Planview Portfolios Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have different users for different modules. We manage programs and portfolios by using the Strategy module. Our project teams predominantly use the Work module. Our resource management team uses the Resource module and RMA to manage resources capacity, demand, etc. So, each of the modules is important for the respective people. We have a yearly planning process, and we use the Planning module to a certain extent to do the portfolio creation work.

RMA has been really good for forecasting the remaining effort. Planview has been making a lot of improvements. The recent improvement that they have done to provide visibility to the actual timesheets that are submitted has been really good. The roadmap that Planview has and the way they're continuously and quickly improving and providing solutions have been very positive for us. We know that we don't have to wait for six months to realize the benefits of their development. From the delivery point of view, that has been one of the best things about Planview.

It helps our management team in planning resource capacity and availability pretty nicely. We've been doing this for over two years now, and consistently, it has improved. Even though the functionality was there, we only started using it in the last two years. We provided whatever feedback we had to the Planview team, and they went in and built those additional features that we requested. For example, they created a great way for our users to search for a specific resource, project, program, or role. We were not using some of the features, and we wanted them to not be visible, and they helped us with that. They also brought a feature to provide visibility into when a resource was never assigned to any task. There was no visibility to this before. This feature was really very good for visibility into the resource portfolio. If we have about 60 resources, and four of them have never been assigned to any task or any project, we can see that. So, the search option and the visibility into the resources that have not been assigned are the quick features that they provided.

We've been encouraging our users to manage their schedules directly in the Work and Assignments module. So far, it has been good, but we've been in conversation with the vendor product team to improve the performance of the Work and Assignments module. Right now, it is a bit slower.

We don't use the Progression feature. We will use it at some point in time. Until then, we want to have a way to set time to help decide what's in the past, present, and future. It is one of the things we've been discussing with Planview.

It provides flexibility for configuring assignments, but one of the things about which we've been talking to Planview is related to certain resources that are associated with a project. When the project extends, their demand also equally goes up. There are also resources where if a particular task has to crash, it may need additional effort. So, it is between the fixed effort versus fixed duration. Planview is more duration-based. For example, if you crash a task, the system rightly thinks that you're crashing the task, and you need to finish the work by doing overtime or working additional hours. If you are taking 30 hours to finish a task in three weeks, and for whatever reason, you have to crash the task into two weeks, 30 hours need to be fulfilled within those two weeks. If the task moves to four weeks, instead of three weeks, you still have 30 hours that get distributed among four weeks, so you will be able to finish the task. That makes sense for those resources that are associated with the task, but there are certain resources, such as a project manager or project administrator, for whom when a project extends, the demand also equally goes up. So, if somebody is assigned 50% for a project, and assuming that the project is moving out by a month or two or three months, the effort shouldn't go down. Currently, the allocation goes down, and our resource managers have to go and update the effort back up to 50% or whatever the demand is. We are interacting with Planview to provide a solution. Right now, we have to go and update the additional demand because of the change in the project.

We've been using Planview since 2010. It wasn't called Enterprise One then. In 2010, it was still called Planview. It became Enterprise One a few years ago when they changed the platform to include the CTM portion. 

They have been excellent. They're very accessible. I would give their support team the highest rating because of the way they respond. Most of the time, the issue gets resolved within the same day. If not, it is resolved the next day. We've been very happy with their support system.

We were using Business Engine Network before we moved to Planview. Business Engine Network was bought over by Planview.

Until about a year and a half ago, our users used to use Microsoft Project for schedules, and they used to update the schedule into Planview on a regular basis, at least once a week. Of late, we have started to move to Planview for full work resource management. We've been encouraging our users to manage their schedules directly in the Work and Assignments module.

In my previous work experience, I have mostly used Microsoft Project and some of the products that Microsoft gave. At one point in time, I used Rational, but that was mostly from the software development management point of view.

I wasn't part of the team. I joined in 2010, and all the discussions and evaluations happened in 2009. All I know is that our company went in and looked at all the other products that were available at that time, and then they decided that Planview would be a better solution. It has been one of the very good decisions the company has made. We've been using it for close to 11 years.

Overall, it has been a good tool. Based on my conversations with other users and colleagues who moved from other organizations, I would rate it higher than other solutions. 

In a way, it provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. Our IT team uses different systems. They use Jira and another home-grown system. We have done integration with some of the IT systems that they use, and we are also planning to integrate with Jira, which is critical for us to do. Right now, we have a way to integrate that information, and we are making use of it, but we are looking at seamless integration with Jira. Our IT teams are looking at updating and moving some of their work into Jira for easy management, and that's where this whole end-to-end solution would become a reality, but the integration that we currently have is meeting the expectations of our users as well as the business.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. There is always room for improvement, and Planview is constantly making changes. We've been a part of their inner circle programs where we provide our feedback, and they look at our requests. They have been great in terms of looking at those requests.

