Planview Portfolios Reviews

We're using it for IT project management and annual planning. We also have CTM (part of Enterprise One), which is the true application portfolio management tool. The application portfolio management tool is more about managing metadata around our applications that we support. However, we are looking to do the integration between CTM and the PM modules.

The biggest impact is the maturity around getting projects in a single place so we can do portfolio level planning and use the tool for more than just timekeeping. This has been the biggest step that we've taken so far. This year was the first year that we did all of our annual planning in the tool instead of starting it in the tool, then doing it in spreadsheets afterwards. So, we're still growing there.

It has been effective for our delivery. It's given us much better visibility into what is being delivered and when.

Our finance/accounting department has been able to get more information than what they had before.

It helps connect funding with work execution. All of our projects have budgets and expected benefits to calculate an NPV. That is part of our annual planning processes. Then, we track monthly reforecasts and progress against those plans.

The visibility across the portfolio, who is responsible for what projects, who is working them, and where we are in terms of financials.

The integrations need improvement. We have some data exports. They're not even live app integrations. They're just data exports that run with our SAP instance. They either fail, hang up, or aren't configured correctly to operate. Those are the issues that we're running into now.

Some things that we're looking forward to are alerts and monitoring notifications for active notifications. We would also like more about the history of actions which are happening within the tool, so more recordable history.

The platform is stable. We rarely have any issues with Planview for functionality. We don't have any issues with crashes.

We do have some significant issues with our integrations that we're working through. Those are not as stable or reliable as what we would like. I think it's processed-related, but it's all on the Planview side.

We haven't run into any issues with scalability.

We have run into a few issues with performance. It just seems to be slow, depending on how many activities you have in a work breakdown structure, how many projects in a portfolio resource, etc.

We are planning to implement more features, as the organization can absorb that change. We haven't tapped all of the capabilities of it yet.

We have used the professional services for the integrations. Their support is good except when the applications don't work. 

We have had several conversation, even at Horizons. It is really a process issue.

We switched from Primavera. We had sort of outgrown it. We needed more of a project and something that would be a little bit easier to use for our projects. We weren't taking advantage of the full capabilities of Primavera.

It's very complex. Maybe it was a lack of defined processes on our side of things. We really struggled to understand how we needed to answer the questions that they were asking, so they could configure it to support our processes.

We overcame it by trial and error. We kept at it until we got to a point where we could at least deploy and start tracking time, then grew from there.

It's been several years, but we did use professional services for their initial rapid deployment.

We would have a hard time calculating ROI at this point. It has been part of our normal operations for several years. Knowing what it would be without the tool, that would be difficult to calculate.

We recently did a new bundle for all of Enterprise One. It includes some of the newer pieces, like Projectplace and LeanKit. It bundled our CTM in with it as well. I think the total came out to be about $900,000 a year. This is for unlimited licenses.

We did evaluate other vendors.

We don't use Planview's Lean/Agile delivery tools. We use VersionOne.

Start with processes first. Do that hard work before you get Planview in and start talking about the capabilities of the tool. The tool can do pretty much anything you need it to do, but you need to know first what it needs to do for your company.

The tool is very powerful. Sometimes that complexity makes it difficult to use, but it certainly has more than what we need.

The tool has a lot of potential. Our particular implementation of it has some work to be done. I would rate it a seven out of 10.

We don't use Projectplace.

We have a huge contractor base and the solution is the primary time-keeping system for our contractors in IT. We manage all of our projects and financials in Planview, as well as the time submissions associated with those projects.

It has improved the way our organization functions by giving us the overall picture of our financials. Before, we were functioning using spreadsheets, and now we are using a tool where we're all able to collaborate right in it. I'm part of the PMO, and my team is Portfolio Management. My team manages the financials and oversees the financials for all of the capabilities and the departments within our IT organization, and so it provides us that one source of truth, that one data repository for us to obtain our project actuals as well as our forecast data.

