Planview Portfolios Reviews

I have a governance role in our strategic portfolio management and I use this solution for reporting out against the strategic portfolio. I interact with the PMOs and FPNA and help to get the two on the same page.

Our ability to do strategic portfolio reporting has gotten much better. We're more accurate with how we report out. One of the biggest things is that each year, we've had a lot of shifts in how our pillars are set up and we can quickly shift to meet those needs without having it be too lengthy or too difficult.

Using this solution has helped improve how quickly we can deliver. It saves us time.

Collaborative Work Management has affected our operations because we're able to collaborate with different groups. We've got our PMO groups, and I'm able to get the information that I need from them. They go in, pull all of their information and I get the reports. We collaborate really well, from what I can tell.

My understanding is that we are using the Lean/Agile delivery tools, but I am not sure if we are using them to the full extent.

The most valuable feature for me is the ease and customizability of reporting. We can get different reports and customize them to do different things.

I also like business objects capabilities, although I haven't used them in my current role.

This is a flexible solution.

This tool is easy to use. I have used solutions such as SAP and Oracle and compared to using those products, I picked up up this tool right away. Once I had a little bit of training from our admins, I thought that it was really intuitive. It was easy for me to go in and build reports, where I didn't constantly need other people to do it for me. That is nice because I have administrative access, so I can do pretty much anything within the tool that I have the knowledge for. That is a plus for a business analyst. You can get the data you want quickly, export it to Excel, and slice and dice it the way you want to.

I would like to be able to integrate with Oracle to supplement what we're currently doing with reporting. We aren't doing it right now, although I don't know if it's a limitation with Planview or it's a limitation with us. I know that it would be helpful for me to bridge that gap because we have to deal with two different datasets.

From a stability standpoint, I think it's solid. I haven't had any major issues with it. I'm always able to get my reporting and I'm always able to do the things that I want to do.

My understanding is that we have seen ROI from this solution, but I am not aware of the specifics. I know that other Blue Shield organizations are using it, and I have heard that it has been successful for us.

Currently, we are not taking advantage of the full functionality that is offered by this solution. We really need to push to get to that next level and use everything that is being offered. I think that there is a disconnect between the people who are the administrators of it and the people who tweak it to get it to do what we want. We just need to have the conversations and that vision of what we want it to do. I know we've got some limitations within our own company, where I think we have a vision of where we want to go and things that I want to get. We're just not quite there, yet.

We've always struggled, but we have been getting better with our reporting each year.

This is a great tool. I have a stronger finance background, so I've used more ERP-type systems and this is my first project management system. From what I can tell, it's great. I haven't used Oracle's or one from another vendor, but I think that this one works well.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Mainly, we use it to manage all of our strategic and capital projects. There are about 80 to 100 projects per year that we manage with it: schedules, issues, risks, and financials. We manage everything in the tool.

Our reporting is much better. There is much more visibility on projects, schedules, tasks, and in our milestones. Now, we have a consistent way of reporting out to the committees and getting all of our schedules and milestones.

The most valuable feature is the reporting. We are able to extract monthly reports out of Planview Enterprise One. We then report out to our leadership and executive committees. It is a combined report that lists all of the issues, risks, our schedule, and milestone. It gives leadership as well as all the committee members and everyone a one page view of the progress of the project.

The tool is easy to use, and that is good.

We had some learning issues at the start, but now that the users are in the tool day after day, they are getting there.

Power BI versus getting reports within Planview could improve. Instead of having to leverage Power BI, those reports could just be generated within the Planview tool using the tiles. This would be a huge jump for the product.

For most part, it's pretty stable. The only issue that we have seen is with the reports. Sometimes within the application, when you pull a report, it takes awhile performance-wise for the reports to pull up. Otherwise, it's good for the most part.

The technical support is pretty good. We have opened up many cases with Planview which get addressed in a timely fashion. 

It's when we want to get into integrations that the time response could be a bit quicker.

It is changing the culture of project management within our company a little bit. Before, we had multiple tools, so project managers were either using Excel or some had Microsoft Project. Reporting was done in different ways. This tool just brings the project management community together. We're all on the same tool and reporting on the same structure.

The initial setup was complex because we also implemented it in a three month time frame. This was a pretty aggressive timeline for us. We got it done.

We didn't get all the integrations done, but that was sort of our phase two. We started in December with our build portion and went live in March.