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

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

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

The capacity planning is great. I love the ability to forecast resource usage and to work for as long a period as I want to track. That's a really big, important aspect of resource management, and, specifically for companies that have contractors in which those contractors might only be funded due to a project. If you don't have project dates in and you don't have funding, then you don't have validation for why you have a resource. It makes it so that there's some accountability there. 

I love that using this tool gives you the ability to plan work out three, six, or even 12 months in advance very successfully. It gives us a real picture of what our organization really thinks it wants to do, what our organization is really doing, and then what our people are really doing, and reveals who's not working on anything.

When it comes to managing project plans, it works. I had this discussion yesterday with someone who's in more of a senior leadership position than I'm in. One of their concerns was the inability for project managers (PMs) to manage work in Microsoft Project and then sync that data to Enterprise One, and I said, "Well, then, if they're going to do managing the work in Project, they might as well manage it in Enterprise One," as MS Project only offers the PM visibility, unless it's cloud-based, which means it's hidden, not transparent. Enterprise One is transparent which makes it the perfect place to manage work and tasks.

I love the forecasting. It's a great tool. One of the things I'd say about Enterprise One that I love the most is it provides transparency. There's nothing to hide when an organization uses Enterprise One. You will find out what resource managers are really not managing resources. You will find out what resources are really not working, and then you will find out what PMs are not working and are working, and then you'll find out what work is relevant.

The functionality of Enterprise One, by default, is that if you request a resource to a resource manager for your project, if you're a PM, one of the actions you have to take is to submit the utilization and the effort required by that resource. Therefore, if I said I needed this person, and I just left it and submitted it to their manager, the manager would see you come across as a 100% request. If I already know the person is working on other projects on support, I’m not going to allow them to be 100% because I'm not giving that resource. It requires a PM to align the requirement for a resource, as an example, with what the budget forecasts. You only have resources based on budget.

The accountability piece that I like about Enterprise One is that it forces the actions that PMs are supposed to do. They are supposed to manage budget time and resources. If you just arbitrarily say, "Give me 10 resources at 100%," that's not managing the budget. That's not creating an effective timeline. That's not creating a realistic schedule of when you think proposed work can be done. It forces the PM to do a little work. It forces that resource manager to sit down and say, "Do I really know what my people are doing, and do I really want to give up this person for 50% of his time for the next eight months?" It forces those questions so that PMs actually know what their team is doing.

Enterprise One's view into resource capacity and availability help us manage work from the perspective of I see what my team should be working to, what they're assigned to, and whether or not I'm willing to give up a resource for other work, and kind of puts me in a place to prioritize planning of work. Every request for every resource and every request for every component of work that is entered in Planview Enterprise One requires someone or multiple people to ask themselves real questions of whether or not they know why they're doing it and whether they want to do it.

Enterprise One has the ability to create summary reports across multiple projects. The reporting tool is great. Out-of-the-box, it's just kind of black and white. It's a list of data. It's like an Excel spreadsheet without lines, and it's got sections. It pulls all the data from wherever you want to pull the data, depending on your access. It’s great for data, as the Planview Enterprise One database is huge. There is lots of data being captured. I love that. I love the ability to integrate with, for example, Microsoft's Power BI. When we do that we can take the wonderful data that Planview captures and formulate that into a more visual representation that people want.

The reporting enhances our ability to share the big picture with management. The amount of data that Planview captures for every item of work, whether it's a support bucket, a capacity, or an actual project in the project management world forces conversations. The old-fashioned corporate American model of work leadership, especially executive leadership, is to ask the arbitrary question, "What is the status?" and that's the worst question anyone in leadership can ask as it doesn't mean anything to me. What you're looking for is what you want to know - including the status which may not represent what another department is actually tracking. It's an irrelevant question.

For me, the right question is, "Where do we stand with the money?" or, "How do we look on our timeline?" or, "Will this functionality be delivered by X, Y, or Z?" Those are specific questions, and the tool has that data. It requires a project manager who knows the work, understands the timeline, is really managing the resources and their capacity, leveraging their time, validating the time being submitted in approval to give that picture.

It's more difficult, as it requires more accountability. It's not a simple spreadsheet that says "Oh yeah, we'll have it done by December 1st," without any data to back it up. Planview Enterprise provides data that almost forces the PM to make sure that the "We'll have it done by date," is legitimate based on resources and legitimate based on work. It's a little bit more complex due to the maturity of most organizations. It works well for organizations that have serious thoughtful PMS. It's not for an organization that really just has note-takers tracking tasks on a spreadsheet.

Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. For all types of work, I’m not 100% sure. Enterprise One captures capabilities or features, deliverables, something that you're enhancing, and then, also, due to its ability to incorporate into tools like LeanKit, you can track that actual work. It tracks traditional projects, what we know to be a start-and-stop funded thing. It tracks support work. If you really think through how you're going to design that model, you can track your day-to-day operations, break/fixes, emergencies, et cetera.

It tracks all types of work that are performed within technology. It's just how you're going to use the tool to track that work that is in question. There’s complexity. It requires an organization to actually sit down, to know what they're doing, know what work is, know what they're delivering, how they deliver it before they start building out their structure within Enterprise One.

Enterprise One helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. That’s true in my experience with Planview, however, it’s too early in my position at this new company to really gauge. They're new; they're not there yet. They're not at that universal, "Let's plan work across the board because it's all aligned to an organizational strategy" place yet. At my past organization, we were able to prioritize work just by having snapshots by portfolios of, "What work are we actually delivering? Can we deliver it all?” This forces executive leadership to make a decision and say, "Okay, this is the work I actually want," as opposed to the old-fashioned, "Get it all done because I said so." It really breaks that model, and I love that.

The solution provides a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people. It allows you to reserve a person so that they have access to submit time to work items, but not necessarily have to work in those items. It assigns you the ability to allocate a resource for a specific work assignment which they will be doing. It also allows you the ability to reserve a role type based on function and role, not necessarily a named person.

In terms of the flexibility of configuring assignments, from a tool usage perspective, it's easy. It's the click of a button. From the person clicking the button, the perspective of that user, the complexity comes into play in terms of whether or not you can understand the definition between what is a requirement, what is a reservation, what is an allocation, and you can memorize that and remember that every day, and know where to click a button. other than that, it’s simple.

The flexibility allows us to plan ahead for work that we aren't sure is going to be fully funded or not. We can plan a type of resource without actually knowing who would potentially do the work, which allows us to forecast a resource. The forecasting model gives us the ability to say, "Will our team that's presently in use be able to fulfill that prioritized work, or do we have to begin a process of obtaining additional headcount?"

The solution allows program managers to group work together and see resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. For example, at one of the other companies that I've worked in, they had the mindset of, "Our organization keeps our work, and you don't need to see what we're doing, and I don't need to see what you're doing." However, with this mindset, they're going to run into the constraint of, "Oh no, you need someone from my team to help you deliver that work, and now we need open visibility." This product impacts the mindset and the model of, "Who owns work? What is collaboration? Do we still remain in silos? Or is the organization the main objective?" If delivering work for the organization is the main objective, Planview delivers due to the fact that it's transparent and open to everyone.

We are mostly able to drill down into details underlying the consolidated information using Enterprise One. As an example, you can have a work item called Cool Project. With it, you can see when it's supposed to start and when it's proposed to finish. You can see the resources allocated to it. In there, you can see work items, like features or deliverables, epochs, or milestones. You can see that in a Gantt chart. You can see the start and stop dates for all of that. Planview does have the ability to let you actually see the tasks, or what Enterprise One calls the action items, for every one of those. That may not necessarily answer the bigger picture, as there's always going to be that human component that has to speak to the work, which is why a lot of teams use secondary tools, like CA's Rally tool, or Planview's new LeanKit tool, or Jira, to really give the full picture of what each individual respective work item is. Therefore, while it does give us a visual, it may not speak fully to it without the help of a secondary app.

Enterprise One has not increased our on-time completion rate. The reason is due to the fact that Enterprise One leverages true resource ability and capability as far as effort and available effort. If you leverage the tool that way, and you keep governance that reflects that, you’ll be better off. As an example, my contractors are not legally allowed to work past 40 hours, so I forecast them that way. I can see if somebody's over. I need to deal with that, due to contracts. That said, if you track outside of Enterprise One, there are organizations that may say "Hey, you're a contractor. I need you to finish the work. Sorry. You'll be doing 50 hours.” It's on a spreadsheet and no one sees it.

The issue we had was during a test case and had to do with Enterprise One linking to third-party apps. For Enterprise One, for what it's supposed to do, I don't have a problem with it as a PM. It does what I need it to do and the issue doesn’t necessarily impact traditional project management. You can manage budget, time, and resources - the three key pillars of project management - and IT can all be managed within the tool, Enterprise One.

For the more granular visibility that people expect, there are always third-party applications, like LeanKit. That gives you that more granular picture for managing the work, however, that doesn't necessarily take away from the scope of what project management is in Enterprise One.

I've used the solution for about five years at two different companies. At my latest organization, we've been using it since August 8th and, of course, however many months they've been working with Planview leading up to an official launch. I'd say it's been less than one year. I joined the company a month before go-live.

