order to manage that data.

This is a flexible solution in the places where it needs to be, although it is rigid in certain places because it still uses old technologies. For example, you can see this in the reporting. They started with a Cognos Business Intelligence/Business Objects, then they moved to BIRT, and now they have moved to SSRS. There are still some legacy flash components in there, so there is no clear strategy on that side.

The flexibility helps in that it has a vast amount of predefined roles. It's flexible to safeguard the areas of the platform that you open up. The new portal is flexible enough to create your own portfolios and column sets, which will cater eighty-percent to what people want. The flexibility allows it to become more self-service, and we can on-board users that do not have an IT or enterprise role, but more like an add-on list or even a business user.

Configuring the UI in the content management system is too elaborate and too time-consuming. The look and feel are outdated because it's more than ten years old, so it's not that flexible when it comes to using the real estate that you have on the screen to cater to certain persons. If you look nowadays at web UIs, they are more intuitive than what is currently provided.

The workflow engine needs to be improved to provide for easier configuration and better functionality. Creating workflows needs to be done in multiple places, and the process is elaborate and time-consuming.

We would like to see improvements made on the CTM side and the survey engine. We are now doing app rationalization and we took all of our applications out of Planview CTM and put them into a different tool to run the surveys.

All the parts are there for a low code platform, it needs some uplifting in the UI and workflow. this is the real untapped possibility of CTM.

We have been using this solution for 12 years.

I think that the stability of this solution is below average. With every new update, I find bugs. We have on average twelve bugs active overall and the number doesn't go down with each release. They will fix something and then I find something else.

The scalability of this solution is good. We're onboarding more people and because we're running on-premises, we can scale our VMs ourselves.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the technical support an eight. It depends on the question that I asked because we do a lot of our own development on Planview, and sometimes it's in a gray area. At times it will need to be Professional Services, but in most cases, I will get my answers and technology questions answered.

I believe that we have seen ROI because for us it brings value, but I cannot quantify it in a monetary sense. It's more in the insight and knowledge that makes things feasible. That's what is important. We're not in a place where we can put a figure against it. It is a subjective measure, rather than objective.

Our licensing fees are approximately $50,000 USD annually.

As an enterprise architect, it's our role to see what's out in the market and evaluate competing solutions. I do have contacts with two of their competitors, BiZZdesign and LeanIX, who would prefer me to use their solution. 

There are several reasons that we have stayed with Planview so far. First, we have a lot invested in this solution. The metamodel is still great. We are used to their UI and we have integrated our application portfolios into other systems. Moving away from this solution would require changing some of our integrations.

LeanIX is not ArchiMate 3 compliant and has a limited set of relationships and components.

With BiZZdesign, you need to have multiple products to match what Planview can do. 

Generally, Planview is always keeping in touch with the players in that field. They are always heading towards a common discipline.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to start small. Think about your primary use cases and build it out from there. Also, think about what kind of information you want to use or start with. Make sure that you are safeguarded for scope because Enterprise One is a strategic and tactical system, and don't try to make it an operational system. We tried to do that in the past, doing more like IT operations, like CMDB, and the system is not geared for that. It's more on the strategy side, but that also means that you are more thinking in logical construct and conceptual, than really operational things.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our company has a PMO, which they use to intake their projects. They use the request module and do a process for the steering committee before its turned into a project. Once they turn it into a project, the project managers take it over and work the WBS all the way through to the end of the project.

The product is deployed on the Planview cloud.

With the lifecycles, it helps us step through our processes easier. We'll take a process and create it in Visio, then we'll go and implemented in Planview. Anytime that we have to do a new process, this is what we use. We just step it through the lifecycles and the configure screens are very easy to use. The fields that you need are easy to use.

With the prioritization that the company is getting into, it's easier to do that using this solution, including a ROM. Normally, the ROM is done in the work, but we put it in the request module. You don't have to have an in-depth ROM. You don't have to create a project, we just do it in a request module today, which has been very helpful.

