Planview Portfolios Reviews

My company uses the solution to do investment planning, project and program management planning, and they do some resource management using that primarily for cost forecasts.

I work on one of the support teams here. I do some configuration and I do some training as well as some design work that involves configuration within the tool.

It's helped the company due to the fact that it does a reasonably good job of tying in those resource forecasts. We're able to integrate with cost information from other systems that we have. It does a pretty good job with that. Also, the ability to tie the risks in with the work is pretty helpful. I like that. Having that being sort of a single source of truth for the risks and for the resource forecast, that's been very useful for us.

The solution has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic initiatives or objectives. We are now funding incrementally, planning for shorter periods, and doing reviews more frequently instead of doing yearly reviews.  We're able to do that using Enterprise One. That's helped us a lot.

I like to work in the resource assignment view. I like the ability to plan tasks out and sequence them. The risk management is great and I appreciate how you can tie risks to the work level items. It helps us forecast resource costs and we’re able to tie the risk to those aspects which helps us keep those items on track.

We're not using the solution for forecasting remaining effort. We use it just to forecast resource costs and other direct costs that are entered.

The solution view into resource capacity and availability helps us to manage work.

For example, we're currently moving forward with what we call capacity-based planning. The tool is integral to how we're doing that.

The solution provides a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people. It does allow us to have different assignments for resources. It does have some limitations, however, it does allow us to do that for the most part.

The solution allows program managers to group work together and see the resource demands and cost at a consolidated level through reporting. The reporting is pretty basic in that it allows us to export the data. It requires project management to undertake some additional analysis outside of the tool which we're able to do at this point.

When it comes to managing project plans, the solution works fine. It works well for that. The challenge that we have is that, in our environment, we don't necessarily use it as designed, we use it a little bit differently. That's not the tool's fault. We don't advance the system time every day or every week. We do it monthly. We currently are not doing extensive dependency management within the work.

The out-of-the-box reports, as far as I can tell, are weak. We've had to build a lot of reports using Power BI, which we connected to it.

Reporting is not my focus area, however, one of the things that would be nice is if we could connect our Tableau to it. We do use Power BI, however, we have also been using Tableau. It'd be nice to be able to use that toolset as well for reporting.

One of the problems that we have is that any of the data that comes out of Enterprise One is a point in time. We can't show change over time. Therefore, if we're looking at, for example, progress on work, and we wanted to know if a schedule has gotten better or worse versus last month or last year, we're not able to do that directly on Enterprise One. We have to use a reporting database and extract the data periodically and then use that as a basis for our ability to show change over time. That's a hassle. It would be nice if Enterprise One was able to show change over time, by having the ability to report on data from prior periods.

The solution doesn’t provide end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work. It doesn't work that well in and of itself for planning Agile delivery, for example. I know that they have LeanKit, and we have LeanKit licenses, however, most of our enterprise is using Jira. We are interested in connecting to Jira. That should be coming out in the next year. That said, at this point, I would say it doesn't provide us the end-to-end work management or resource management that we would like without that Jira plugin.

If it could provide historical data or prior time period data, then we would be able to have fewer integrations. That would be an improvement for us. It would probably mean an ability to shrink our footprint on some other Hash Apps, which would probably mean cost savings for us and a simplification of our reporting. 

There could be some simplification on how we manage the users on the system. When you have a user for the system, you have to manually provide them grants. It's not like you could clone a user and provide those same grants to somebody else on their team. You have to do it all manually. That's a hassle.

The inability to paste in data, or do bulk data updates is a little bit difficult as there is no bulk update for work and resource working assignments. You have to manually enter all that information. That seems unnecessary.

If somebody's allocated at a certain rate for a certain time period, you should be able to copy that across and say, this is flat for the rest of the year and then modify it with any exceptions. It's not easy to do that sometimes.

We are not able to drill down into the details and align the consolidated information with this tool. We’d like to have that capability. Every time a project manager or a program manager has to export information and then do pivots and do whatever else in Excel, it means that there are copies of data floating around that we'd rather have stay in the tool. We’d like them to be able to do their analysis and reporting directly out of the tool. We're not there yet with that.