We did not other vendors. 

We're part of UT. Because we already had an existing contract within the UT system, we piggybacked on that contract and utilized that to implement Planview.

It is about a seven or eight out of 10. I think for the most part that the tool itself is excellent. It meets our needs. It gets us the reports that we want. It has all of the portfolio and program management functionality. All of that is working well. I would've given it a 10 out of 10 if the integrations in some of the reporting capabilities were easier,

The primary use case is for portfolio management on product development.

We do a lot of big projects which are pretty expensive to structure the product development around and see the progress. Every time we start a project, we have to expense the spends for certain amounts. We need some baselines, like predictive versus actual.

The product has been stable and reliable throughout our testing.

So far, it has been scalable.

The support is good. There are some good people there.

My frustration is that there is so much turnover at Planview. Every time we have had an issue, particularly on the sales side, you're talking to a new set of people. 

The technical people are very competent, but there is so much turnover in the people that we talk to, and that's frustrating. They will say, "We can make this work." Suddenly, that guy has left, and we have no one. Then, we have to start all over.

The decision was made before I was in charge of Planview.

We found it the best to hire the Planview team and get the setup done through them. It took a couple of days.

We used Planview for the implementation.

It is way too soon.

Our licensing costs are about a quarter of a million dollars per year.

I would rate the product a seven out of 10.

The primary use cases are project management and resource management. We use both of those modules of the tool today.

The transparency piece has improved our organization. We're big into financials. We set targets annually. We are able see real-time based upon our reporting structure, and we do this on a monthly basis. We use some of the reporting features that they have in the tool to show this information to key leaders in our organization to be able to keep the wheels turning down the road.

We are in a very transparent company. I like that the data that we store is available for everybody. We're not trying to hide anything. Being an administrator, I know a lot about the tool. It is very easy to show somebody how to use the tool and get used to it. Hopefully that user doesn't come back and ask the same question twice is really what it is about. It's a very intuitive product as well. For what we use the tool for today, it's easy to learn and pick up.

I am looking forward to the upcoming features. Previously, we have had continuous upgrades, so not having to put in so many tickets to get in a queue to get the migration up and running. we'll leverage that. Based on issues that we've run into, such as, having to open up a ticket, then going through development and that whole process, it lengthens out to find out that, "Oh, we can't fix it. It's going to be in the next release." Then, we have to wait for that release to come out. From an admin perspective, I think the upcoming features are great. 

Some of the other administrative screens, like the configured screens, they are modernizing those, which is exciting. This will help me out.

About six and a half years.

We started in version 10. We have gone through the migration path of upgrading and the pains that they've talked about today of having to go through the process of upgrading to a new version. I'm very excited to see the features which are coming.

For the most part, it is stable, but we've had our struggles as well. From a reliability and performance perspective, we don't have a lot of users. We have about 350 users, not all online at the same time, but we've had our struggles with performance. It is good to see that Planview has seen that themselves and are doing everything they can to fix and remedy this. 

One of the reasons why we've upgraded so many times is because of performance standards. We've just run into issues where we've had performance problems. Maybe they are not upgrading, but they're adding more horsepower. Then, we do go upgrade and lose that horsepower, which is frustrating from my perspective as an admin to lose that horsepower. Hopefully, that'll change. It's been pretty stable though in the version 17.

The support is slow. I've heard that they're beefing up that side of the company. It just seems to be the same people who are slow. It's getting that first contact resolution to the customer after I submit a ticket. It's literally within two minutes that I get a response back that says, "Hey, we got that." Then, it may be a day or two after that before they will get back to me. It is just going back on their words. If you're going to say something, just do it. That's the way I was growing up: Finish it out. If it's going to be two days, just tell me it's going to be two days. But, if you're going to tell me that you're going to get back to me today or tomorrow, and you don't, that to me is a little shot in the foot.

Planview Enterprise One is way better than what we had before. We have been through spreadsheet hell. Being able to leverage Planview to get us out of that has been great. We've had some great success stories come in since we have launched PlanView.

I would rate them as a seven point two out of 10. The magic quadrant says they are at the top of the top, and I don't disagree with them, but I think there's room to grow. I have seen that every year. This is my seventh time being at Horizons. It's just great to come back every year to be able to see what is coming next. You can definitely tell that they are listening to customers and trying to do everything they can to build the best in show product in this space.