For the delivery, we can tell when a project will be late, so the PM can find out why. The PM would have to tell management why it's going to be late, but they can see that right off because they do weekly status reports. So, they don't have to wait to get a status report. They can just go in there and look. Also, with the reporting capability, where they can do the subscriptions, they get it every Friday.

Resource managers can see their resources. They try to do things on their own, so that is good. Today, we don't have high-level resource management, but we are going to start doing that. We will start having demand or resource meetings to see where resources are available. However, we are still developing that. 

We don't have that today, but I worked at other companies who used Planview and saw where resources were available, scheduled, and short. It was very useful. We would meet every two weeks to view resource management. We would just sit in a room and say, "These are our projects. These are the projects that are incoming. Where are our resources today? What are they working on?" So, it was very good.

The biggest impact has been the ability to see your resources and what they're working on. Most importantly is having your projects in one place. We don't have that specifically here at GM today, but we're working towards that. That's our new initiative: Get everything in one place and have one place to go for intake. So, if you have a new request, they go straight to plan B. Once we post a project, they can do that today. We get on reporting for Power BI and the ease of use of Power BI is very big.

It's easy to use compared to other platforms that I've worked on, e.g., Microsoft Project. Innotas was one of our contenders, but they ended up buying them, so it's good to see that those features are coming out across Enterprise One. 

• I love the requested intake.
• I love how you can do calculations of fields. 
• We put in the lifecycles, which I love. 
• Love that you can get notifications within Outlook. 
• The reporting: How you can do subscriptions of the reporting. So, you don't have to sit there and send reports manually. That's very helpful.

These features save me time. Anything that you can automate is always helpful. When somebody doesn't have to come and ask me, "Hey, can you do this for me?" They can do it themselves, then it's easy to use. You can show them one time, and they go through it the next time by themselves.

It's flexible and very easy to use. Just having all of our projects centralized and all our programs in one place so we can see what the PMs are working on. Now that we've gone global, we can bring in the other PMs and PMOs easily because we've already configured stuff. Although, they may have things that they're reporting on, we can easily integrate those into our current system. 

I would suggest for the request module that they open up the fields and columns so it's like we are doing our work in the work module. You can't do that with today. We also have to make sure that the fields can go both ways with the request and work modules. Including fields in the column sets would be helpful, because today they only use attributes.

For the multiple fields that you have, there is not a single select field, but multiple selections. You can't use those in column sets today. It excludes those fields when being reported on. So, you have to figure out another way to do that.

It would be beneficial for us if it was able to integrate with other tools and have those tools integrated into Planview, which they're working on. Examples of tools being integrated DevOps, JIRA and Projectplace. Since we're a mature PMO, and not all of our PMOs are, if they can integrate with Projectplace or the Planview PPM Pro, that's good. 

I have never had an issue with the stability of Planview. That's one thing that they can tout very well. Performance issues have not been an issue. When running a report, all I have to do is let them know, and they will expand my timeout limits. So, I've never had an issue with performance with them, not in the cloud.

It's very scalable. We're on Enterprise One, so you normally have to be pretty mature. Where I came from, we were immature. We adapted to Planview and became very mature. I know that other companies can do that too. They start out with Projectplace or PPM Pro, then they'll go to Enterprise One. So, it's very scalable. It's a great solution for scalability.

The technical support is very good. I've never had an issue with them. They answer their tickets right away and always come back with a solution very quickly.

We moved from another tool to Planview. I don't know what tool this current company was on. I worked for them for 10 months, then I left and I came back. I've been with them since June again. Another company that I worked with, we went from MS Project Pro (the PPM tool) to Planview.

It was more complex because I came from MS Project Pro. Planview has so much more to offer, so you had to consider a lot more. You had to figure out what its capability were, what your portfolio and programs were going to be, what your teams were, how they were structured, and what type of resources you had in what roles. So, there were things that we had to consider, but Planview asks the right questions. They bring that out of you.

We did a test for three months, then we did a soft launch. So, only our PMs were on it, and they brought all their projects over and managed their projects there. We had another tool, where we had to do double-duel entry for time sheets. So, when they ended their time sheet over there, then they started doing it in Planview. That was just to get them used to it, and saying, "We're going to do our time sheets." We were a company that already did time sheets. That seems to be a big thing for other companies. How do you get your people to do time sheets? But if you're doing financials, they're going to do time sheets.