I'm also the Planview administrator. When I first joined the company, Planview was primarily used for timekeeping. Since then, the level of information that we're now capturing in the tool has gone from a three to a nine. Within that three or four-year span that I've been working with Planview in my organization, I've seen us implement better measures and better data points within Planview itself. We had this information parsed throughout the company, and we are now leveraging the life cycle and the various configured screens to capture this information from end to end before a project goes into open active status.

The fast-track reporting has been beneficial to us, as well as the project and portfolio management tool. We don't have any add-ons at this time. We're exploring those at a later date, such as Projectplace and connections with Jira.

When it comes to managing project plans, we are currently in a crawl-walk-run with Planview, and we're just starting to walk. Right now, stage-wise, we can see, financially, a good picture. However, in terms of the attributes that associate the different phases in a project, we're not there yet. We're in the process of implementing that right now. I know it has great features to do that. We're just not there yet. I’d rate it at about a four out of ten, however, that's no implication on the tool itself. It's just where we are as a company. We need more time with it.

In terms of assessing Enterprise One for its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects, I would give it an eight out of ten. It provides us with the ability to slice and dice the data. We have capabilities. Most companies have departments. We’re able to leverage the project portfolios to have that visibility within the various capabilities. It provides us a more granular level, and it just gives us a source of truth in organizing our data as well.

It helps with our ability to share "the big picture" with management. It really enhances that ability, actually. We have a consolidated picture of all of the capabilities captured within Planview financially. From there, that said, we're not using the reporting features fully. We just upgraded from 15 to 18. We plan to start leveraging the Power BI feature. We do have the data now at hand where we're able to extract it and provide that overall picture to our upper management.

Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. It provides our project management with one source of truth in terms of tracking projects from creation. In terms of our backlog efforts, for example, we open projects on a quarterly basis, and so we're able to have that data housed or stored in Planview. Therefore, it's end to end, from project creation to if a project is on hold, and then that effort is reassessed and then placed into open active, and the effort is then in place while the project is going through the various phases through deployment, and then we have a complete end. Right now, for example, my quality and methodology team and I are looking to revamp our end-to-end life cycle to be inclusive of some additional project closure updates, as Planview does have that functionality available, and our quality and methodology team is currently using a different site to oversee their processes. It will be beneficial with that as well.

Enterprise One has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives in terms of visibility and the ability to leverage the portfolios amongst our capabilities. It does give us a better visual into slicing and dicing that data to assess the prioritization of the efforts. It's improved our business and its structure. The processes that we had in place previously have definitely been enhanced and we have more faith in having a source of truth versus various tools and spreadsheets.

Users can assign resources and work and the product provides a variety of types the resources so that users have the ability, when they submit their timesheet, to select various work items that have been authorized for them to charge to.

The configuration of the list is really driven by the projects themselves, so it's pretty simplistic. There's no structure that I have to go in and manage. It's all project work-driven. They are added at the task level, the task is assigned, and is populated to their spreadsheet.

The flexibility on offer is very helpful in meeting the organization's needs. We have also transitioned a work authorization request process into Jira, and from there we have a good cadence where, when resources are needing a new work authorization, our project managers and program coordinators essentially are able to view those requests and implement them. In Planview, those new work tasks will be readily available for them on a Friday when they can make their time submissions. As long as the project is in open active status, there's no hindrance.

Enterprise One does allow program managers to group work together and see resource demands and costs at a consolidated level, however, we're not using the capacity and utilization feature at this moment, as we've got that work to do to clean up our resource roles.

In terms of helping with our on-time completion rate, I rate the product at a seven out of ten. I say that due to the fact that we have better visibility into the financials, and it assists us in the monthly financial assessments that we conduct. The project managers are now able to understand how their projects are tracking and to hold them accountable for a timely delivery. In terms of the time that we spend syncing with these program project managers to assess the timeliness of their delivery, I wouldn't be able to speak to an exact number or percentage. I oversee the system and the tool itself to provide the functionality for my team to assess that, however, I wouldn't be able to give a good quantitative number for that. It might be about 50% of our time.