I would not say that the solution has increased our on-time completion rate.

I'd like to see some of the configurations simplified. There's a lot of weird duplication of fields when you're looking at the alternate structures. There's inconsistency around field naming conventions.

I've been working with the solution since 2018.

The stability is pretty good. It's a little bit slow. In particular, we have some projects that are pretty sizable, and then there's substantial performance issues. For some projects where we have hundreds of tasks with hundreds of resources to open, it might take on the order of five minutes to load up, which, to open a screen, is not a reasonable amount of time. That's not normally acceptable.

We've had to artificially break things down into smaller projects, even though that's not the way the work is being managed. That's been a challenge in terms of when we've had to execute workarounds.

There's a scalability problem around very large projects. If you get a large project with a lot of resources and you want to project out for several years, we've had to change that forecast due to the fact that it wouldn't scale. Opening it now takes five minutes, however, in the past, it would take 15 minutes to open and then change things. It was really slow to refresh. We've had to break large projects down to something smaller to make it still somewhat unmanageable, but better.

We have 500 or 600 staff that use the product. We have some people that really just manage risks. We have some people that do resource forecasts. We have other people that really are focused on reporting. We also have other people that do project management and others that manage programs. On top of that, we have some people where their extensive usage really has to do with certain life cycle approvals.

Usage may increase slightly. At one point we had almost 800 users. We were able to cut that down a little bit. We may go back up above 600 in the near future, I don't know for certain. If we have any growth, it would probably be 10% in the next year. That is my expectation.

Technical support has been pretty good. We had some challenges as we were not on the latest platform, on the latest release, however, we just did an upgrade. We're on the July release now. We're two months behind. We are not yet accepting the monthly releases.

Overall, technical support is usually pretty responsive.

Positive

We used Microsoft Project Server for some things, and for other things we used EPPM, which is from HP.

We switched from EPPM to Enterprise One. It had a good review and we wanted to give something new a try. I wasn't at the company at that time, so I don't know if it's the best alternative to EPPM. For the scheduling stuff and detail planning at the task level, we switched from Project Server based on cost. We knew that Enterprise One had the functionality, so there was no reason to support two tools any longer. By focusing on Enterprise One, we were able to simplify the assets we had running our software platforms.

I have not used SAP or Oracle products for project management in the past.

I wasn't a part of the initial setup. I can't speak to whether it was straightforward or complex.

The deployment took about nine or ten months. We wanted to do a phased roll-out due to the different organizations that were involved and also due to the fact that we wanted to work with the different parts of our organization to get the sets of requirements configured.

In terms of maintenance, we have a team of about 30 people that does testing as well as configuration and deployment. There are some people that focus on the configuration of strategy information, and life cycles. Others work on configurations related to the work and any of the work-related attributes such as risks and issues and status. Other folks just work on developing Power BI and other external reports. We have other people that work on training and communications as well.

We worked with Planview directly.

We didn't implement this product to expect some specific financial return. We were just trying to enable certain functions that we have not monetized. We don't have a payback period or anything like that.

I do not have information about the pricing. I know that we have on the order of 600 people on the license, however, I don't know the costs around it.

The company may have evaluated a few other options. Project Server was one of them.

It's my understanding that Project Server has better integration with SharePoint, which is in some ways similar to Projectplace. Project Server is easier as it requires a desktop client, or, at least it did previously in order to maintain the schedules, which was very convenient for a lot of users. That said, in a lot of ways Project Server and Enterprise One are similar, however, honestly, I like Project Server better.

We're just a customer and an end-user.

We're using the July release currently.

The solution meets our needs at this time. It has some limitations with respect to some functionality we're not using yet related to team-based assignments. Maybe it's an area that is not fully applicable since we're not using it yet. It's a feature that was rolled out a year or so ago, or maybe a little bit more, and we have not yet adopted it.

One of the things that I did hear, although I wasn't part of the decision, was that the Gartner Magic Quadrant was a big factor in swaying management's decision. Enterprise One was in the Magic Quadrant. It was well-reviewed by Gartner. I would advise others to give this less weighting and to really look at how configurable the tool is. Project Server is easier to maintain in terms of configuration and operations than this product. 