We used consultants, and I would recommend that for everyone. They're very easy to use. They listen to your needs and requirements. They gather them. They've been in the business so long that they understand what people are saying. Some people may want a lot of details, and they'll talk them down from that by saying, "Do you really need that? Let's start with this, and then we'll see. Does that give you what you need?" So, they're really good about listening to the requirements and providing what you need from the beginning.

When you talk to a consultant, make sure you know where you are, how many users you're going to have, what number of projects you have today, where you think you're going to go with it, and what are your pain points. 

Know your pain points, and definitely tell Planview what your pain points are, because they'll have a solution for them, whether it's reporting, which is real big, or just the ease of use. Everybody is so used to using Microsoft Project, but it's really not that different from Microsoft Project. You just have to use the tool, like Word or Excel, and the more you use it, the better you get at it. It's a very good PPM tool.

The learning curve is not steep. They have very good training and a lot of people. My recommendation is when you take on Planview, get the training. Have trainers come onsite and make sure you budget for that. Make sure you budget for consultants to come onsite and train your people. Don't try to do it yourself, let them do it.

I think our company has seen ROI. If you can see where all your projects are, what type of projects you have, what resources that they're working on, and finally, where your budget is. That's a win-win, all the way. 

We have unlimited licenses for all of our functionalities. Since we went global, we went with that model.

We evaluated MS Project, because we thought we going to stay with them. We evaluated Planview and Innotas. There was another minor one too and we want to be more mature than that. Those were the main ones that we evaluated.

We chose Planview probably for the centralization of all the projects, ease of use, views, and the configured screens were very easy to use. Ours was more about resources, knowing where your resources are, for example:

"What projects are you working on?" 

"I'm over here working on these five projects." 

"But they're not on my list!" 

This solution is just about able to see what your resources are working on and having all your projects in one place, even team schedules.

We do not use the solution’s Lean/Agile delivery tools yet. That's one reason why we were looking at this heavily at the conference. They seem to be really focused on that, which is good. A lot of companies that I talked to seemed to be struggling with it, so it's good to see that Planview is trying to move into that direction, taking everything with it.

Today, Planview does not help connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution because we only have one PMO which is using finances. I don't think that they're doing a capital budget yet, to say, "These are the projects that we're going to work on." But, as we've gone global, we will start doing that. So, it'd be very beneficial. The other company that I worked for, it was very highly used. We forecasted constantly to see where our budgets were, what our capital budget was for that year, and what projects we were going to work on at the beginning of the year. That was good.

There are so many different functionalities within it that you don't have to take in all in one day. You can just grow with it. So, that's what I like about it.

I'm always a person who will never give anything a 10. I would probably give it, compared to other tools, a nine (out of 10). I would've given it an eight (out of 10), but they've made improvements this year. So many good things are coming out, and they really listen to the customers. I'll give them a nine for that.

I am part of the admin team that uses this. So we kind of help run it behind the scenes, but company-wide, we mainly currently are just using the project management system for our IT projects. We have a few business projects that have started using it, but it's still mainly only with our IT organization. And in planning for next year will be the first time that we have used it for our annual planning purposes. That seems to be working really well.

We really like how it ties into Projectplace for the annual planning. The integration has been really helpful in terms of keeping the business case files together. Once a project is created in Enterprise One, it shows up in both places and that's been really helpful. It's also a really good place to pull data from. In addition, it helps us better manage our people and get better insight into their hours.

We just started using the planning tool and it has been an improvement from each team running projects individually in different Excel spreadsheets.

Enterprise One has been helpful with prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. This is because sometimes we have upper management expecting more work than our team has the resources to carry out. Being able to use the tool to give them insight into our capacities has helped make decisions. It gives us the proof we need to show higher management how something will or will not work in terms of our team's capabilities.

The solution allows program managers to group work together and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. Setting up portfolios has worked really well for us. We are able to drill down into details the underlying consolidated information.