The solution is stable. However, it's so robust, there's so much data, that it has the tendency to lag. I don't know if that's how we configured it. I don't know if that's due to how we configured our cloud instance. That said, specifically with reporting, it was the same at the other organization I was at. I was at another large organization that had 4,000-plus people using Enterprise One, and when you pull up reports, reports can take one to 15 minutes to pull one report, sometimes longer. That seems to be consistent between the two organizations.

The ability to scale Enterprise One is great as you can integrate with tools like Power BI and then tools like Planview's LeanKit. Therefore, I consider that scalability to be great. We're building a working model right now.

We have executive leaders using Enterprise One. Overall users might be close to 4,000. I say that as that's how many users are in IT, and this is presently an IT tool for timesheet reporting. It's a pretty significant footprint, and the roles range from executive viewers, executives who just want to see reports, senior leadership, senior management, management, project managers, program managers, timesheet reporters, contractors, and then finance people who just need read-only rights to be able to see stuff. There are quite a bit of different roles that are using it.

The solution is being used daily by up to, plus or minus, 4,000 people. The organization is using it right now as it's an IT tool, however, there are other organizations that are not IT including HR, training, accounting, and other business units within the organization that are already seeing the value to it from a project management perspective. That footprint can grow and we may increase usage.

There are conversations within the company with others that want to use it, and that would turn the IT team, who owns it, into trainers for building out new administrative groups and coaching. There's just no one yet who has actually been implementing it as we're all new to the product.

I have never had to contact technical support in the five years I've used it.

I've used the Planview success page and it is very thorough and very good. They have a wonderful KB platform. I know that we have had to reach out maybe five times since August 8th, at least that I'm aware of. Our global admins had to reach out for some support from our Planview representative from an administrative perspective, however, from a Planview SME perspective, for finding out about usage and best how to use it, the KB articles are phenomenal which is why I've never had to call.

Our organization previously used Micro Focus. There was not enough detail. It tracked the work. It tracked somebody reporting time to it, as well as resources. However, they didn't necessarily track the budget to the fullest extent. It tracked the budget, however, it didn't track that budget to forecast, and it had no forecasting model. You couldn't plan resources and then do comparisons for analysis, and you couldn't get granularity into work items the way you can in Planview.

I was not part of either implementation of a product instance of Enterprise One for either of the two organizations that I've worked in.

However, I can say that, with both of them, I have heard after-the-fact statements such as "We should have considered this. We should have considered that." Both organizations did not know the full scope. As an example, one of the organizations I have worked with didn't want to track at a strategic level. They wanted to track at team levels due to the traditional silos surrounding work. However, now that they're getting a taste of the tool, understanding that there is cross-collaboration, they want to manage at a program level. That said, you can't manage at the program level without using the strategy functionality within Enterprise One. When you get into strategy, it's no longer siloed work. It's organizational work. That it requires planning.

We have approximately 20 people that are classified as Planview admins, and some of those are global admins. Global admins include probably five or fewer personnel. Planview admins are probably 25 or less, and those all function together as a team. It is a collaborative effort to maintain the solution. To administrator Planview properly requires a representative from every organization and/or department that will use it to act as a liaison/admin/coach. That rolls up to a global administrative group which is about 25 people at least.

Most of the maintenance is governance. It's not maintenance for the application. It's maintenance for usage, roles, access, that type of stuff. From the application perspective, the maintenance is low. Once it's implemented, it's global, it's across the board, and it's in use. That said, there is administration for governance, usage, visibility, rights, minimal rights, and that type of stuff.

We had some assistance from Planview directly.

We haven't recorded an ROI yet, however, we are expecting one.

That's going to be evolving as we're understanding the data and why we're putting the data into the tool. Actual data from what we planned, the budget that we planned, the budget that we spent, overspent, didn't spend, et cetera, will give us clarity in the future and those types of conversations are happening right now and they will all roll up into ROI.

I don't have any details in regards to the pricing or the licensing of the product.

I'm not sure if other products were evaluated before choosing this solution.

I'd advise those considering the solution that it requires planning. If there was some CEO or senior IT leader that said, "Hey, we're thinking of using it," this is where I would go. I would say: You need to understand what is the work that you deliver. You need to understand how all of that work that you deliver rolls up into organizational goals and vision. You need to understand that and understand what type of work you deliver, being able to compartmentalize your work into either support work, operational work, or actual project or program work, or intake work for requests, or emergency break/fix-type work. You have to be able to quantify the type of work you deliver before you use a tool like this, and then understand the hierarchy of work so it can be prioritized across the organization before you implement it, and then understand what are the roles of people, like people who submit time, what is a project manager, what is a resource manager.

