Planview Portfolios Reviews

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

The primary use is project and resource management. Right now, it's just used for technical infrastructure, which is IT. But, we are also configuring it for business.

We are not live yet. It will make us more "agile" in things whenever we deliver. It will bring better visibility for projects, in terms of: resources, whether we are lacking resources or not, If we are in alignment with the global strategy of the company before a project has been delivered, financials, etc. 

The flexibility is whenever we implement for technical infrastructure, we have our business transformation process with targets, etc. Now that we are in the process of configuring for the business, there is a totally different solution. We have all the lifecycles, capability, and capacity to create screens based on workflow, shifts, etc. This is giving us huge flexibility to accommodate the company's needs. If we didn't have this flexibility, there would be one global solution for different processes of project management in the organization.

We are using the Lean/Agile delivery tools. The new solution for waterfall will be extremely helpful in making delivery faster because of visibility that the application brings to us, such as the schedule, resources, and what is happening in the background. Before, we had projects, but we didn't know if we'd have enough resources. We didn't know a lot of things. Now, with this tool, we have the full visibility of what's happening: 

• Do we need to hire resources? 
• Do we need more project managers? 
• What is our capacity? 
• What are our investments? 

Now, we can see fully into the portfolios and that everything is integrated. For the project financials, we can roll up and spread down. It's pretty good.

The most valuable features are the control and visibility that you have for portfolio management in terms of projects and capacity planning for resources along with strategies and outcomes, etc. It's so easy to access information for sharing analytics and reporting.

When I started working with Planview, I didn't know anything about project or resource management. I had to learn everything: the admin side, then the user side of it. Probably, in the beginning, I would implement in the blueprint or workshops more demos. A live demo of how the system works because we would like a little deeper dive in how the application works for us to understand what we need to provide, what we are doing, what we will be doing. Because in the beginning, it was so overwhelming, and we didn't know anything about the tool. 

You know your process. You know how you work, but you don't know how you're going to put that in the tool. If we had more demos in the beginning to make us more comfortable with the tool, we could have improved the success of the configuration.

We finished our configuration in June. We have been proving the solution here and there by running test and everything else. It does work the way that we want it.

So far, the stability is good. We haven't had any issues.

The scalability is good. The only thing that is hard with scalability, and may have a little hiccup, are the structure levels that we need to define in the beginning of the configuration. It makes for a lack of ability to be flexible whenever we are scaling, and we are growing as an organization. We are stuck with the levels that we set up in the beginning.

Whenever we define these levels, we state the amount of levels in a way that will allow us to scale in the future. That is our workaround.

It's just moving with technology. We cannot be living in Excel files. The company needs to be able to grow. Yet, we were still using Excel or other applications from Microsoft. So, we needed something more robust to support the growth of the organization. I think Planview came at the right time.

The initial setup was complex. We didn't know the tool in the beginning. So, it was harder to understand what is being done and what information we need to gather. Planview helped us gather all the information and deliver it. However, in the beginning, it was so blurry. We didn't know what was happening. We just went with the flow, then suddenly, "Ah!" Things started clicking. We started seeing things as they became live. Then, we were like, "Okay, now I'm getting it."

Configuration-wise, we took six weeks. Then, we had some issues after the configuration. It took us four more weeks to get it back into shape. Overall, it took us about 10 weeks.

We are planning to go with this project now that we finished the configuration. We are planning to go live on the second week of January 2020.

We used a Planview consultant for the deployment. Our experience with them was challenging. The initial consultant lacked some knowledge to help us. He didn't know the user interface, plus had very superficial administrative knowledge. 

Once we escalated the issue, we were taken care of immediately. Now, we have a way better consultant. We are extremely happy with our current solution architect (consultant).

Planview just jumped on this issue. They have been great and extremely supportive. They have been making sure that we are on the right path. 

The company evaluated other vendors.

The company chose Enterprise One because of the potential of the platform. It links to Spigit, PPM Pro, and a lot of other things that will support the scalability and growth of the organization on one single platform. This make it easier to manage licenses, administrate contracts, and everything else. It's one vendor with many solutions.

I would rate the product a 10 out of 10.

We are not using outcomes yet. But on the course I took on Monday, we saw the value of having outcomes. It was also brought to our attention the gap that exists between strategy programs and how you connect everything together: strategy outcomes and programs. How we can connect all this, it seems to be the way to go.

We are a big company, which has almost 30,000 employees.