I would give the solution’s ability to create summary reports across multiple projects a three out of five. I think Enterprise One is great at being a source for data, but our company is still running reports externally. Currently, I'm working on setting up more specific reports and pulling into different environments, but overall I would say it's a great data source, but not the best reporting source. The best way to improve this would be to have an integrated tie-in with Power BI or Tableau.

One big issue we have been having during our annual planning is that only the creator of a portfolio can edit it. This means that only the creator of a portfolio can edit which projects are included or excluded in it. If the person who created a particular profile that we need to make changes to is out for a week, we can not put it into a big overview until they come back. Admin rights for portfolios would be super helpful.

I have been using Planview Enterprise One since May of this year. The company set it up in 2017/2018 but has been using it full-time only since 2019. 

My impression of the stability of the solution is that it is stable. The upgrades run overnight and it seems to work well during the day. We have had a few minor glitches, but nothing that hinders the broad use of it. 

Right now, Enterprise One is pretty much only being utilized by the IT program, but I know there are several other parts of the company that are looking into using it. I think the program itself would allow it, especially in terms of licensing. I think we have an unlimited license, but I think the biggest issue with adding more parts of the business into it is having enough admin staff to run it right now. There are five of us and so adding more parts of the company would just make it harder in terms of the administration side of it.

I think they've been helpful and we have never had any big major crashes. But, with any minor glitches we had, they tried to figure everything out within a couple of weeks and get it fixed on the next update. I think we get monthly or bi-monthly updates.

We previously used Microsoft Project. 

I would say that we have had some issues. This might just be more of a tractor supply issue, but we've kind of had to almost backtrack a lot of how it was originally set up. This is because the people from Tractor Supply who were there when it set up left four months in, so it was set up a little off, to begin with.

We got help from Planview's people on the implementation. 

When we have teams using it correctly, I would say the solution works really well. It is really helpful in terms of scheduling and being able to look at which teams are needed on projects. We just have some issues with buy-in from some people.

I would say it works really well for forecasting remaining effort, especially in terms of forecasting the dollar amounts. We've gotten pretty good at adjusting rates because we have a lot of contract workers.

The solution's view into resource capacity and availability helps us manage workers. This is particularly true if you have a resource manager rather than just a project manager looking at just one factor. A resource manager can look at the time they have spent on every single project and adjust and talk to the parts' managers. Enterprise One makes it really easy to just pull the resource management tab and quickly look at who is overloaded. You can color code the resource management assignments page screen to make it better to look at.

We use Enterprise One to capture everything in IT that we're working on from projects that require capital funding, to running the business. We are doing everything from soup to nuts, including timesheets. We've established the full implementation.

It provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. We're able to see the full scope of what people are working on. We can see all the different types of activities that they are charging time to and we can do an analysis of whether we think that's the right distribution of the workload.

Enterprise One has improved my organization in terms of everything that we're working on. We're able to see where our resources are allocated and when we have availability, which helps us to schedule the portfolio. That's really the main intent of Enterprise One.

The ability to capture timesheets is the most valuable feature. Also, the ability to see what the full organization's working on is probably the biggest bang for the buck.

Prior to implementing Enterprise One, we didn't have a tool to do any of that. We were hard-pressed to understand what our people were working on. Now, we have a full view of projects, allocations, and effort to deliver our portfolio projects.

Enterprise One's ability to forecast remaining efforts is pretty good. It's a regular schedule, so you can see your burndown rate and see what's left on the project to spend from a labor and non-labor perspective.

Its view into resource capacity and availability absolutely help us manage work. We can't plan out projects for delivery until we know if we have resources available to deliver them. That's been really critical. We look at our projects and see what availability of resources we have. That helps us to determine when we can start new work.

Project managers can group work together and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. They can create portfolios. 

We are able to drill down to the underlying details via consolidated information. We can see exactly what people are working on and we can see where they're charging their time. We can see their allocations and redistribute the load if we need to based on how much is being demanded for individuals.

We hope that it will increase our on-time completion rates. That will hopefully happen when the projects are delivering. Some of them have end dates coming up in the next quarter and some not for another 6+ months. We'll probably be able to start viewing that within two to three months.