The only area that I can see currently needing improvement is just the modernization of the look and feel of it. I just attended the Accelerate Conference and heard that that is underway. The configuration for the front-end user can be a little antiquated and it needs a facelift. That said, overall, I'm definitely impressed with the tool itself.

I've been using the solution for three years. The company itself has used Planview probably for about 12 or more years.

I was not a part of the initial implementation. The company had set up the solution before I started working for them.

We are just a customer and an end-user.

With Enterprise One, for forecasting remaining effort, I would give it a six out of ten. That rating applies to how we're using the tool at this time. For example, we're not using requirements and allocations, and so we're able to associate effort in our financials, pending additional effort based on forecast dollars, and things of that nature and accuracy, where we go in and do our monthly financial reviews and do a comparison of actuals to forecast, and we're able to get visibility to that.

At this time, Enterprise One's view into resource capacity and availability does not help us to manage work at this time. That is another component that we look at in the future, however, we're not using it yet. It's on our roadmap to have in place by year-end. We just have some role alignments that we have to facilitate, as well as some blended rates that we may need to assess to align to those roles, to then start using the capacity and utilization feature, which is ICP.

I would definitely recommend engagement from all stakeholders versus a core team rolling out the tool. From financial management to project managers to analysts within the corporation, it would need some blanket engagement, versus one core team deciding everything for an entire organization. New users should also be mindful of what level their PMs function at. Are they operating in a full-blown project management software development life cycle? Before a company builds a tool out to that, definitely be mindful. When I first onboarded, we were upgrading from version 11 to 15, and it was like a re-implementation as there was a lot of revamping of life cycles and things of that nature. We built out a lot of screens and life cycle gates and things of that nature that were not utilized. Being mindful of your user base would likely avoid wasted time if everyone was engaged from the beginning.

I would say the biggest lesson that I have learned is the tool itself definitely can cover a lot of mileage, and you never stop learning with Planview. It's a continuous learning curve when you are actively using it.

I would rate the product overall at a nine out of ten due to what the tool can do and the various features and improvements that it can bring to an organization, as well as the process improvements automation of manual processes within the tool itself. It brings a lot of benefits to the table.

We use Enterprise One for our Project/Portfolio Management. I'm new so I'm still learning about the tool but from what I know so far, right now, we mostly use it for tracking, status reporting, budget/financials/contracts, level of effort time tracking, and project governance.

Enterprise One has enabled us to minimize the usage of other tools like tracking in Excel and have one place of the source at a consolidated level. This tool has reduced the amount of time and improved visibility across the organization on Portfolio Management. Everything is in Planview. Planview is the source of truth. So that really helps us to efficiently look at the budget, scope, schedule and to identify if there is any variance. There's a lot of learning still to do as we are also new to this tool, but right now it works for us. 

There are also a few tool limitations, but this has also brought us together as a team and community to be creative, to revise and simplify the governance, focus on what is important to be tracked and reported. 

Real-time information. Enterprise One is good for enabling me to see what stage of work and the current financials. I'm able to see where it is during the project adaptation, project summary, and also comparison to the performance baseline. Since I'm still a little new to this, I am still learning how the organization is adapting to the tool. The Planview conference gave me a lot more ideas, in terms of what more I can do with Planview. 

We do have an in-house reporting and analytics team that are working on creating custom build reportings to generate tiles and utilizing the Power BI functionality. It has been really a very cool report that has graphics with color-coded information making it easy and user-friendly. Again, as we are still new to this tool, it has been continuous learning on how to use it better and as we continue to invest time, cost and efforts we are excited to explore what would be its full capabilities. 

We think that Enterprise One will help with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. We haven't gotten there yet because we're moving towards the product Portfolio Model.

