Planview Portfolios Reviews

We use it for resource management, financial forecasting, and time reporting.

I am a user, not an administrator. I mostly do portfolio management.

It is good to have everything in a centralized place.

It has helped improve governance, mostly. People want to know where their money's going. Projects sponsors need to know what we're spending money on and what our burn rate is. Planview can give that to you straightaway.

The forecasting and time reporting functions are the most valuable features. We have about 200 people and can accurately forecast to the penny how much it's going to cost us for the year.

It is a bit of a rigid system.

We are looking to upgrade next year and the big thing for us is BI integration. The project already has that, so that is what I'm looking for, and Planview has sort of covered that base already. This will make our reporting a lot more customized. We can be more flexible. Right now, we are sort of using custom reports, which can be a bit buggy, as they're not native to Planview. This will be native integration.

Stability and reliability are absolutely fine.

We use it very basically. We only have 200 people on it. Most other organizations have thousands of people on it. Our entire company is 1,500 employees.

In the time that I've used it, we've doubled up the amount of dollars on our intended projects. We have managed to double the number of people using it and doubled the amount of projects. We went from one portfolio to three. All of that was a walk in the park.

I am a user, so I don't have to contact technical support.

It was there before I came.

I would recommend Planview compared to what is on the market. I would even say that Planview is the market leader.

I have also used a customer solution in the UK and Microsoft Project.

I would rate the solution as a 10 out of 10. It does what I need it to do, so I've got no complaints. From a user perspective, it's perfect.

We use it for a little bit of everything: R&D, product development, project management, resource management, and program management.

It has given us much greater visibility to resource management and financials.

I like that it's an enterprise environment. I can look across everything that's going on and have a sense of what is going on within the organization.

We're looking forward to version 18, upgrading there, and seeing what we can find there.

It would be nice if Planview were a little more flexible.

One thing that we'd absolutely really like to see is an improvement in the administration capabilities. With the Planview administrator, the interface is very time consuming, and that is not fun. We could be doing other things.

It is very stable.

It's pretty scalable.

Overall, the technical support has good people who are knowledgeable. They are a little overworked. At least, they have been in the past year. We need them to focus on somethings from time to time. You can tell that they're really focusing on many things. It has gotten better, but I think they could still use some relief.

Karen Anderson has been a big help to us.

Historically, our company switched project management environments every three years globally and organizationally. When it was time to do a review, we looked at an entire enterprise portfolio management environment. Planview met the criteria that we had. It was a global organization. It was very solid from a financial perspective. It was able to do multiple currencies, etc.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

The deployment took us three and a half months.

We deployed it ourselves. We did have an integration with our SAP environment, but that was through Planview. We didn't have a third-party do it.

The Planview consultants were very good. They came in with a plan. They said, "If you execute this, then this, then this, and then this. This is how long it will take. This is how much it will cost, and it did. It took this long across this much, then we were up and running.

We have several hundred licenses. It costs us several hundred thousand dollars a year. 

We overbought our licenses. We looked at our needs three to four years down the road and tried based our contract on that. 

However, we were over aggressive. We use about a third of the licenses that we have. We're looking to adjust the makeup so we can start utilizing the amount of money that we are spending. Right now, we're overspending, and my organization is not seeing the value in Planview because we are paying so much for licenses that we're not using.

At the time of evaluation, there were only four or five environments in the entire world that could have met our requirements. Planview by far was the best. 

We evaluated SAP, Oracle, Planisware, and another vendor who dropped out. 

Listen to what they have to say. They know what they have to say. Start small and grow into the environment. Definitely get executive management buy-in for the environment.

What I usually hear from our own implementations and other implementations, they tried to do all the modules, integrations into this environment, SAP, Windchill, and Integrity together. Instead of that, just get the thing up and running. Get people used to the interface. You will have the executive management screaming at you to get it all in one place. But, if you can't get the actual users onboard with using the environment in a simplified manner, then you're never going to get the advanced solution in.

We are beginning to use the solution’s Lean/Agile delivery tools.

I think it's an eight (out of 10). I really like it. I don't really rate anything a 10 I just don't think anything's perfect. I'm happy that they've worked on improving the reliability of the environment over the last year, and I think they need to finish the integrations with all the different components that they purchased over the last year. Once they get that all together, it will be something special. But, let's see it happen first.

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.

Our primary use case for this solution is for managing a 450 million dollar portfolio from the inception and ideas into a strategy. We do this by turning it into an actual project and then understanding how that project performed and taking lessons learned for the next time around.