I don't initially expect the on-time completion rate to be increased, but I'm hoping over time, we get better at project intake and estimation. That will help us to deliver things more efficiently and meet our timelines.

The scheduling's kind of clunky in terms of its ability for us to see what stage work is at. They could have done better with that. It can be difficult to use.

We don't use its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects. I think it's poor.

We implemented Enterprise One three months ago. We're about to upgrade to the September release so, we'll be current as of next week.

It's mostly been stable. There have been a few times where things were delayed but it came out pretty quickly.

We will be rolling it out more broadly across the organization. I don't envision any issues with scalability. We plan on expanding it to many other areas. I'm already talking with seven other departments within my company. It's going to be rolled out enterprise-wide. The supply chain is probably the biggest organization next to ours, then there's legal, and a couple of other departments who it will make the biggest impact for. 

There are 750 users across our organization. 

Technical support is fair. Some people are very talented and very knowledgeable but others are not. They're generally responsive. There have been some times when they've not been, but they are 75% of the time.

The initial setup was very complex. If you've ever done the implementation it's not an easy implementation. It's very complex. We had a group of 20 people working on this project for 6+ months to implement the tool. The configuration alone was six weeks just to set up resources, initial lifecycles, and things like that. 

In terms of the implementation strategy, we had the project all laid out. We knew what and when we needed to deliver it. We knew what the scope of our work was. We had a massive communication exercise. The change management aspect of this going from no tool to a very sophisticated tool like this one required extensive communication and change management. I was the project lead, I lep up the whole implementation and worked with project managers. 

Maintenance requires three people. I oversee them. I have two full-time people.

We worked with Planview's implementation team for the deployment. 

As long as we can get enough participants, it will make the pricing more reasonable. We signed up for an enterprise license. That makes the per person cost much lower.

Aside for standard licensing, we had a cost for the implementation but nothing besides that. 

We evaluated nine other solutions including Planisware, Clarity, Microsoft, and ServiceNow. Enterprise One is very similar out of the other two industry leaders. Clarity, Planisware, and Planview are the three industry leaders. They're all pretty comparable. We ended up getting a reasonable price, which is why we went with them.

For the organization, people really have an appetite for the data. Being able to pull it all together really was the biggest benefit for us.

My advice would be not to underestimate the amount of effort it takes to implement. It's much more than the vendor would tell you.

I would rate Enterprise One a seven out of ten. I would give it this rating because of the amount of effort it took to implement and bring an organization this big along. It was a monumental effort. It took a lot of work to do that.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

We've been using Planview Enterprise since 2013 and we moved to Enterprise One in 2018 with the latest version.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We didn't use a consultant, we just did the deployment ourselves. There is an in-house team who worked on it. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

Enterprise One supports our portfolio planning and approval process. People who are interested in having a project done would enter it in Planview and we would use Planview to facilitate the approval process. If it's disapproved, then we would cancel the entry and nothing would happen. If it's approved, then we use the tool to facilitate the execution of that project from a cost estimation and management resource as well as tracking the project progress and current status.

We also use it for risk management and to facilitate change management.

One example of how it has improved my organization is the introduction of Microsoft Power BI reporting. It greatly improved the visibility and the flexibility in those management reports. Prior to that, oftentimes there was data taken out of Planview and Excel created visuals for management. But with Power BI, definitely, the visualization capabilities are very strong.

It has definitely helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with the strategic objective in terms of strategy, outcomes, and capabilities. It lets us tie projects to strategies, rank them, and prioritize them based on a number of attributes.

Enterprise One also allows program managers to group work together and see the resource demands and the costs at a consolidated level. That's basically the core of what Planview Enterprise One does. It gives you the ability to see across a portfolio the cost and resource demands. It doesn't affect project management ability specifically, but it helps us in the portfolio management to make sure that we're working on the right things and have the right amount of resources and it gives us visibility into future demand to help us plan for resourcing.

It drills down into the details underlying the consolidated information to a number of different levels, all the way to tell individual tasks and assignments. This lets us see what the resources are working on to help us prioritize. If we have constraints in a certain skill, we can see the detail and then make intelligent decisions on what work may need to be put off versus what work needs to get done now.