When I just joined, it was very easy for me to pick up. I was able to get myself familiarized within a month or two. I think it's a very easy tool to use. Although Enterprise One is easy and user-friendly, currently the learnings have been more via trial and error, I think if Planview could provide better consistent training like a tool demo, structured training, how-tos that would help tremendously.

I have been using Enterprise One since I joined my company around four to five months ago but I believe it was rolled out in the organization about 1 year ago.

We're still learning about the tool being about 1 year in, so far it has been fulfilling the purpose and the need of the organization. 

We are currently transitioning to a more Product based model and Planview has been a great tool to help us and I believe as we succeed that might give us the opportunity to explore other Planview products that might scale the use of this solution.

Initially, it was challenging but most recently its been great. I've been in one of the few sessions that we had with the point of contact. We do have a list of the backlog of the things that weren't functioning as intended or something that needs to be added. Our recent rep has been very helpful.

Previously, my company used Oracle Primavera. I think they switched because of the stability. Planview gives the organization what they want. We're able to do all project/product management in a very simplified and yet robust manner without any added complexity.

I wasn't involved in the setup of the tool here, but I heard was it was quite challenging specifically for configurations and to receive good technical support. It took a few executive escalations, but we were eventually assigned an excellent support representative. 

I wasn't intimidated by Enterprise One because even though I'm totally new to Planview, it is very easy to use. It fits the purpose of what the organization wants. We just want to make sure we know how are we tracking our resources, budget, etc. Enhancing the integration part would help. So once we explore the integration aspect, like with JIRA, where we can pull the milestones in and automatically log time, etc, I think that will enhance what the company is trying to achieve.

Planview is pretty cool. It does what you need to do. My advice would be not to overcomplicate it.

I would rate Enterprise One an eight out of ten. 

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.

At the moment, we use it for work and resource management modulesmainly in the area of R&D. In addition we started using the modules Planning and Outcomes in several areas for solution and program management.

With Planview we got  more transparency in the resource utilization and the budget ussage. Planview gives us the insights where we spend out budget and how we can improve the utilization of our internal resources. 

The most valuable features are: 

• The resource management
• Outcome management
• Work management

It helps us to see resource utilization and resource needs. We get more transparency out of the system to plan the resources and resource skills to train our resources or support the long term onbording process.

We can see the budget spend for a product or release with the outcome area. We can also monitor what we have planned against what was spend, to monitor how good the programs or project is running.

The view into resource capacity and availability helps us to manage our work. It helps us with resource management and when we see have available resources we can easily start new projects. If we see with the tool that there not enough capacity available we can prioritize projects and programs according to our resources and the business needs.

In terms of reporting, we're mainly using Power BI connected to Planview data and we generate our own dashboards. 

Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool.

The system has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. Enterprise One is the only offical place for our projekt data and in this way it gives the portfolio management back the data of the projects for prioritization and monitoring. 

Enterprise One provides a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people. There are a lot of possibilities for the resource management. There are some improvments in the area of agile team managment and team assignment which could be improved in the future development of Enterprise One.

There is improvement space in the handeling of agile teams and team assignments in the work planning and the resource reservation. 

My company has been using Enterprise One since 2016.

Up until the last few days, it's been very stable. It's been stable but slow for the last few days and last week we had some connectivity issues. 

The scalability of the system is really good. You can choose which module you want to use and it is possible to make a seperate role out of the different modules.  

Enterprise One is able to be adapted to the already established processes and could be confugured in different ways. 

The main useres users are data stewards, scrum masters, some project leads, finance and resource management. 

The quality of the support depends on the technician you get. Overall the expirence is really good and if there are second level support needed it is available same as the correct contact in the product management. Planview customer service is really good and is cutomer centric.

Before Enterprise One, we had some solutions which we can't use further. 

With the consulting team from planview it was a good process but sometime due to our business complex to get our work processes into the system. At the end of the configuration process all worked well

We implemented direct with the planview teams.