In IT, a resource manager is basically the engineer who can do more tickets but can't deal with people. Planview actually does the reverse. You are managing people more than you're delivering work, and that's a big, big pain point for a lot of organizations. Those things would have to be considered. Really ask those types of questions and get examples before implementing. 

One of the reasons why I love Enterprise One so much is due to the fact that, when I first started using it in 2014, when I was given the role to help administrators, there was an assumption that this tool was too complex. The company was struggling and fighting to use it. I interviewed people, including probably 30 managers, every week for several months. These were just generalized questions to help build a method for helping them use the tool, and coaching them to actually start using it. The universal answer was, "We have a lot of work. We're extremely busy, but I don't know what we're doing." Planview gives that visibility, and answers the question "What are we actually doing?" and then that leads to the, "Why are we actually doing it?" And that's extremely helpful.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

We work as an internal support factory and use Planview Portfolios to manage our projects and develop software. And we are trying to migrate to agile functionality. We used the software for booking reservations in hotels.

The benefit of Planview is that you can manage all the features simultaneously, and you have the information you need online. You can change your information and manage the resources very well. Getting to view the project is the best feature in Portfolios.

The box reports are too limited. If you want to configure it, you must consult someone, which is sometimes expensive.

I have been using the solution for four years.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is very scalable. We are only using a part of the solution. About 20 people from IT are using Portfolios in my company.

Customer support sometimes takes a lot of time, but otherwise they do great. It is necessary to have some support because we have to do some special configurations.

Neutral

The initial setup was just a little complex. I rate the initial setup a seven out of ten. Deploying the solution took two weeks. While deploying the solution, we had two instances, one for the IT team and one for the business team. And we had to connect the two and explain things to the team. Only two people were needed to deploy the solution, me and another person.

Sometimes, we needed to hire a consultant, but not always. The majority of the time, we can implement the solution alone.

Planview Portfolios is not too expensive. You get what you paid for.

Before choosing Portfolios, you must prepare all the scenarios well to create projects on Portfolios. You must find the stage you want to manage in the life cycle. I rate Planview Portfolios an eight out of ten because the solution should explore more with reports.

We use Planview Enterprise One to capture information about all of our IT projects, IT resources, and financials associated with those projects. We then use information from Planview to understand how we are progressing in plan delivery, what our pipeline of work looks like, and what resources are required to deliver that pipeline of work and the execution. We are utilizing a broad range of capabilities across what Planview Enterprise One provides.

We don't use it for task management, and the work breakdown that we keep in Planview is relatively high. As a result, it is at key milestones rather than individual activities.

In terms of features, the financial planning modules are quite good, and they are the ones that are used the most. For us at this stage in our use, the financial planning feature is the most valuable feature of Planview Enterprise One.

The reporting is poor and requires improvement.

The tiles and exception-based activities in the application are sufficient to get by. However, when it comes to producing executive reports, MI reports, or any other type of reporting, we must exit Planview and work offline. We have been working with them to improve on that, as well as using some of the Power BI capabilities that have been available for a while, but it's still more difficult than it should be.

In the next release, I would like to be able to use the data in the tool to gain insight much more easily.

We have been working with Planview Enterprise One in our company for the last two and a half years. Prior to that, I implemented it in a different organization. I strong level of knowledge of this solution.

We are six months behind because we had a few problems when we took current releases. While we didn't do any customization, some of our configurations failed in some releases and required re-work.

We haven't run into any scalability performance issues. We have over 500 work items and 2,500 resources, and it's been fine for us. 

We use this solution across the company's IT and have approximately 250 users.

We've opened a few tickets with Planview due to bugs, defects, or configuration issues. Because it varies so much, I would have to put their rating somewhere in the middle. They are sometimes excellent and sometimes poor. It all depends on the circumstances.

Neutral

The initial setup was straightforward. We took a very quick approach to delivery. It was simple from a Planview standpoint. The questions and approach they used worked well for us. There are no concerns about the initial implementation process. Aside from us being clear on our requirements, the tool itself is fine.

We weren't looking at this as purely a return on the investment project. The return is generated by the projects themselves, allowing us to deliver the projects more efficiently. It's difficult to quantify the improved performance of our project delivery. 

We went through an RFI and RFP process before going to market. We specified our requirements. We went through a series of presentations from vendors to determine who could meet our needs. And we looked at five, and we narrowed it down to three: KeyedIn, Daptive, and Planview. The process we went through there made it clear that it didn't really matter which tool you chose; what mattered was whether or not you felt the implementation process was going to go well. In addition, we compared user feedback to how well the user would interact with the tool. Against those two key criteria during the implementation process, Planview outperformed the others at the time. Based on user feedback on the UI and usability, Planview came out on top.