I'm not sure it has increased our on-time completion rate specifically itself, but it certainly gives us visibility into what is on time versus what is finished not on time.

The financial planning capabilities are very useful. We have integration for an SAP system, and so we load financial data from SAP into Planview for prior months. And then we use the forecasting capabilities to get a complete picture of the cost of a specific project. The financial management is very useful.

The resource management is also useful to show us resources utilization, as well as capacity and it gives us a picture across our employees as to what capacity we have, which helps us plan what work we can take on. It helps us with scheduling when certain things might begin or not begin. It also gives us visibility into if we need to consider going external for contracting or consulting resources to perform certain tasks.

Enterprise One does a very nice job of telling us what stage a project's at. We also use it from a portfolio management standpoint to gauge the health of an overall portfolio of projects. And from a planning perspective, knowing when projects are going to be ending helps us in planning future work.

It also does a nice job of letting us forecast effort either by an individual person or by skillset. If I have an individual person assigned, I can plan out their work into the future. If I have a need for a certain skill set, but I don't have anyone assigned yet, I can still plan the work being done.

It does a very good job of providing summary reports across multiple projects if there are different options of reporting available within the tool itself. It also connects with Microsoft's Power BI. That's integrated as well to provide some dashboarding KPIs.

Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. We use it for different types of work. We use it for project work. We use it for production support monitoring and production support work. We also use it for managing smaller work requests that don't require a formal project driven by a project manager.

In terms of improvement, I know one of the things they're moving to is a single Planview account ID. Right now, if you have multiple Planview products, you have to log on multiple times. But that's a general statement. It's not specific to Enterprise One.

I've been using Planview for 14 years. Enterprise One is their current version, their core PPM application.

It's very stable. In the four years I've used it at my current employer, I think only once I've had an actual issue where there was something that they needed to fix. It's a very stable platform.

I know in our case specifically, we've had over 1,000 active projects at any one time with over 1,000 users using it all over the world, and it performs fine. I know other companies only manage several dozen projects at a time but Enterprise One definitely seems scalable.

When I joined, we had about 1,200 users. We've spun off a couple of parts of our business that used to use it. Presently, we're smaller, but when I first joined, we had about 1,200 users.

We use it within our IT organization and within IT the adoption rate is 100%. There were other business areas that were using it that we sold off. We're having discussions with other business areas on using the functionality.

In terms of the types of users using Enterprise One, project management obviously is very active in it every day. We have people that work in portfolio management. They're in it quite often. We have a team that we call our relationship managers. They're folks that work with a business on project prioritization and project ideas. And management uses it, again, for visualization reporting. Resource managers are also in it to view what their people are working on and view assignments to projects and approve assignments.

I manage the solution. I'm an IT manager, but in this capacity, I'm the Planview architect so I do all the configuration of it.

The technical support seems strong. I know they've started doing some more off-shore support, and that space still needs some growth. But the US-based technical support is fine. Their off-shore support is something new that they're laying out and the team just needed some development in terms of skill and experience. 

I was not involved in the initial deployment here. I've used this product at two different companies and I actually wasn't involved in the initial deployment in either one.

In hard dollars, I have not seen ROI. In productivity and the ability to help support achieving our strategic objectives, I have. But I couldn't put a dollar figure next to it.

I'm not involved really in the pricing or licensing aspects of it. One of the things that Planview as a company has done is introduce something they call FLEX licensing, where if you have Enterprise One licenses that you're not using, you can exchange them for licenses for other Planview products. So as a company, the licensing seems flexible. But that's not an Enterprise One statement specifically.

One of the big lessons, and this applies to any solution, is not to customize it and use it as it's designed to be used. Adopt your processes to leverage the capabilities of the tool. I've seen many instances where people take applications and customize them to fit their processes. And it just ends up being problematic later on. That's one of the things we did in the latest implementation of Planview four years ago. We had an on-premise version that was heavily customized. We moved to a SaaS model that was not customized at all, and we've been able to keep it current. Upgrades are easy. So one of the lessons I would recommend is: Don't customize.