As Enterprise One gives us more transparency we can use our budget and resources better and trough this the ROI is given

Yes we have one in 2015 an assesment with several tools and than decided for the best tool for us.

We use it for contractor and associate contracting which reflects directly to project resource, "our spend". We do a calculation based on the vendor that the contractor is through, as well as each associate has a per hour rate that is applied to the project to attract the spend applied to that project from the resources. 

We also track the number of hours spent per application. Every application in our bank has the application code that we tied back to Planview so that we can track and see how much time is spent within the application, either with upgrades, maintenance or break-fix type of situation and also to report. It's primarily for tracking reporting.

Enterprise One has improved my organization with the ability to look at the hours that people track. Prior to Enterprise One we didn't have any estimation model. As we grow within Enterprise One, we're able to pull reporting to see how much time it takes for each individual person or a team to perform a task to complete a project. So with that, we're able to start building that model to estimate the approximate number of hours for each task so that when we provide that to project managers, it reduces the amount of time building the project plan because they've already had that base model to use for each of those tasks. It's created our ability to forecast how much time it would take to perform specific tasks that are very similar to each other. 

It also improved our communication. Prior to Enterprise One, there was not that much communication between project managers and resource managers. So that when a project manager went out to Microsoft Office or to Microsoft Project to schedule a resource for a task, which they actually didn't, they have to have a separate spreadsheet. They would put down a number of hours and it was just a guess. A resource manager would then come back and say, "They can't do that." It was very back and forth. It wasn't like a synergist, a single point of information where everyone looking at the same thing, it was back and forth. So with a project manager entering just random hours and just guessing to get a specific dollar amount or to fit a specific dollar amount it was a lot of work on the project managers to try to adjust it to fit in with that dollar amount.

Now, with Planview, with them being able to see as soon as the project manager submits a request for some hours, the resource manager can communicate with that project manager instantly and say, "It won't do that. It's not going to take that much time". And then when it comes back where the resource is actually entering the hours on the task, there's an exact number. So it's hard to put a number on how many hours were saved or how accurate it's going to be because we're still growing. But prior to this, the accuracy was really, really off. It was terrible, but now we're getting more and more accurate where we're in the, I would say, closer to 70% accurate on the estimations. So it's getting really close to being very accurate.

Enterprise One helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. We use what we call Roadmap, Roadmap items under the planning and capacity section. We're the best at the capacity section. With the Roadmaps, our department heads are able to categorize the project by rank. By ranking those we're able to, especially during this COVID period, we've seen so many projects get pushed down to the bottom or completely removed due to the inability to complete those or the return on investment not being there. It really helped a lot with that planning, investment, and capacity planning.

In terms of the flexibility of configuring assignment, my other administrator and I actually came up with that solution. We decided that was the best way to go primarily because at the state that we are in our company, the project managers weren't mature enough to utilize allocations and the resource managers weren't mature enough to reject or approve those allocations. And that was causing people to be over-allocated because they weren't charging time. Because it the estimation on the number of hours needed was completely off. They were just putting however numbers in there. The resource would show over-utilized 1,300%, 1,300% and it would just throw off all of our reporting.

We cracked down on it. We had people to start utilizing the utilization percentage. Making sure that they had that communication line with the resource manager since we have our estimate as growing. But with the reserve and authorization, being able to authorize an entire team to a specific task and reserve them, allowed us to easily create the schedule that works best for that agile environment. Especially with the specific number of hours used for each person that was really easy to use those types of assignments.

We have different groups that use it for different purposes. There are project managers who use it in place of Microsoft Project. So they track their project through its phases, their financials, keeping on schedule, on time, and on budget. Our resource managers use it primarily to track their resources, to see how much capacity their team has to perform different tasks or different projects, and how much time they're spending on each individual application. Technology managers actually represent the overall group who use it to roadmap, outlook,  see what's down in the pipeline, what team has what capacity to actually take on a task, see if that project is worth the money, that return on investment is worth actually doing it. Executives are just in it for the reporting to track the financials, to see how much we're spending within the technology and enterprise operations departments. Enterprise One is useful in many ways. We have a little bit under 2,000 people using it.