My advice would be to be very clear about requirements and the associated value. Planview, like many other tools, has a broad range of capabilities, it does some things well and some things not so well. If the things you want to do are the things it excels at, then use it. If you want to do other things, this is not the tool for you. I would be focusing on the requirements against the capabilities, the core capabilities of the tool, rather than the features that may or may not have been added.

It does what it says it will do, and the majority of it is fairly simple to do. I would rate Planview Enterprise One a seven out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The resource management and assignment features are valuable. The timesheet management is also valuable because that is a requirement for us. So, the ability to see timesheet forecasting and timesheet actual submission from resources has been very useful and valuable to us. 

The configuration of the application helps us in aligning the projects to our strategic initiatives. So, we're able to configure that hierarchy or structure.

Forecasting is very valuable because based on the user profiles and resource profiles, we can add the utilization and the capacity for the work. So, once we do the forecasting, we're able to see if somebody is being forecasted above their capacity. There are good indicators within Planview Enterprise One that, at least, notify us to say, "Hey, this person is being forecasted above and beyond what the current capacity is." So, that's a good feature for us. It doesn't prevent us from overloading resources, but at least it indicates that somebody is overloaded. In terms of forecasting, I would rate it a four out of five.

Its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects is very limited. In terms of the out-of-the-box reporting for summary reports, the reporting that we typically leverage is around forecasting for resources, timesheets, and actuals, and just looking at what is the capacity. There is no real summary of what work is being done and how work is being accomplished. So, what we typically do is that we get a copy of the data files from Enterprise One daily, and then we have a team that manages the data mod outside of Enterprise One. They use data from Enterprise One as well as other additional sources to provide the reporting that we share with the management. So, we leverage a lot of Enterprise One data for reporting, but we don't use the reporting capabilities within Enterprise One. So, reporting can be improved, and they could help us make more customized reporting. I know it is very configurable out of the box, but we have to leverage an outside data mod that pulls in a lot of data from Enterprise One. So, the reporting function, and being able to customize reports, is the area that could be very beneficial.

We've been using it for three years.

It is very stable for a cloud environment. Over three years, we've had very few incidences beyond our internal network issues. So, it has been very solid. It has very good stability. I would rate it an eight out of 10 in terms of stability.

The version upgrades that they've done over the past two years have definitely increased the scalability. I would rate it a seven and a half out of 10 in terms of scalability.

Currently, we have 2,100 users. When we first deployed it, we had about 800 users. So, we have definitely grown exponentially over the last three years. 

The majority of our users are simply team member users. They just submit their timesheets there, and that's the majority. More than 1,600 of those users are simply timesheet users. The other users are in the Portfolio Manager role. They are the people who are serving in the project management role and have to manage the work and assign resources as well as resource managers. So, we have about 400 or so users in that role. We also have six Planview administrators who are providing day-to-day operational support for our users, and then we have some senior leadership, which is part of the portfolio management, but they mainly just take a look at it from month to month to see how the work is progressing and how we're looking in terms of the costs with our strategic initiatives.

It is currently being used extensively for project portfolio management. As a growing company, there is a likelihood of increasing usage. The number of users is likely to increase and continue to grow beyond the current 2,100. So, our usage will certainly continue to evolve, and we're also looking to do integrations with other applications and tools.

We submit cases from time to time. If we see any errors or encounter any system behavior that we're not able to understand from an administrative perspective, we do submit tickets on their website. That's the way we all contact them.

They're very efficient. They're very responsive as well. They typically help us in terms of explaining system functionality, and if there is a determination that there is a genuine issue with the application, they also make sure to explain that clearly to us. I would rate them an eight out of 10.

We used what's now known as Planview PPM Pro, but when we were using it, it was known as Innotas, which was prior to Planview's acquisition. At the time we were looking at upgrading from Innotas, Planview actually acquired them as an organization. So, we're using Planview PPM Pro.

We switched because we just wanted greater functionality. With the growth of the organization, we just wanted to use a tool that was more geared to help with enterprise management for projects and portfolios.

It was straightforward because we had great support from Planview. They do provide consultants who work with you and walk hand in hand with you in terms of setting it up. Maybe the complex nature is just the way that the tool is designed. I know they've made improvements to it, but at the time, the interface wasn't very user-friendly. So, we knew we had to do a lot of handholding and training, but the implementation was very straightforward.

The whole project exercise, from the initial inception of the idea to the actual implementation or just the actual deployment going live, took about seven months. So, it was about a seven-month project from sitting down to gather requirements to full deployment and getting users onboarded, etc. Because it was a cloud deployment, it was very seamless.