Public Cloud

Other

We currently use it for all of our technical projects. We use work and resource management for our technical portfolios.

The biggest impact for using Planview currently would be to understand the true costs of projects. We are trying to get to a point where not only do we take into account technical costs, but what the business cost is. Trying to integrate our business right now into Planview is helping us identify the true cost of the investments that we make so we can try and understand their value.

The tool does have the potential to impact our organizational delivery. As we continue to integrate our entire business with our technical teams into Planview, I definitely see it changing how we deliver projects in the future.

Currently, it provides insight to leaders that they don't otherwise have access to get. As far as delivery leaders from technical teams and determining their resource capacity and constraints, they don't have another way of figuring this information out right now unless they were to do it manually on their own, which would be very time consuming.

The most valuable feature is resource management. You get to work with a lot of resource leaders for capacity planning. Although, we don't use capacity planning to its full potential, we would like to go there as well as financial management for the projects.

All of the features that we get out of Planview, it just helps us to provide information back to our senior leadership and have those conversations to get insight. When we have that information, we get insight from them on what it is that they are looking for and what they need. Then we can transform that information from the tool and get them what they need. All the information is helpful for me to be able to provide the data that they need. We want to help them make the right decisions that they need.

I would like to be able to copy and paste from Excel into work and assignments along with roles and hours, as opposed to having to type it out one by one.

We have been using Planview since 2013. I have been using Planview since 2015.

It's very stable. It's a great tool that is evolving. It provides more information and opportunities for us to expand what we offer to our customers. 

We do use the technical support. We always have a good experience. We have dedicated people who we can work with to submit tickets. The responses to tickets are always in a timely manner.

We did the upgrades with the help of Planview. It was a really good experience. 

It wasn't just me. An entire team from Planview worked with my company, so this helped us get all the information so we could make each upgrade. We've done multiple upgrades so we could make each upgrade be as seamless as possible. So, the support that we got from Planview was nice.

We have seen some return on our investment within Planview. As we transform here to turning on more of the features, reworking what we've done, all the customizations, and trying to just start fresh, I think that we'll see an even bigger return once we can take advantage of the features that Planview offers that we aren't currently using right now.

This is information that we can leverage from PlanView once we transform how we use it today. The information that we can leverage that will, in turn, provide a return on decisions that we make, how we deliver work, and maybe delivering it faster. Then, we would see a reduction in costs for some of those projects as well as having our leadership setup to make better, more informed decisions than what they currently can do from the data that we provide. I believe that once we started leveraging all the tools that Planview can offer from what we have in Enterprise One now, we'll have more information for our leaders.

My advice would be do to planning. Ask a lot of questions and do a lot of planning out first what the goal of the organization are. Then, from what their goals are, utilize the tool to try and meet those goals.

I am an everyday user of the tool. When you don't have everyday users, or users who go into the same task over and over, it probably is not as flexible for them. For myself, I do find it very flexible.

I would rate the tool a solid eight (out of 10). I wouldn't give it a 10. Part of it probably is that we haven't activated all of the capabilities that Planview has. The other part of it is that I work in the tool everyday. So, some of the things that we would like to do as an organization may very well be available to us. We just haven't utilized them yet. Once we go through this assessment process and sit down with Planview next week to go over what we can do, it may change the team. This is where we are in our current state for everything that we want to do.

We are in the process of having Planview help connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. We are just building a roadmap for this.

Our strategies have evolved from other factors, but not necessarily from the tool.

We do not use the solution's Lean/Agile delivery tools nor do we use Projectplace.

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

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

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

I have been using the solution for four years.

The solution is very stable.

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

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

Neutral

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

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

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

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

We use 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

The primary use case is project costing, resource forecasting, and financial reporting of projects. It is implemented only in departments that touch what we call our project portfolio. So, the people in IT who do the coding, programming, developing products for customers, and the maintenance on our systems, they're all in the solution reporting time. However, our payroll and human resources do business as usual. They run the company and business, keeping the lights on, but they are not part of our time reporting community.

As we grow, it will help us because nobody in the company speaks or understands Planview data. It allows us to take that and put it into a format where we can walk into a boardroom, and say, "This is where we are. This is where we're going. This is what we need."

The biggest impact on our company is resource forecasting.

Planview has helped connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. That is the key use that we have for it. We use it to validate the work that we're doing and the funding that we need. The difference between the previous version and current version for us would be the ICPM and the way it gives us different scenarios. We can go in and build that out.