Another good thing is that we can create custom reports, which is great. If I created a custom report, a tile that tells me how many people have logged in today. We currently have a little under 2,000 users, and that's only users, we actually have integrations, that we created a custom form that sends hours directly to Planview. They're not using Planview directly, but they're sending their hours to Planview through an API. We have over 1,500 contractors overseas and within the United States, that submit their time to Planview, so we can track their work in their project as well. In total, I would say the amount of user input for Planview would be close to 3,000.

Inside Planview, they have what they call a "lifecycle". It's basically a workflow, it's a set of steps that each project has to go through, and with its customization, being able to match our own project process, we match it one for one. And so we can see at each stage of the project where it is either through the gate, from gate zero through gate four, and even with Agile, being able to iterate through that same gate, by using scripted dialogues, or exit scripts, we've been able to track projects exactly where they are. Each schedule can be tied back to either the hours entered, by either date, or a percentage of the effort completed on it, so it ties together pretty good.

It's being used a lot for the remaining effort. We actually create tons of reporting off of it. We've created multiple Power BI dashboards. Data feed allows us to create our custom Power BI dashboards, so that way we can track what efforts been used, what efforts are remaining in a very graphical, easy to read way. We've created this primarily for the project managers and resource managers. My manager has a breakout session that discusses our Power BI dashboards. It's really nifty for tracking that. We use it a lot. Our executive challenged us to be able to forecast and estimate hours used on each task. That's why we implemented Enterprise One initially, but we since provided what she wanted and now we're providing more. Initially, it was just the requirement and now we're exceeding that requirement to give better visibility to all resource managers and project managers.

We have a really large organization, 22,000 associates total, including the 3,000 people using Planview. Being able to group projects into portfolios based on specific filters, either the project manager or any other approver organizational hierarchy, once you set your portfolio, you can either share that with your team or whomever so that they can all be on the same page. With the Power BI dashboards, we have a very open information model where we want everyone to be able to see the same thing. There's only one section where it's confidential and we as administrators have to provision that separately, but everything else is open for everyone else to see. So if you're just a time reporter or just have a reporting, you can go in and see the same information as a manager. Being able to group projects in the portfolios, filter them, and being able to see all of that data graphically using the Power BI or the standard reporting that came with the FastTrack setup has been very helpful to our entire organization.

For all the work that we perform, Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. We have our technology projects. We have what we call non-technology projects, which are basically projects that don't necessarily have a technology component in it. It's things like branch opening and closures, even though sometimes they will have the technology, but it just depends. We also have what we call OTW, which is another planned work. This is primarily for resource managers so that they can track their applications like how much time is spent on their applications doing upgrades or break-fix. We also have programs of work, another resource manager tool that tracks Agile programs, and we also have Roadmaps. For all the project types that we, or work types that we have within our organization, it does great.

We just started doing the on time and on a budget since we are in infancy with Enterprise One, we weren't really holding the project managers to that. We were holding them to it through the governance, but not through the Enterprise One. Now that we're a little more mature, we've started tracking that grader as well as being able to use those change requests to track as scheduled, budget, or scope changes. It has allowed us to definitely increase our on-time and on-budget awareness.

The content management definitely needs to improve. We don't really use content management for projects inside Enterprise One. We have actually switched to a SharePoint site. We have a feed from Enterprise One every night of all the projects that are created. And once they're created, we run our process that goes out to create SharePoint sites for each project. Because of the inability for drag-and-drop file ingestion, the best thing about it is the versioning, but that's also done in SharePoint. We just don't use it because it's HTML and it's hard to use. It's a little bit more cumbersome than it should and then we like.

We implemented Enterprise One initially for our pilot group at the end of 2018 and we went into production last year in April.