The implementation strategy was just going through meeting with stakeholders and understanding the requirements. We initially rolled it out to a sandbox environment, and we did some user acceptance testing in there for about a month or so. We rolled out all the features and full capability after about a month of the UAT from our sandbox and copying over that information into another sandbox environment. We had created a parallel environment. So, we had two environments for us. One that we actually had rolled out, and one that was a cut-over environment, just in case something went wrong with the full deployment.

We worked directly with Planview for its implementation. For its deployment, we required at least three of the administrators at a time. We could obviously leverage all six administrators.

For support and maintenance, at any given time, we have three administrators available, even though we have six of them. The maintenance is mainly around timesheet management. It involves helping users facilitate in terms of making sure that users have access to the work on their timesheets, and they are assigned to the correct roles. The way we have it configured is that we have work project roles and project attributes. So, it is just maintaining that access and making sure that if there are any changes within the organization, we maintain our organizational structure. Similarly, we also need to maintain access to the various users if their roles change or if their positions change within the organization.

I don't know about the actual pricing. I have not come across any costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

I believe prior to me joining the team, they'd also looked at Clarity. I wasn't part of that initial review, but I understand that Clarity was one of the other options that they looked at. I am not too sure why they decided to go with Enterprise One. The cost might've been a part of it. It could also have been because of a previous relationship with leadership and being familiar with using Enterprise One. At the time, because we were using Planview PPM Pro or Innotas, the relationship was already established. So, we were able to grow with that relationship.

My advice is more on the change management process and the training. I know Planview does offer great training with that. So, I would advise just making sure that your key stakeholders are involved with the implementation approach on the progress of it. That's because as a tool, it can be hard to understand and use. So, you just want to make sure that people who are going to use it are very aware of its full capabilities. You should definitely leverage Planview's help in terms of training and working with the consultants to know the full-scale capabilities of the application. You can probably go for a phased approach. There is a lot of capability within the tool that can be leveraged. So, you can maybe do a phased implementation to understand and get familiar with each of the different functionalities that are available.

It doesn't give full visibility in terms of managing project plans and seeing the stage of work. The way we have it designed, our teams do put in schedules and the tasks that are related, but they don't see the day-to-day task accomplishment. It is still very manual. If they know that the work or the task is actually done, they would have to go into each one to manually close out that task. There is no automated closing out of the schedule, and it is more at a very high level at this point in terms of project scheduling and management.

Enterprise One provides many types of resource assignments for assigning work to people, and we use the one that's more aligned with just our processes. So, it does give us different types of work assignments, but we don't require flexibility just based on our process. This flexibility doesn't really affect us because we just have one approach to resource assignment. We know that we can switch it and be flexible if we are able to change our processing, but at this point, there is no impact or no effect. However, just looking at it from our initial implementation and the way the functionality worked, the flexibility is good. So, I would assess this flexibility as a strong component or a strong feature. Depending on their process, each organization can do a resource assignment that is effective and the best fit for the organization.

Enterprise One has not increased our on-time completion rate, but I don't think that has to do with the tool itself. That's more with just our own internal processes that impact how our work is managed.

I would rate Enterprise One a seven out of 10.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use time reporting. We convert time reporting into financial costs and do contractor and capacity planning for our resources. We track our work. That's the module we use extensively. As a matter of fact, we have upwards of 300 open projects at this given moment. It is pretty close to 300 open activities that are working.

It is not an end-user-friendly product, and that's really the biggest thing. The hardest or the biggest hurdle I've ever had to face was adoption. I did the installation of the HP product in 2011. The company used it from 2011 to 2015, and the adoption was very high. When I was given the Planview product, adoption was very low. It wasn't as extensively used. We actually had people who wanted to go back to HP PPM because the interface of Planview was so broken, and it still is to some degree. It is not user-friendly. It doesn't flow the way a project manager thinks. What we did with HP PPM was a lot more manual programming. It wasn't as nice in terms of the interface, and it wasn't as pretty, but you could design it and build it so that everything flows with the way you worked, but Planview doesn't quite do that. There are a lot of screens. You have to jump back and forth. There are so many different places you have to go to just to do some basic tasks. That's the biggest thing that has really hindered adoption.

We use it for forecasting and planning work on the projects. We are able to leverage the data that it provides to do some more concise consolidated reporting, but we mine the data using other functions. The data is collected into Planview, but its reporting is just not quite what we're looking for. We don't use it to do reporting directly. So, we create data sets or pull the data out of Planview, and to get the data down into a view that leadership can then work with, we reformat it by using tools like Excel, PowerPoint, and those kinds of things. We do quite a bit with Excel. We export the data and run it through certain functions. We deliver that data to different groups for feeding into other products because we don't currently allow direct interface into our financial systems. To eliminate the need for exporting data into Excel reports, for the most part, the Power BI capability will eventually replace the external reporting that we do by using other tools. Power BI interface is a huge improvement in the capability, but it is new in our organization, so we probably have a learning curve there. The SaaS reporting is obviously more complex and less user-friendly, but the Power BI solution has definitely more reporting, and it is leadership-data focused. It easily allows the creation of dashboards that executives can manipulate and work with themselves.