If I had a colleague at another company and they asked me, "Hey, do you like it?" I would say we do like it, however, it's not perfect. Nothing's perfect. However, users need to really think about how easy it is to find resources that can configure it or how easy it is to actually do those configurations.

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

Public Cloud

Other

It is for total strategic management, portfolio management, etc. It is used for end-to-end projects from the beginning to the end. Our entire company is using it.

I am a developer. I work on RBI reports (financial reporting) in Enterprise One for our business leaders.

The product has been good. The strategic planning started in 2017. They have been making good decisions based on the data that is available in Planview. They can do a drill down to the results level and what is happening exactly in every project.

They are trying to use the product portfolio. I had news that our management team is trying to get the product portfolios in place. It's about to launch.

The integration stuff from tool to tool, like Projectplace to Planview, to manage projects is the most valuable feature. It keeps all our tasks up-to-date. It closely follows up with everything, which is really cool.

From a reporting angle, it is flexible. We can use it in multiple ways, like with the in-house dashboards inside of Planview. With the security and all its options, the data can be limited to the extent of that user's need based on their roles, which is awesome. There is a lot of connectivity to a number of tools.

We had issues with the data rephrasing. 

The integration stuff is not going so well. I heard that there are a lot of updates to version 18. It is almost 40 to 50 percent updates on the integration part. We should feel the difference and our problem should be resolved.

I am looking forward to exploring the bots on the recording part. This will really help us out when it is added.

I've been using it for a year.

The stability is good.

Impact-wise, more users and teams are getting onboard, seeing Planview within the organization. People are using it in IT, engineering, manufacturing, R&D, etc. Users are increasing daily.

Technical support is awesome. I personally know Natalia. I have been interacting with her for my last couple of calls. Whenever we have support, we raise the last developmental request, and they are very good. They're very helpful all the time.

The product is a nine out of 10. I need to give a little space for improvement.

The primary use case is project management (PPM) for the IT and PMO departments.

We can easily see which functions are overcapacity. Before, we did not have visibility into that.

Planview has helped us connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. Now we understand that if we reprioritize projects in the pipeline, it will impact downstream capacity.

It hasn't transformed our delivery yet. We are still new at it. We're learning all the functionality, so this is something that we're working towards.

Once we get more comfortable with the tool and the data accuracy, strategy will be a great step forward for us.

It's an end-to-end integrated tool. We can look at resources, finances, tasks, etc. 

It is very flexible. It's almost too flexible and lets us do stuff we shouldn't do.

We want to deploy the program management function. We are not there yet. It's not already part of our solution. It's a further enhancement that we want to purchase eventually.

We have been using it since April 2019.

I would rate Planview technical support as a seven out of 10. When we first deployed, there were some issues. We never got to the root cause of why they happened. Since we didn't have any history with it, we weren't quite sure if this was a standard operating procedure or it truly was a glitch.

Before, we did not have an integrated tool. Now, we can load all the resource and project requirements into a portfolio to see where we have gaps in resources, capacity, etc.

It was straightforward. However, I don't think at the time we understood exactly how all the processes were integrated. So, it was the learning experience for us.

We deployed it with the help of Planview consultants. Our experience with them was good. They came onsite, gave us a training, and were always available by phone.

We evaluated other vendors before going with Planview. We chose Planview because of the end-to-end integration.

I would recommend coming to the the Horizons conference first. Ask a lot of questions. Talk to other companies who have gone through a similar experience.

We use the waterfall delivery tools.

I would rate the solution as an eight out of 10, because I don't know all the functionality. 

Public Cloud

Other

We use it for project and program management.

The solution is flexible. Planview is always introducing new releases and functionality, which ends up being beneficial to the company. We are able to do some customizations on our own along with our IT department, and that's very helpful.

The solution’s collaborative work management has affected our operations in a positive way.

• The work and assignments
• We can track the financials.
• We can do portfolio management. We can look across the portfolio at several projects.

I find these features valuable because of their visibility.

I think our performance issues have to do with our large portfolio. We have a lot of data in there. We're a global organization with thousands of users, and that also has an impact.