I personally integrate with SAP, Workday, and JIRA. My stance on JIRA is that LeanKit is the way to go. I believe that. I think our company is just stuck on JIRA. We're in JIRA land. Everything is JIRA. It's not for everybody. I think the flexibility with LeanKit is the answer. It's just getting that message to the right people in our company to take that leap and go that route. I integrate with Workday and ServiceNow within our tool set at our company. They're all cloud-based.

We have a number of custom fields, but not really. It's pretty generic from that standpoint. We don't have a lot of bolt on things that need integrations. Flexibility-wise, it's good for our needs right now. We are right in the thick of agile transformations. So, it'll be interesting to see how we can hopefully leverage the tools that Planview offers to help ourselves and our company transform along the way. I'm looking forward to that.

We are using it to monitor all the investment planning from the business. In IT. we using it for monitoring all activities, the financial spent, and the delivery of the work.

There have been new additional features helping us quite a lot, which have helped us to get executive adoption of the tool. Now that we are moving into version 18 with automated things, we will get more value with that. It's going to help us facilitate upgrades, I am looking forward to that as well.

It's helping us to be more mature in the way we handle change and projects from the business point of view. We have some transparency in what we do and are auditable in our different steps. That's a huge basic step, but a good start from the business point of view. We are now connecting to the IT through Columbia. There is now a nice simple flow.

It is helping to have a more structured process for planning and investment in capacity management for decisions. Now, we have information that is visible and helps to have more certainty that the decisions made are the right decisions. It's helping us to be more on the right side of the decision or have more confidence in the decision that is made.

Our transparency is increasing a lot. It is helping us to get people together. There are no dark rooms anymore. In some areas or concepts, we want to add more light to every single concept. That's the big impact that the tool is having. It allows conversations between people.

It gives us room to grow because it's very flexible. It gives us a lot of configuration that we can do on our own, so we can set up at our own pace. 

At the moment, the company goes at a slower pace than the capabilities offered. So, we can develop a lot until we hit its limits. This is a very valuable thing for me.

You have more capabilities. You can do things more quickly. It is helping us to transform the way that we are organized, communicate with each other, and interact with one another.

It could do with a quicker response time for some reports or portfolios.

What we are exploring now: 

• What happens after a business decision is made in Planwiew? 
• How is it enabled through other processes of the company, such as purchasing? 
• How we create a straight line of action for the users? 

We want to see what it does that is possible and what could be a good use case for it. The same way when information is collected in other systems financially, how does it comes back so we can reallocate it. Can we use something similar to ITV's business management in Planview? Is anyone else experiencing that? If so, that would be a great use case for the whole Planview community.

It is stable and reliable. Downtime is marginal. 

Planview alignment is a replacement for SAP cost center, specifically the finance, controlling, and some PPM. That was the comparison that we started with. We didn't compare Planview to other PPM tools because what we saw gave us a run for our money with what we had before. 

The initial setup was quite straightforward. We had a very special launch that took three months during its configuration cycle. This was unprecedented compared to similar implementations that we had in the past course. It was brilliant.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. We have angles that can still be better, but the product gives us enough growth for years.

The primary use cases are soft management and work management. We are expanding at the moment to outcome management and strategy management as well as ICP planning. Next year, we will expand to CTM.

When I started in the group on the German side, we could only have aliases as resources. Now, we are able to have named resources through the agreement, and pulled from the worker's council, for example. 

We have more stability in the data. Our group has plenty of portrait data now, as we are part of the source of the tools for portrait data.

Planview has helped connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. We started to have strategic planning inside going then down to the outcomes. Out of the outcomes, we will try to wait on the projects and other teams, then growing slowly to link it.

It brings transparency to our projects.

I like the Excel interfaces that we have and use it for. 

It gives us the vast ability to churn out-of-the-box reports and have an overview about approach rates and resource utilization.

The product is flexible. E.g., the work infrastructure is easy to adjust. Some other structures are really easy to configure, adjust to our behavior, and adjust to our processes.

Overall, the UI needs improvement. The UI should have more possibilities for users who are not specialized in using Planview. At the moment, it is more of a technical UI. I would like it to be an open user UI. 

improvement is needed on several modules, like resource management and outcome management. 

The product can grow with us. We can add more users.