I would rate Enterprise One an eight out of ten. It does an outstanding job of supporting our needs in this space, and the company has done a great job of continuing to enhance and improve it.

We not only use Planview for resource allocation but also for tracking financials towards the projects that we have set up. We also have financials and resource allocation and we also use the project planning piece of it.

We use Planview quite a bit to articulate and tell the story around where we're at, whether a project's at risk, whether it is on track, whether or not we need to either extend the timeline or add additional resources.

I just took it over about four or five months ago, as part of my responsibilities. But from what I can tell it's pretty robust in terms of flexibility.

It maps back to our SDLC process pretty well. I'm able to see the stage of where things are at. We also use Azure DevOps for all of our requirements and our coding. 

The work is in Azure DevOps but the planning aspect of that work, the financials, and the resource allocation are done through Planview. I'm trying to figure out how to connect the dots. Meaning, if I have a project where I've burned through 50% of my financials, and I've done all my resource allocation inside of Azure DevOps, I'm able to visualize and see the data that says, "Hey, I'm 50% through the development work of the project. I have this work that I currently have in flight, and I have this much planned for the remaining amount of time, which represents the remaining 50%." And then I want to see how that then maps to Planview. Because Planview could say, "Hey, you know what, we burned through 80% of our money." How do I then use the data coming out of Azure DevOps to then either go ask for more money and more funding or to do something to make decisions?

Resource capacity helps me to ensure that I have the individuals needed to complete the work. We basically go in at a high level. We know we have a project and we know we might need around 500 hours of a cloud engineer. And so we'll go out, we'll make the request, and the allocation is done for it. Then you have a person that's allocated for those 500 hours. The only thing I don't have is when they've burned through those 500 hours, I understand that they're burning it against the project, but I don't know how to tick and tie that to the features that they burning it against. 

It provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of the types of work. From a project view, I'm able to see where things are at by the financials, the allocation of resources, as well as the lifecycle of the project.

It also provides a variety of types of resources assignments for assigning work to people. It's pretty flexible. We could set up a variety of different rules within Planview across organizations. Each team sometimes has different roles that they need to pull in for the project or for the team. And so having the flexibility of adding roles is good.

Another thing that it has helped us with is our burn rate of dollars, more than anything else. We're able to look at things and say, "If we're coming towards the end of this year, we know our burn rates higher than it should be." And we can look at certain projects and say, "Let's remove certain work streams that we don't want to work on."

As more and more organizations are adopting agile as a framework of how to deliver work, they should build in some flexibility within Planview of connecting the work to the teams.

For example, right now the old waterfall methodology of planning was to say "Hey, I need an allocation of a resource." Normally with other tools I've seen, it's if I need an allocation of 18, I know Planview has that. We, unfortunately, made some modifications, we didn't go that route, we're on fast forward. That is an example where I think Planview has done that. 

When you think of planning at a PI level, roadmap planning, or release planning, I think they should make a little more headway into how agile delivery works, tying it back into the financials and the planning to Planview. I think it would be good.

We have been using Enterprise One for four to five years. 

The stability is good. I have not seen a lag time and we haven't been down when I've had to use it.

The scalability is good. We have 20 to 25 project managers that use Planview, a couple of team leaders, and then we do our time cards in Planview, so really the entire organization uses it, at least in IT, so it's probably around 400 to 600 people.

I would like to see us use it more. When we use Planview I would like to use it at senior level leadership planning where we can see forecasted spend, my allocation for the budget, my resources, and all of those things. I want to be able to tie that to detail work that's in Azure DevOps.

The initial setup went smoothly. It was straightforward. I don't think we had a whole lot of tickets.

We do a lot of upgrades. It's usually overnight and it doesn't take long. We had a major reconfiguration about two months ago and it went pretty smoothly.

From our side, I think we had about four or five analysts involved.

For the management, we have two people that help support and manage Planview.

We only worked with Planview, not third-party integrators. 

It's pretty easy to use. It's not that difficult.

I would rate Enterprise One a seven out of ten.