The financial piece of the tool could be better. While it may have to do with the complexity of the work that we do, it seems that the tool should be able to drill down a bit deeper into the financial area.

We have been using Planview tools since 2016. We rolled it out in two waves: wave one in 2016, then wave two in 2017. Currently, we are using version 17.

The stability is fine. We are currently experiencing some performance issues, but as far as the stability of the system, it seems to be rather stable.

It is easy to add users and introduce new projects into the system.

There are people on my team in my organization who work with the technical team. I do not usually work with the technical team. They are happy with the support that Planview provides.

The biggest impact was to the end user because we have always had a project management tool. We had a tool prior to implementing Planview. This tool is more user-friendly, so it was more easily adopted by the organization and end user community.

The switch between tools was made for better adoption throughout the organization and to move to a web-based system. Our previous system was not web-based. 

We did the initial deployment with the help of Planview. There was good support.

They also helped with the deployment and training. They were available to help us through the whole rollout. Then, they took us further than that and provided some support after the rollout to make sure that things continued on.

We evaluated the current vendor that we had, Planview, and a third vendor.

• Understand what it is that you want the tool to deliver. 
• Have clear expectations of what you expect to get out of the system. 
• Have good user requirements.

I would rate the solution as an eight (out of 10). 

Public Cloud

Other

We have the business side who uses the project management stuff for managing their plan and stuff. We have our IT side who uses the project management as well as time management to keep track of all their projects and the hours being spent on projects by all their resources. This way they are time compliant, e.g., they run this every week to see how many of hours are being spent as people enter their hours.

With the IT side of it, the tool gave them visibility on all their projects from a program and enterprise perspective. The tool helps the enterprise with more capabilities in terms of decision-making, making better decisions on efforts, and the money that they spend.

The solution’s integrated product portfolio has transformed our organization’s strategy because previously we didn't have a specific tool which was being used for project management. People were using different sets of tools for managing their projects, and there was no centralized tool where the organization knew what people were working on. This tool gives them that visibility on all projects.

The solution’s integrated product portfolio has transformed our organization’s delivery. It gives them their capability to govern and set some governance models around what they want to see in terms of projects progressing and how they can make them better.

The portfolio management gives you a view of all the projects as well as all the information about the total amount of effort, time, and cost being spent on the projects. It gives the organization how much money and effort should be spent towards projects so they can budget and do better capacity planning in the next fiscal year. It gives them visibility into their resources and if they have capacity.

I have found this solution to be flexible. I have found it flexible enough in terms of tweaking different configurations for helping the customers doing VMs.

I can access the system anywhere. I can manage my project wherever I am. Since it's web-based, it's flexible enough for making any changes. I can go in at anytime. I can just login from my cell phone.

I would like to see more documentation pieces. Right now, they do have the content repository. I would like to see more out-of-the-box features with document repository capabilities.

We are currently on Version 16.9. We started with Planview 13 and have been on it for more than three and a half years. We have using Planview for our medical center and plan to move to Planview 18.

With Enterprise One, because it's cloud-based, we have never experienced type of crash. It's always available 24 hours. I've never seen any critical issues where the system is down more than an hour or so.

Since the IT side is already using the tool, we are promoting it to the entire business side as well. There are a lot of groups coming in trying to use the system now. We have an onboarding process that we follow for each group where we explain to them how the tool can help them. In terms of your project and portfolio management, we sort of customize or tweak the tool to satisfy their wants and needs. That is when they begin to agree to onboard the system.

We do one BU after another. We do workshop, training, and demo sessions where we understand their needs, then we do a customization of their requirements. We do custom configurations, which we show them, and they become happy.

We have used the technical support for a number of things, like reporting. 

We use our customer success team for any questions where don't know the answers or if we have a query. We do put in a ticket for that and they are pretty good with their response.

I would rate them as a nine (out of 10) because they are pretty fast in their response. I would have rated them as 10, but we use the capability and technology management. That's where it's gone a little down in terms of the support. As far as Enterprise One and the PRM side goes, they are very good.

The initial setup was straightforward. In terms of the lifecycle, it was pretty straightforward and we wanted to start small and see how it went. We wanted to see how people would react to it. We were pretty small with the initial configurations.