We have the cloud solution. It's all hosted. The team that is using it, for the most part, is just the technology area, application development, information security does our technology group. We have some enterprise groups also that are using it.

We haven't had any issues with stability. In the previous versions, there were interface issues with Internet Explorer because it's just an antiquated browser. With Microsoft adopting Microsoft more of the Edge and Chrome, the stability is fine. We haven't had any issues.

Scalability is great, with the monthly improvement push, they're on a monthly cadence of updates with the new version 18, the improvements come every month. It's awesome. They have a vast library of API calls that we actually have a contractor system. We're actually onboarding that now and we're going to implement API calls to Planview that way. I have created a multiple UiPath robot that used Planview to create reporting, to add users, to do monthly maintenance, as well as the call API to UiPath. I do a lot of robotic process automation and I can do a lot of the automation with Planview. The scalability, being able to integrate with JIRA, Workday, create custom integrations if we need to, being able to use API calls through either JSON or primarily SOAP, is pretty awesome. I don't have any complaints so far on the scalability.

We're looking to integrate JIRA into our Enterprise One with LeanKit. We're still working out the financials on that to try to figure out a way to integrate that either through a flexible license or through individual licensing. Initially, we started off with technology because that was the executive who decides to start tracking the projects since that's where the project management organization lives, under technology. But more and more enterprise business unit groups are starting to want to track time and see what their resources are spending their time on as well. We're growing slowly throughout the rest of the organization. With the amount of data that the Planview provides and that type of reporting, it's kind of giving other departments and other groups visuals into what they could have by using Enterprise One. We're growing through them. 

Technical support is great. It's just like technical support at any other institution where sometimes you'll get someone who is very adept in the system, and then the others are a little less. But, generally with the way that Planview is set up, if we have any issues, we have a representative we can talk to and bail and get the right people to work on it. We've had no issues.

We were previously using a homegrown SharePoint site that we worked with our SharePoint team to build. It didn't have a nearly as robust workflow, reporting approval ability, and tracking as Planview.

In terms of the setup, I actually got hired on in the middle of implementation, but we had a Planview representative on-site performing the configuration. She basically did training while we were there so I was able to pick it up really quickly and become adjusted to building or configuring the system through configuring screens, scripted dialogues, and the lifecycle. It was really easy. It seems like a low-code solution, so it was really easy to pick up.

I would estimate the setup took from July to December. That is when we did the primary build-out of all of the integrations. We had a previous system that was homegrown through SharePoint that we had a lot of projects and data in. We had to do a lot of data manipulation in order to put it in a format that's ingestible by Planview. That took a little while too. I wrote a robot that would automatically convert all of the data over to the new data format, and we were able to send that to Plan B to have them import it.

The big parts of the strategy were just integrations with our financial system. We have a general ledger financial system that we had to integrate with and that we had to send a file over to Plan B to enter that information. We also have a Workday integration for resource management. That is a pretty nifty one where whenever the Workday feed comes over, it either removes resources, adds resources, and creates users based on if they're in a specific hierarchy of the bank. That was really nice.

From our end, it was primarily just me and my teammates working on the deployment. We were the primaries. We actually had one other resource through application development that was helping us. That was primarily for the deal integration. The Workday was just a file feed, and that was all in Planview. My colleague is also a Planview administrator. He doesn't do the robotic automation, but he does a lot of the architecting of the system.

For management, at this point, it's just me and my teammate. We have one other person who is specialized in the reporting. They do a lot of the SQL queries, SSRS, and Power BI setups, but they don't do really much of the administering of the system. 

We only worked through Planview. We didn't work with any other third parties.

The area with the most ROI is our ICCMO, being able to track that on time and on budget, all of the resource managers. Those are going to be the department heads for each of our technology departments. They would be the ones that would see the most return on investment. As well as tracking their contractors and the hours they're spending on the applications.