Nothing is the most valuable. We're really just tapping into what Enterprise One will do for us, such as, the ICPM. planning, and data that comes out of the system right now.

The flexibility of the solution would be around the reporting, resource forecasting, work breakdown structure and how we build out a project, and the lifecycles at the beginning of a project.

We have required more time from our resource managers to spend time in the tool. The adoption has been slower than we would have hoped. So, I would think from a rollout perspective, if Planview could help us with material which gets non-Planview users or previously light Planview users to become more heavy users of the system, then this would help us with the rollout. Our biggest improvement that we've seen has been in the annual planning process each year that we go through to map out what projects we're doing and what are we handling next. It has become noticeably easier the better that we have gotten in Planview.

It's still a project management tool. It's that slow adoption thing. It hasn't come full circle in the other parts of the company. Therefore, it hasn't transformed our company's delivery.

The technical support piece needs improvement. 

When we rolled it out, we rolled it out out-of-the-box, which didn't allow for hardly any customization. We found out that we probably should have slowed down and customized it. Giving advice to anybody, I would tell them don't do the out-of-the-box solution. It's worth it to sit down, customize it, and make it work your way.

On December 3rd of 2018, we upgraded from version 11 to Enterprise One version 16.4. So, we've been using it for about 11 months now.

So far, we've not had any problems with it. We did have a couple of little hiccups. Most of our stability issues have been around that it is hosted at Planview. When our network goes down, so does our connection to the outside world. Then, we lose all of our cloud-based solutions. When everything was on-prem before, we could lose that connection to the outside world and still function as a company. Now that all of our solutions have moved offsite, anytime we lose that connectivity, it's a whole office of people sitting around twiddling their thumbs because you can't get to JIRA, Confluence, etc. Most of our projects are still actively managed out of Microsoft Project and saved on their desktop. That's probably the only thing that we can still leverage when that connection goes down.

We lose Internet connectivity once every two to three months when there is a hiccup somewhere and something goes down in the matrix, then we lose connectivity. It is usually down for maybe 30 minutes to an hour, then we're up and running again.

I would rate the technical support just slightly below poor. We have found that for us to communicate with Planview technical support and open a ticket, we have to make a business case with a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation including screenshots, red circles, and arrows. We have to draw it out for them, then we make a video showing this is us and everything the way it should look. Then, we do this activity: Here's the outcome and the malfunction with the explanation. We have to remind them that we don't use allocations, that we're just using reservations. We go through this whole diatribe of putting almost a packet together. Then, two weeks later somebody calls us, and says, "Hey, we're looking into your ticket. Can you explain what's going on?"

It's like, "I just spent all that time. Did you look at the video? Did you look at the PowerPoint?"

"Well, not really."

"Well, go back and look at it." Then it's, "Well, did you understand it?"

"Well, I don't know. I can't reproduce it. Let me..."

Then, the other day, we went through that same process. They called us up. and said, "Hey, we couldn't reproduce your problem, so we just went into your production version and updated your project for you." I don't ever want anybody from outside of my organization to touch one of my projects. So, I was pretty livid about that.

In some ways, the solution is flexible. In other ways, it is not. It seems that the support that we get from Planview when we call them up over the phone is almost misleading at times.

When we talk to people at Horizons that have had some of the same challenges, they found it very flexible because they knew about a thing to make Planview work the way they needed it to and we didn't get that assistance from Planview. The biggest benefit in being at Horizons isn't the support from Planview, as it is the support from the user community having been in the software.

My wish is the company, Planview, steps up to be just as valuable as the use cases and user stories.

We found it straightforward. Some of our end users found it more complex because they were required to get in and do new things. The expression we used is, "We're all growing new muscles together. We're working out new muscles and we're learning new things." Like when you start a new workout routine, you're sore in the morning. You're going to get sore from Planview until you build up muscles to do this. There is a learning curve.

Our business users are still overcoming the learning curve, not as fast as we would like, but they are getting there.

Glen Van Koojic and Mike Moulden were outside trainers and facilitators who helped us with the rapid deployment of Planview. They are contractors, not actual employees, of Planview. They are great guys and helped a tremendous amount.

We have seen ROI in non-tangible ways. There is still much more to be had there as we improve our business plan and operation.

We evaluated Clarity, Rally, and a Microsoft Project Enterprise solution.