Our initial implementation was with Planview consultants. They were very good. We love them.

We have portfolio managers, resource managers, project managers, and time reporting licenses. These are the licenses that we have.

We did on a comparison of different tools, such as, Planview and some other tools available. We did our evaluation of those tools and came up with Planview as the tool that we want to use.

Initially, the university and medical center were one company. Then, we split because the university was using Planview. Then, we also took the same tool but after evaluations we came across Clarity and Planview as the bigger, better tools. We went with Planview because it was already being used in the organization and everyone was familiar with it.

The tool has transformed. I have seen it grow. I have more than 12 years of experience working in Planview and have seen the tool from the start. I've seen all the versions, and it's grown to a more flexible tool.

Right now, we are mostly focused on the waterfall method, but we are also promoting the lean and agile method. E.g., we are promoting tools like Projectplace and LeanKit. We're trying to get our customers and project managers to use those systems. Our developers are mostly more comfortable using JIRA because they've been using it for so many years. However, we are promoting these types of tools as well, where we can see if we can add value for them.

We don't use the financial management piece because we don't have clear visibility on the cost aspect of projects.

I would rate this product a 10 out of 10.

Public Cloud

Other

The primary use case is portfolio management. We're looking at the business unit portfolio and health of the portfolio as a whole. We are not just looking at projects on time, but capacity management for resources, and on the financial side, if we're on budget.

It brings visibility into capacity, how that affects our projects, and having the whole portfolio be able to see everything at the same time, then talk about it. 

One of our guys actually has a great quote that I use, "Planview Enterprise One isn't a tool that takes away communication. It actually increases the need for communication." It brings people to the table to talk about more things because we have transparency in all of our stuff.

I like that everyone is able to see the same data. All of our users who aren't just time reporters have read access to all the data that is out there. So, it is one source of truth where everybody can go in and see the exact same data that everybody else sees. It is transparent.

To see work, resources, and ICPM and those different cuts and views is very beneficial for us if we just want to focus on resources. E.g., here are all the resources, but here are the projects that they're working on. If we want to look at the work, then we can look at the work and can bring in the resources. Being able to slice and dice that way is really good.

• Integration
• The cost of other pieces and integrating them in.
• The response to certain issues that pop up.

We just implemented it in March.

It has been pretty stable.

When we put in tickets, they are responded to them as quickly as possible.

There is improvement there on responding back to customers. On our side, we've got quite a bit of experience in tools and systems like this. Normally, when we are putting forth a ticket, we know that it needs to be escalated. 

There can be improvement on the sense of urgency because a lot of times we've exhausted everything that we can, and now, we're reaching out. So, it isn't a, "Well, have you tried to reboot this?" We've already done everything. Once we put in a ticket, there should be more of a sense of urgency on it.

In 2006, we engaged Clarity. We were using Clarity. We had just gone through one merger. We were completing another merger while we were trying to implement a tool: two different banks, two different cultures, and one new tool. The implementation wasn't that successful. So, we had a system that was too robust for what we needed. We sort of needed what was now called a low code common language type tool.

We ended up building our own. From building our own tool, we made changes to that, and rebranded it. Then, we made changes to that, and rebranded it. 

One of our CIO's big things was we needed a tool that will be able to facilitate our evolution into automation, Agile, and everything else. That's how we came to Enterprise One.

The initial setup is more straightforward for us because we've had other tools in the past, so everything is there. One of the things that we're excited about with version 18 is the configuration: Some of the entry points and user experience will be a lot better when we can collapse certain information. The clean look and feel of it will be really nice.

The product is flexible. We have someone on our team named Allison Cobb who is our Power BI and reporting specialist. She went in and learned the whole schema of Enterprise One to where we have more flexibility than others because we can see certain things, and go, "We want to put that in a dashboard. We want to be able to use that in a different way."

I would give it an eight out of 10. The reason why I would give it an eight is what's being brought into the suite of Planview. The integrations that you're going to be able to do with Planview with LeanKit. All of these things, it's really forward thinking on, "These are all the different pieces which are needed to move forward." All of this is great. 

Public Cloud

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.

On-premises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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