We don't find Planview's guides and documentation extremely useful. There is room for improvement. It is very difficult to find things on their website. There is no easy way to find what you're looking for. Everything appears to be broken and in small snippets of data. When you go to their customer success center sites for documentation, everything is just a little snippet of information. There is no clarity about how something works, and how something should be configured. If you're an administrator, it is even less useful, and it is very vague. We end up spending more time taking that snippet of information, and then we have to actually go and figure out the details ourselves. It is not something that tells you how to make something work. It says this is what this does, and this is what it can do. You have to then go and figure it out. They have a consulting arm of the organization, and I think they expect you to call up and ask them to come and show you how to configure something.

I have been using this solution for five years.

It is very stable from an operational perspective. In the five years that I've been managing the product, I've never had an outage of more than 15 minutes.

It seems to scale very well. We had migrated 1,900 users from HP's PPM to Planview, which was a user community of 300. We now maintain an average of 1,800 users in the system. So, we went from 300 to 1,800, and there wasn't any impact on the performance of the product.

In terms of the roles of its users, we have project managers, portfolio managers, developers, release people, architects, engineers, and a management team that does overall oversight.

I do use technical support. At the moment, I have to. Most of the time, they're knowledgeable. They tend to be responsive. I'm the product owner for the company that I'm with. So, from my perspective, they're never responsive enough, but when I think about how bad it could be, I want to say they're reasonable. Sometimes, the turnaround time is a couple of hours, and other times, the turnaround time is months but not from an actual impact to resolution. Sometimes, it takes weeks.

There was a merger of two companies. One of them was using HP PPM, and one of them was using Planview. The company that was running HP PPM decided that it was better to go to Planview, and that's when I became the owner of the Planview product. That's when I started the current path that we're on for migrating to the way the product is used. They switched because it was cost-effective.

I was not a part of the initial setup because the original setup was done in 2013 or 2014 by a company that we acquired. In 2015, we migrated HPs' PPM. 

We're starting to see a return on our investment. Obviously, it is a journey, and you have to first get adoption. We're starting to get some serious adoption. Now that leadership is starting to adopt this solution, they're looking for more from it. So, as we grow, we get more from it. 

We got an organized environment in the beginning in terms of project reporting and project management to a clear set of guides and principles. We have a single source of data for that kind of stuff, and that was a huge piece because it was all broken before. So, on that journey, return on investment has to be looked at from an individual company's perspective. We're seeing the return on the investment more so today because the leadership team is now using the data to make real-time decisions. They're forecasting their work for the next year. They're now using the data that's actually in Planview. Three years ago, we didn't do that.

Planview is a little pricey. From a licensing perspective, for just a simple timesheet user who does nothing in the system but reports time, the licensing is a little pricey, but you have to look at it from what it is that you get.

We have 6,000 users, and I don't manage the system at all. I just have to add them to the system. The servers, maintenance, OS levels, security patching for the OS, and all other things are not something that we maintain. So, you have to look at it from an operational perspective. It is not just the product itself. A holistic view has to be taken when you look at the product and how you're going to support it. I would have to hire an entire operation staff to bring it in-house, and at the end of the day, that might cost me more. The license might cost me less. I might get a whole lot lower cost on my contract, but at the end of the day, I'd have to have all of the backend resources and the knowledge on the backend resources to support the app locally. So, the cost is strictly going to be looked at from a company's perspective.

We've looked at other options. We've looked at the possibility of a different product. As a matter of fact, our current agreement is about to expire. So, we're looking at other options and other capabilities to see if there is something out there that makes more sense for us.

We've looked at Clarity and Azure. We have Azure and Jira in the organization today, and they are used widely. We also have ServiceNow in the organization. We are evaluating whether those products meet what we get from Planview today and whether we can reasonably migrate to that type of solution. It is really more about the migration to a new product in terms of adoption and training.

Its view into resource capacity and availability helps us to manage work to a degree, but we don't use it extensively. That's the one area where we're looking to improve or increase the capability of the product from our own internal perspective. It is not necessarily in terms of the way the product works; it is in terms of the management and administration of our resource pool. That's the step that we're working on now.

We don't use it for end-to-end work management, resource assignment, and creating summary reports across multiple projects. All the reporting is done in Power BI.

I would rate Planview Enterprise One a six out of 10.