The pricing and licensing are fine, but with the model we currently have, we don't have the FLEX license just yet. We actually have the tiered based on the access side from just a team member to project, we call it portfolio manager to admin. The pricing is fine. That was one of the solid points for switching to Planview. There are additional costs for integrations.

We actually did an RFP. So we looked at the Gartner quadrants and we had other people provide proposals. But with all the requirements, Planview was the only one that was able to provide all of the items that we needed which is why we went with them.

The biggest lesson learned would be regarding making sure to have Planview do the training. When we did our training for our organization, we did a train the trainer where Planview came in and trained just a few people in our organization and then they went out and trained their people.

But it's like a game where you tell one thing to a person that you pass it down the line and it gets changed by the time it reaches the very end. If you have the budget for it, have Planview perform the training because I think that would increase adoption a lot easier. We had a lot of people who came from different areas that had different methods of tracking projects from Visio Excel and Microsoft Project. Getting everybody on the same page to Planview we had a lot of contention and a lot of people who didn't like the product initially. And that came down to me to training. With the trainer themselves not being very familiar with the system, being unsure about what they're trying to train the other people on didn't give the other associates much confidence in the system initially.

The adoption was a lot slower than we wanted. I think that if Planview had worked to perform the training, it would have made people a lot more of a point of contact to reach out to. And having a lot more acceptance and what they were being taught. So that would be the lesson learned.

Especially if you're an administrator, go through the advanced training if you're doing FastTrack and if you're doing the configuration so that you'll be more familiar with what the consultant is doing. Our consultant was great. She did a lot for us, but we also saw afterward, once we became more familiar with it, we saw a few errors that needed to be corrected but they were easy and we were able to fix them ourselves. If you don't go through advanced training, you wouldn't recognize it. 

I would rate Planview Enterprise One a nine and a half out of ten because nothing is perfect.

We use it to help us manage our IT assets for our company.

We've heard many heard sound bites from other areas where, five to seven years ago, they did not have this type of visibility into the IT assets for the organization. As it is now, we work with multiple teams who ask us for these different types of information. None of which would have been possible without having an application like Enterprise One.

The biggest impact has been the visibility into our IT assets.

Some of the most important features that we find are the ability to relate assets to one another (applications to software and hardware) and associate capabilities to each of our assets, as well as to whom the users in our user base are, whether they're internal/external customers and which departments. From this, we can create reports which can help identify for a particular department the applications that they use or own. Then, from there, the capabilities they offer.

We do find the solution flexible. Having the ability to make customizations to the product offers a great deal of flexibility to buy business requirements as well as meet the needs of our clients and customers.

The product can probably improve in a couple areas: 

1. Support is still a challenge. We find it challenging more due to the responsiveness and getting a case or ticket assigned to an analyst. That's what I was just doing. I was following up on an email that we opened last week. We haven't heard anything, so following up on that. So, that's one area of opportunity.
2. I would like them to be more product-focused with the continuing evolution of the product. As companies transform the way they do IT asset management, the product should continually change with it as well.

We do have some interruptions in service for one reason or another, but a majority of the time, it seems very stable.

We don't scale. We don't have a lot of users, just in the hundreds, even though our organization is in the thousands. 

It seems fairly scalable, particularly as our organization is in the cloud.

We interact with technical support quite often, whether it's deployments, bugs, or errors that we run into. We work with them on a fairly regular basis, whether it's just typical deployments or if it's actual issues that we run into. Most of the time, it's on the Planview side, whether it is an outage or some performance issues. Occasionally, it's something that we introduced.

I was not involved with the initial setup.

Our ROI is the visibility and relationships between our applications and software with one another along with the ability to tie capabilities and assign owners to identify individuals who are related to the assets. In a lot of cases, different areas of the organization have different needs. They come to us for information regarding different IT assets, and we're fortunate enough to be able to provide that information from what we've captured and placed into the Enterprise One application.

I would rate the product a seven out of 10.

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.