The customer support center is really valuable. I have had a lot of email discussions and talks with them. We have found several solutions. Sometimes, it ends in an enhancement request.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We plan to upgrade to version 18 next year.

We did an assessment of several companies.

I would rate the product as a seven out of 10. 

Our primary use cases are for portfolio planning, forecasting, budgeting, and obviously reporting. The project managers input for projects, input resources for proper forecasting, and for budgeting. It's the same with our resource managers to monitor their teams' capacity and then also for finance purposes for our annual budget planning.

We don't use the solution a lot for the project planning itself. As far as tasks and milestones, we don't use some of the features to see what stage a project is at. We really just use it to input the project. We actually use outside applications to manage a project in most cases. 

As far as project planning, entering specific tasks and resources assigned to the project to forecast those projects is about all we use it for. And then, of course, start and finish dates. The flexibility to use a certain finish date is nice, but we don't really go into the project details in Enterprise One.

Enterprise One improves our monthly portfolio and resource capacity planning and forecasting. It improves the visibility of the resource capacity and the team's capacity to take on new work. 

It has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. We have not used the strategy feature much in Enterprise One, but it does help to prioritize projects based on the need and the capacity of the resources to take on the work. It ultimately helps manage the project to have the bank customer in mind. So as we're taking on new projects, we can all work for the same goal with the customer in mind.

The assignments are in a project that's assigned to a resource. The capability is there.

The resource capacity planning is the most valuable feature because you can evaluate your team's capacity by team and what projects they're working on and you can forecast easily by team.

The resource capacity and availability help us to manage our work. During portfolio planning each month with new projects that are presented, we're able to use Enterprise One to measure the capacity of each team that's being requested to be on the project. And obviously, the resource managers and project managers are still getting used to using the tool. But I think that as time goes, it's a good tool to measure, to see the capacity and overloaded resources, as far as projects go and taking on new projects.

Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. It does do end-to-end project management. It's a good thing that we can do end-to-end project management as far as monitoring the project resources, capacity, and timeline, and the schedule of the project. But that's all we use it for. They get what they need from an outside system in order to manage the project end-to-end.

I do all of the reporting for Enterprise One and it's not as user-friendly. So there's not a whole lot of flexibility of what we can do with the reports or custom reports like we could in our old system. The ability to customize reports is not there. And we actually have to pay for Planview consultants to capture reporting that we really need because of the inability to configure the current track record for Enterprise One. That's the thing that we are struggling with is the reporting capability in Enterprise One, without having to pay for extra services from Planview to get what we need. The downfall of this is because Enterprise One is a hosted application, our administrators do not have access to the data table to all of the data tables, to all of the data, and all of the data sets that are running in the background.

The feature to create summary reports across multiple projects affects our ability to share the big picture with management. The flexibility to customize the reports in the way that management would like to see them, we cannot do. We have to engage Planview in order to have access to data to provide to management.

The reporting capability and access to the fields for our system administrators to have access to the data without having to pay Enterprise One to get the data that's needed to create custom reports for management to create reports need improvement. 

Another improvement would be on the request side for visibility. For the requesters to see progress for work and reporting for requesters portfolios, and for requesters to be able to monitor the working end to end.

I would also like to have the ability to report at a task level for chargeback purposes.

We just configured Enterprise One last September and we went live in December.

There is very minimal downtime. The only thing that is room for improvement is that their reporting is very slow. It's a very painful process to pull reports, it's just really slow.

It does slow down based on the number of projects and also based on the amount of data that's being pulled in a report. If we are pulling reports, from September, for example, it's pulling nine months of data into a report. Every month goes by it takes that much longer because it's pulling in that much data, especially if we're trying to get time-phased effort.

We have about 500 users and the roles are requesters, project managers, executive users, resource managers, compliance, finance users, and we have our system administrators.

We are using it about 50% of the application's capability and we have plans to increase that by bringing in cost capital. It's basically expenses.

I would rate technical support a six out of ten. Most of the time, if a ticket is open for an issue or we are not able to do something, we're just referenced to go read out into the customer success center without actually getting help from the customer support. Or by the time a solution is provided by customer support, our system administrators have figured out a solution. Our customer support representative that monitors our tickets is really good. He monitors our tickets for us. He follows up on the tickets. I think that that is a good thing to have for all clients. I think clients should have a customer support representative to collaborate on what tickets are open.

