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

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

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. 

We implemented Planview in 2014. We hope to upgrade next fiscal year.

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.

Public Cloud

Other

We use it for project and program management.

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

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

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

I find these features valuable because of their visibility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Public Cloud

Other

We use it a lot for managing project resources. We do a lot of research and project management with it.

I personally haven't improved that much yet using the tool, but I see how there's a lot of value in it. We even started doing proactive resource management. The way the data is presented in Planview, there are a lot of ways to take it and mold it for use within the business.

I like is how customizable it can get and how detailed some of the data you can get out of it can be. A lot of the basic reports come through it. I am a resource manager, so I slice it to see things like time sheet completion, compliance, etc. It's really useful to dig into some of the reasons why people aren't compliant.

I have been using the product for three months.

It's mostly reliable. There are some issues with how long it takes to load the data to Planview, It just depends on what your setup is. If there was a way Planview could maybe make the loading faster, in case you do have a lot of things going on with your setup.

Whenever we have issues, there is always someone ready to help us. Their people are knowledgeable and responsive. They get to tickets quickly. Just three or four weeks ago, we were having issues with getting data into Planview. We submitted a ticket and the turnaround was probably 45 minutes to get a response.

A lot of our internal training came from Planview support. They were Planview videos from Planview.

I would recommend the product. There is a bit of a learning curve with it, as with any type of new software. Once you get a good grasp of the principles of Planview, it is a really powerful tool.

I would rate the product an eight (out of 10). It's pretty good. It gets a lot of what we need done. There are ways for it to improve, and we should always strive for that.

We use it for its intended purpose of project management. It is a typical PPM tool.

I don't think we're trying to do anything with it outside the norm that would need it to flex a whole lot. Our intent is to roll it out pretty much out-of-the-box.

This is a platform shift. If it works as advertised, it will potentially make us a bit more efficient.

The reporting looks pretty good. Although, we're not into it yet, so I can't say for sure how well that will work.

The look and feel of it is pretty clean, so that's good.

Our version is definitely set up a bit more waterfall world. It would be better if some of the agile features were more in the standard product.

We are really not that far into testing yet. We're not going live until the beginning of the year.

It doesn't look buggy based on what I have seen so far.

We're not live yet, so I can't speak to post go-live technical support.

The initial setup has been pretty straightforward. The deployment process has taken us four to five months so far. We are hoping to wrap up by year-end.

The implementation team has been good and responsive. They have been onsite quite a bit.

I don't think we have necessarily purchased everything that I would have liked to have seen.

We looked at other products, but I wasn't involved in the process of choosing Planview.

Compared to other tools, Enterprise One is definitely cleaner and easier to use. At least, that is the way it looks so far. It's a little more intuitive. It looks like the financial data entry piece is a little cleaner.

Because we didn't buy everything that I would have liked to have seen us buy. Just based on what we have, it's probably in the seven to eight range (out of 10). Some of the agile functionality and features would definitely bump that up a bit. However, we didn't buy everything.

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.

The team has been using it since the beginning of the year, about nine to 10 months.

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.

It's our primary PPM tool. All of the projects across the enterprise are being managed through Enterprise One.

We've been on version 13 for two years now. Prior to that, we were on earlier versions of Planview going back to 2009. So, we've been on Planview for 10 years. 

We have the flexibility to choose not to use things that would be really beneficial. Unfortunately, my predecessors made that choice, multiple times, so I'm trying to undo that.

One of the things that I hope to do, because we have to upgrade soon, is spend time putting together the business benefits of using some modules and pieces of the tool that we don't currently use.

We have a fairly good picture of time tracking. So, it's helping us get there.

As a user, I really liked the ease of the status reporting and the one stop shop of everything being in one location. 

There's still a lot of reluctance within the organization. We're not using all of the capabilities that we have today. We're still doing our strategic and capital investment planning on spreadsheets rather than using the capabilities that exist within Enterprise One. I definitely need to leverage the experts here at Planview to help drive a culture change. There's just a lot of reluctance on behalf of people within the company to put data into the tool.

We have some transparency in where people are spending their time, but we haven't done a good job of resource management in the sense of predicting demand. We have a lot of opportunity there to improve.

I have been using it since the start. It is only in the last year that I have been involved in managing the application.

It is stable.

It is scalable. It should growth with us.

To the degree that we've needed it, the solution has been very helpful. 

Part of the struggle that we've had over the past year has been a 100 percent turnover on our team. Everyone on the Planview admin team today has been in the job for less than two years. So, we don't have the depth and breadth of knowledge and experience as an admin on the tool that other companies have. We're still learning. We don't know what we don't know.

It has been a struggle to make even simple changes because we have to go through statements of work to get the assistance that we need along with all of the legal hurdles and financial issues that those involve.

We were previously using PAC. The move away from PAC to Planview was based on our ownership by Royal Bank of Scotland at the time. They were using Planview, so we moved to Planview.

Our prior PPM tool was a little clunkier and harder to navigate. So, ease of use has been a strong suit here. But as we now look to expand and start using some of the other tools that Planview provides. the integration of the suite is going to be a strong sell point for us.

The last version upgrade that we did from 10 to 13 was complex because we were moving to a cloud platform from a locally hosted platforms. So, there were all of those issues. There was a significant amount of testing. However, we also had an organizational change, which changed the management of the group which was doing that application enhancement. Therefore, we had that complexity. Now that we're on the cloud, it should be pretty straightforward.

We have seen time saved but I can't quantify it.

I would rate the product as an eight (out of 10). This is based really on what I've learned the product can do, not on how we're using it.

Private Cloud