We already had Planview. We looked for a while at Workday because Workday was coming on to do our HR stuff. The idea was, "Maybe we can get some sort of work management project piece out of Workday, then have it all be integrated into one tool with one check to write." There wasn't enough meat on the bone for us to go that route. So, we went with Planview.

We decided to go with Planview because of familiarity. We didn't have to change to a whole new system. Even though the difference between versions 11 and 16 was a totally different code base. It was beneficial for us to keep similar look and feel, layout, and shorter training time.

We still use Microsoft Project as a standalone. Most of our projects are managed out of that because we use Planview as a financial reporting tool. We will hopefully replace Microsoft Project with an expanded use of Planview Enterprise One.

I am happy with Planview. I would give it an endorsement.

We're trying to move in a more lean, agile direction. Everything we use right now for that is JIRA, Excel spreadsheet, and Microsoft Project based.

We used Projectplace during the rollout. I really liked it and would like to keep using it. We don't currently use it, as we are not currently customers of it. I think it was their tool to use when they were rolling us up and because we were participating in that project with them, so we got access to it that way.

I find value in both products: Enterprise One and Projectplace. I didn't see any synchronization or data feeding between the two of them. So, I can't tell if there's any synergy between them. I believe there probably is based on what I've seen at Horizons, but I've not witnessed that synergy.

We barely use 20 percent of the features that are in the current version. I am excited about all of the products that Planview offers and how they seem to integrate together. I would like to see my company mature and develop to the point that we could bring on a second or third Planview product, then we can really start becoming lean, agile, and innovative. However, we need to get our own house in order before we can even talk about future features of Planview.

We need to do a better job of being us than we currently do. We need a little more leadership maturity. We need to refine our business processes. We have a new CEO, and he's setting a new direction for the company. We need to get his business vision a little further down the road than where we are. We're sort of in a state of flux right now.

The product is probably a seven or eight (out of 10), but I think our adoption of it and use of it right now is probably a five (out of 10). So, we need to be better at using the tool. 

Public Cloud

Other

The overall interface is very easy to use. It puts together strategy and execution across all your investments. The demand, organizational resources, financials, strategies, project execution, and ideation elements are all brought together in this solution.

It resulted in a high rate of adoption and sustainability of changes that are associated with the business unit and its regions.

It proved a single set of reliable and actionable portfolio plans, consisting of ranked ideas, projects, and services across the organization. Thus, it enhanced visibility.

It would be great to see Planview incorporate agile interfacing/methods in it. Like CA Clarity and other leading PPM tools – Planview should enhance or develop the interfaces to ingrate with other market leading Agile tools (like TFS, JIRA, RALLY, etc..) and collaboration tools to support the seamless Organizational investment data flow from and to these tools, it could prove as a great eco-system aligned with today’s emerging frameworks, methodologies………

I would like to see them publish their guides, FAQs, tips, and Knowledge Management Database (KMDB) for free in their community, as other market leading PPM tools do. Planview has not published, shared / made available it’s tool related guides, QRGs, release notes in public domain. Only the authorized customers can access their repository – I hope they should think about this and create the open / free / openly accessible community blog, sites where users can found the threads / discussions and can download the user / feature / admin / functional / module guides etc…

Scope of customization – it’s a great tool built with set of best practices from project management perspective, but they should provision the scope of customizations. I have grown up working with Planview versions 5 / 7.4.1 (10 years back, almost) and have never seen them provided the ability to create any custom object / module, if required. What Planview suggests is to use their existing modules as they suffice the PM and Strategic requirements. But like the other tools, they should provision for the scope of customizations so that users can create a custom module / object / entity – which will work individually (as the work, strategy entities do) having the object specific supporting attributes / lifecycles / Scripted dialogs etc… it would then certainly revolutionize the whole PPM space…

I have used this solution for over ten years.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

Customer Service:

10/10

Technical Support:

Technical support is great. They have got really good experts on their team.

I have used other PPM tools before, but I found Planview Enterprise to really be the best-in-class for project and portfolio management practices.

The licensing part is a bit costly in comparison with the other available PPM tools. However, it is worth the price for those organizations who seek to bring their strategy to life in a world of limited resources.

We evaluated other solutions, namely Microsoft Office EPM and HPE PPM solutions.

Go ahead and get this solution implemented. Do not limit your organization’s exposure to the timesheet/resource management. Instead, use Planview's solution starting from the intake part through the overall strategy management.