Secondly, the reason I gave it a six is because a lot of the things that we bring, that's not an actual error, but has to do with the functionality of the application, we're just told the functionality is not there. No, Enterprise One can't do that or yes, it can, but you have to pay a consultant to set that up for you. Which are things that should be able to be done by an administrator. But again, with the application on the cloud, in the cloud, we are very limited on the flexibility of what a system administrator can do within the application.

Then timeliness of resolution and tickets being routed to the correct team's queue to work on the ticket could be improved. The customer support representatives are great. I think they're as helpful as they can be. But their knowledge of the system in itself has them answer us in a way that say "Just go read about it on the Customer Success Center."

The initial setup was very complex. It was rushed and there wasn't a lot of follow up after the configuration. Our consultant was very knowledgeable, he was very good. But there's only so much he can do in so little time. The configuration was basically the consultants setting everything up with very minimal help or interaction with our administrators, and because the configuration and go-live are so far apart, there was not any followup. To improve after configuration, there should be a series of follow-ups with the system administrators and the product owners, as well as going live, make that available.

The configuration was about six to eight weeks. We had our plan B consultant about that long. But after the system is configurated, we didn't go live until December, because after configuration we also have to take time for the creation of training material to train our end users because it was a completely new system. After configuration, you need a couple of months to just create the training material and provide training and adoption of the application. We were not able to go live until about December because of the time it takes to do the training and adoption of the application. By that time when you go live, you're not really using the system right after configuration until then. There are going to be things that come up that a consultant should still be available for the solution as the company goes live.

We had implementation strategies based on the user role. To start, if you think of end-to-end projects starting with the requester, all the way down to closing the project. The strategy was starting at the initiation of a project and continuously moving in the training, the order, or at the same workflow that a project goes.

The licensing and pricing are a bit high and the flexibility of the licensing is high. I think that the pricing to engage consultants is high. I don't have anything to compare it to other than other applications that I've supported. So there's just not a whole lot of flexibility in our licensing, which makes it very limited to what our requesters can do and different roles in an app.

My advice would be to be more engaged between the system administrators and the consultants during the configuration stages. Also, for Planview to be more transparent about what the system administrators can and cannot do as far as reporting. And then also make sure that there is time for a training plan and a very well-thought-out training plan based on each phase of a project and user role as they are interacting with that project.

The lessons I've learned is the need to ask more questions about how the application works as far as configuring the system and learning more of the limitations of a system administrator so those questions can be asked upfront during configuration.

I would rate Enterprise One an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is resource management. Enterprise One is built for this. We have a specific function that we use it for.

We are going to be leveraging the planning tool within Enterprise One. We had a demo of it. It will be a really good tool for us. It will help us visualize all the projects that we have lined up for the next year, where we can shift things around, and see the impact of different resources being staffed to individual projects.

People are happy using the tool. It has had a good impact on the business. Some people may not like the tracker time sheets, but it is just part of the role.

We are able to see where everyone in the team is in terms of hours, where there is capacity, and where we can actually add them, e.g., other projects that they're not currently staffed to.

It is relatively easy to manage the workflow.

I would like easier ways to manage reporting titles in Planview. A lot of our users like to see things on dashboards, etc. I know there are integrations with Power BI and other applications. But, I would like a little more of an intuitive way for us to manage that.

There are some concerns that I've had on my side from the administrative side and controlling certain things. From talking to some people at this conference, there are certain tricks around these things. It sounds like tomorrow that there will be some sessions on improving that functionality specifically.

The administrative tabs are very confusing, especially in terms of configuring screens and users. It's not very intuitive versus many other applications that I have worked in the past. I have to go to separate sections than I think I have to in order to get to the place that I need to adjust something.

I have used the technical support more on the consulting side of things. There have been no issues there. Everything has been pretty straightforward.

Previously, we were just managing resources in Excel.

While I wasn't part of the integration, it's obviously a lot easier when you have a tool which can manage your resources. It's a lot easier to visualize.

if you need a resource management tool, the tool definitely does that.

We're working on an older version right now, so it is interesting to see how we can upgrade. For example, I am interested in learning more about the cloud.

I would rate it maybe a seven (out of 10). Obviously, there is room for improvement and ways that the tool could be more intuitive for our users. But, we're a very niche use case. What might work better for us, probably wouldn't work better for others.