Planview Portfolios Reviews

We use Planview Management to assess the current project portfolio, evaluate resource availability, and prioritize projects based on strategic objectives, ROI, and risk factors. 

Planview Management improves an organization depending on how well it aligns with the organization's goals and processes and how effectively it is implemented and utilized by the team. 

Our overall experience was good. Our primary use case is Planview Management. In this scenario, it is to improve project visibility, optimize resource utilization, and drive better decision-making to achieve organizational goals effectively.

This software totally changed our organization's workflow. Planview Management offers a centralized platform for managing all projects and portfolios. This helps to improve visibility into project status, progress, and resource allocation across the organization. 

Planview Management enables our organizations to make data-driven decisions. The centralized platform offers robust reporting and analytics capabilities. 

Planview Management integrates seamlessly with other tools and systems used within the organization, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and collaboration platforms. This integration enhances data visibility, streamlines workflows, and eliminates silos between departments. All other services are sophisticated

Enhancements are needed in:

Advanced reporting and analytics: While Planview Management provides robust reporting and analytics capabilities, further enhancements could include more advanced data visualization options, predictive analytics features, and customizable dashboards to provide deeper insights into project performance and trends. 

Enhanced collaboration tools: While Planview Management facilitates collaboration, additional features such as real-time chat, video conferencing integration, and collaborative document editing can further improve communication and teamwork among project teams and stakeholders. 

Scalability and performance: As organizations grow and their project portfolios expand, it's essential for Planview Management to ensure scalability and performance. This could involve optimizing the platform's architecture, enhancing database management, and improving response times for large-scale deployments. 

Overall, by addressing these areas for improvement and incorporating additional features in the next release, Planview Management can continue to meet the evolving needs of organizations and remain a leading solution for project and portfolio management.

I've used the solution for six months.

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

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

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

The reporting is poor and requires improvement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neutral

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

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

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

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

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

Public Cloud

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

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.