The biggest benefit that we have seen is that it's increased visibility across the board. It's given us a lot of data to actually make data-driven decisions, whereas before this product we didn't have the level of detail to make informed decisions around a lot of trade-offs with our strategic portfolio.

With respect to our organizational strategy, it has not been transformed by this solution, but it has enabled us to achieve our strategy and achieve our goals. We went through the large process of setting up our own IT shop in the past ten years, and Planview was a big part of being able to do that.

Collaborative Work Management has affected our operations by providing visibility and transparency throughout.

We do not yet use the Lean/Agile Delivery tools.

This solution has helped us connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. I do not have specific examples of this but that is my understanding from my colleagues.

The biggest impact that using Planview has had is that it has given us the ability to manage the main capacity of working our resources and getting better at that over time. We are better at planning for our people and making sure that we use them appropriately.

The most valuable feature of this solution is reporting.

The integration with Power BI, in particular, makes it very easy to get information in a useable format out to our stakeholders.

This is a flexible solution. The flexibility allows you to take care of your stakeholders in different ways. Depending on their way of working, you can accommodate several different processes.

Some of the out-of-the-box reporting is not immediately useful and although it can be configured or customized, there are still improvements that can be made.

This solution is stable. I've not had a technical issue where I was not able to access it. It has always been a solid, high-quality platform.

This solution is easily scalable. It really just depends on the administration team that you have in your company. When somebody wants it, you ask them a few questions then you turn things on for them.

The technical support is among the best in the industry. They're very clear, very thorough and they get right to the heart of the problem. They're willing to work with you and help discover any issues that arise, as well as the implications.

Prior to the solution, we were using the HP Portfolio and Performance Management System. We switched because it wasn't as comprehensive and couldn't handle tying everything together. We had a big issue with getting visibility.

We realize ROI through this solution because it is the way that we manage our strategic portfolio. It is difficult to quantify, but it is an essential part of our operations.

This solution has reached a pretty comprehensive state, so it is difficult to immediately think of features that it is lacking.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of solution is to make sure you're working with a vendor like Planview, who has a comprehensive solution from innovation to the inception of ideas all the way through getting your teams to be able to collaborate together. It really makes a difference if they're all in the same environment.

This is a good solution, but there is always room for improvement. Planview seems great at identifying what needs to be improved and then moving the ball forward.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

It is mainly for project management and resource capacity management across the IT department.

It has impacted our department within IT, which is the project management office.

It brings visibility to work being performed as well as resource capacity.

It certainly has improved the way we showcase our work. I'm part of the project management office. The way we show our projects data is certainly way better than what we could earlier.

The reporting, Power BI export are the most valuable. The dashboards & reports that we provide out of Planview are priceless when compared to any other tool. The tool itself has a variety of built-inr eports. The dashboards that we publish to our executive leadership been very well-received.

If you have a tool, you want customer support with people who you can depend on. It seems like we cannot depend on anyone. Customer service is lacking. Our sales rep did not bother to reach out to us in the past 2 years, and not even at the conference. He excluded us from a local meet-up he had organized. Our customer relationship manager keeps changing. It seems like we have nobody that we really can rely on. 

It is pretty stable. We have hardly had any outages.

It grows with our needs. It is easy enough to scale.

We are not very happy with the customer service. This is one of our main pain points. It doesn't cover the entirety of customer service, as there are reps who are really great and we've had good experiences. 

Many times, we've had people give us attitude, delays in response, or just a lack of interest. This got to the point where if there was a problem, we would rather try to solve it ourselves than call customer support. 

We did have a call with a manager or director from customer service. He will be looking into these issues. 

Different people were using different tools and the reporting was a problem. So, the new head of IT charged the PMO in 2004 to come up with a tool. We did an RFP and Planview was one of the finalists, and our final choice.

Licensing costs are pretty high.

I would rate the solution itself as an eight (out of 10), though the overall experience at a 6. I like the solution. There are things that they can improve on. Planview is constantly working on new things for each situation that comes up.

We have three different teams on Enterprise One right now. We currently have research and development, MIS, and sourcing continuous improvement. The main business cases are new product introduction, MIS projects, and also continuous improvement of productivity projects.

We are on the cloud.

We have recently had some good portfolio discussions about what types of projects and how much effort is going against each type of project, then making better decisions around how they better tied back to the strategy that we want to chase. 

It's around innovation versus continuous improvement versus maintenance-type projects:

• Do we understand how much time and effort we're putting against maintenance projects?
• Where do we want to grow more in innovation? 
• How do we better focus our resources on these types of things? 

That specifically has been how we've been doing it recently.

I don't think it's transformed our strategy yet. I think it's getting us better visibility into how we're working on the strategy. But, I wouldn't say it's changed our company's strategy.

We've brought our portfolio altogether. We have had multiple ways of reporting out what our portfolio is, whether it's in Excel, Word, or in different places. We brought all of our projects together in one place. That has worked out well for us. We've been able to manage the work on Gantt charts and our resources better. The big thing for us on research and development is around managing people's time, on which projects they are working on, and how much effort does it take to launch our projects.

I have found the solution to be flexible. It has the ability for us to have three teams working on it, plus we're going to have capital planning coming onto to Planview next year. The fact that we can all be working on it: MIS folks working on their projects at the same time that you have research and development, new products coming in, and we'll be doing capital projects. We've all been able to work on the same platforms, and it's very helpful that way.

I would rate it as an eight (out of 10). We have had some difficulties with trying to get the financial component of it to work the way that we want it to. The way that we do IRRs, we tried to do that in Planview and the financial model didn't quite get there. It depends on who you talk to, but some of our project managers would probably give it a higher score. When you start talking to some of our financial folks, they would probably give it a lower score, as they are trying to figure out how to best use it financially and have had some struggles.

The stability has been fine.

So far, scalability has been fine. It's added quite a bit to it. It's worthwhile.

The technical support has been pretty good. My technical team would be able to talk more to that than myself. Recently, we have gotten on a newer version. We're currently on version 15. Some of the things that we've been running into roadblocks on, it looks like the solutions will be coming out in versions 17 or 18. So, we have to upgrade before somethings can get completed, but I think for the most part, we've been happy with the support that we have been receiving from the help desk.

We had multiple groups on different tools. Those things were not working for us. We had one group on Access and another group doing things in Microsoft Project trying to manage a portfolio there. All of our project activators were in Excel, Word, and scattered all over the place. It was tough to find information.

It was fairly straightforward. We understood it pretty well out of the gate. We understood the format. 

The format of the tool worked well for us, but there were some things that we were not too familiar with in the tool. We probably didn't learn some things and some training in the tool before we actually got into implementation would have been better. There were some things we were agreeing to ask along the way where we didn't quite see the end picture because we were trying to implement the tool. We were trying to make decisions when we were not sure what the end game looked like. Once we started working on it, it was pretty intuitive and worked well for us.

Planview consultants helped us with it. Our experience with them was very good. It was a different approach than how we typically would have done it internally before. So, we did take a pause along the way and make sure that we were getting what we needed. For the most part, I think we did well with it.

We have not calculated a return on investment at this point. There actually wasn't necessarily an ROI project for this. It was more just trying to pull visibility and get multiple groups under one table. We didn't measure for this one on an ROI basis.

We are on the Flex licenses.

We did talk with SAP and Planview. Originally, we also considered Innotas, which was acquired as Planview PPM Pro. 

Planview Enterprise One was handled best across multiple functions. Everyone came up with different requirements. Planview was good at meeting all of those for each one of us. We did a detailed RFP and scored it all the way through. Each group scored it where they thought it worked for us. Planview scored best.

The big thing for us is that if you're having a difficult time trying to keep track of all the different projects that are going on in different areas and you need one place to be able to go for it. This has worked really well for us.

The biggest impact of using Planview in our company is visibility to everything that is being worked on.

We have not yet used Planview to help connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. I think we want to get there, but we're early on.

We've been using this product for prioritizing work across our Organization and also demand and capacity planning. 

Work that gets added to Planview captures all the key information like t-shirt sizing, key stakeholder names, financial information, and, most important of all, resource allocations and role requirements - all in one tool.

It becomes really easy for the Project Managers to keep an eye on the progress of their Projects, and on the other hand, for the resource managers, it's really easy for them to identify what's in flight for their resources and what's in the pipeline, also do we have enough capacity to fulfill that demand.

Really happy with how Planview keeps transforming its capabilities to meet customer needs.

We are able to take up the right work and invest in the highest value ideas.

The challenge was that we were doing a lot of work without identifying what work has the highest returns. With Planview, we have that visibility across IT, and all the work that gets entered into Planview is surveyed and prioritized to make sure that we start with the highest valued investments. 

Not only that, we have visibility of all the resources as to where they are spending their time and how they can be utilized to better meet the vision and business strategies of the organization.

The best aspects include:

Work Management. Work that gets added to Planview captures all the key information, including t-shirt sizing, key stakeholder names, financial information, and most important of all, Resource allocations and role requirements - all in one tool.

Resource Management. We have visibility of all the resources as to where they are spending their time and how they can be utilized better to meet the vision and business strategies of the organization.

Leankit. The kanban board has really helped us be more agile and we can keep track of everything that is ongoing.

The solution needs to be better at accepting new ideas for upcoming releases. At times, we've requested Planview to add new features to the tool. But they have it go through an enhancement idea process, and we find it a long process. Your idea goes through only if the same idea is proposed by other organizations.

Email notifications for resource allocations/requests/requirements/reserves are something that could be added. A lot of the time, we get questions from resource managers. We would like to get an email notification when a resource request is made.

We've used the solution for nine years.

The product is stable and reliable, with 24-hour support around the globe.

Planview does a great job in scaling the solution with its in-house experts.

We got it implemented through vendor support and are really happy with the support.

The setup cost is mostly the same as competitors. That said, you get a lot of value and return on investment with just one tool.

We also looked into ServiceNow ITBM.

We are using it for timesheet and resource management and project management activities. We also use the analytical reporting, including SSRS and Power BI.

The solution is on the cloud as a PaaS.

The latest version of the solution is using Power BI for reporting functionality, which has provided a tremendous number of visualizations where users can view all the details monthly. And all the visualizations are interacting with each other. We can see the interconnectivity between the work, resources, and the strategy. This helps our project managers to view everything in one screen, with a dashboard.

When it comes to using the solution for end-to-end work management, Planview announced at the Horizons Customer Conference that they are going to integrate it with an RPA tool and that will be very helpful. Currently we are updating tools and user accounts manually. Once they have this type of integration we can update them automatically using UiPath.

Previously, some of our customers were not happy with the way reports were generated. They had to run macros which could fail, but with this tool they are able to generate reports within Planview. That is one of the main advantages and improvements.

The solution also provides a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people. We have included our teams in Planview which is very helpful. We are able to authorize resources at the department level, at the sub-department level, and at even more granular levels.

It also helps us measure timesheet compliance. We have been able to create custom reports with the help of Planview and send reminders to users every week that they need to submit a timesheet. In the last six months we have achieved greater than 95 percent compliance with timesheet submission.

Resource management and project management are the most valuable features. Recently they included the Resource Management and Assignments stream which is very helpful for seeing results related to the resources. It is connected with reporting and helps us create reports easily.

Regarding project plans, we are using the workflow life cycle and create templates, using them to create a process. Some of them are Agile while others are Waterfall, depending on the workflow template that is selected. They are automatically triggered and the task is then created.

Its view into resource capacity and availability helps us to manage work. It also helps to see how much we are using. We derive that information from the work and resource management screen. That is very helpful.

In terms of its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects, we have done summaries of projects in PowerPoint presentations for our leadership team. This helps to highlight things regarding our program. We are able to show them summaries with the help of SSRS. This saves time and is helpful to management so that they can track everything.

It also helps managers see the performance of particular resources. They can see the resource utilization. For example, if we create requirements for a role, such as a developer, tester, or a technical architect, they can see how those resources are doing.

In addition, we can drill down into the details underlying the consolidated information. If a project manager finds he needs one more developer for a particular requirement, he can drill down to find a developer for that requirement. The drill-down approach means managers can completely utilize resources, each one to 100 percent of capacity.

When it comes to reporting there are some challenges with integration.

Also, some of the functionality with Microsoft is restricted.

We have been using Planview Enterprise One for around five years. We started with version 13 of Planview.

Overall it is very stable. Sometimes we run into issues, but not very often. 

Technical support helps us a lot whenever we face an issue or raise a request. They resolve them within two days.

Our initial setup took seven to 10 days. 

We started with a sandbox environment, went through all the test cases, and then moved to production.

We have about 2,500 people using Planview Enterprise One. They span the roles of team member, project manager, through to portfolio manager. We also have about eight staff who are admins for the solution.

I would suggest you go with this product, instead of using other tools. Every tool will have its own advantages and disadvantages, but with Planview there are more advantages. There are more things we can do with it. It is user-friendly and is integrated with many other tools. It is also constantly developing, providing connections with Power BI, which we have started to learn, and recently, with RPA using UiPath. That is also something we are supposed to learn. It isforcing us to learn and to keep up with the world. Planview is not becoming outdated, keeping up with recent technologies.

Some of my colleagues are currently using the CA PPM tool and they are saying that they are facing issues. I explained to them how I work with Planview, and the functionality it has, including Planview LeanKit. I noted that we can merge with Tableau and ClickView. They are thinking about using Planview.