Planview Portfolios Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

Our primary use case is to provide an overview of the status of multiple programs and projects. We're doing many programs and projects at the same time and this is a way to provide a consistent way of reporting on their status and progress.

We're still in an early stage. Things will change as we use it more. I did program reports that are important and that will provide us with value.

I think that the user interface needs some getting used to. It's not immediately intuitive. That's potentially room for improvement. I think also that an organization needs to have good support from some senior management to get something like Planview established. If that's missing, then it's not so easy to get support for it in the organization. If I was to talk about a feature or something for improvement, I think it would be the user interface and, in particular, the link between strategy and work.

We started using Planview in November of last year. 

We haven't experienced any issues with scalability or stability. So far, the application seems very stable and scalable. But we're not using it for 5,000 users at the same time. We're more like a couple of hundred.

We worked with Planview consultants to configure Planview to the organization's needs. So, if there's something that is important that the customer, namely ourselves, understand what we want so we can help Planview to configure it well. Investing in knowledge before starting is quite important.

I suspect it's perhaps a bit more expensive than some other competitors, but I wasn't involved in the competitive bid. My job was to implement what we had bought. I don't have comparison prices.

I would rate Planview a seven out of ten. 

In the next release, I would like to potentially see better integration between the strategy and the work aspects of Planview, so that you can report across them better. I think it's also quite early to say. We need to use it for several months to get a better feeling for that.

The interface has to do with the fact that it takes some time for new people to understand the tool. I don't think it's too bad myself, but, potentially, they could make it even better. More intuitive. In the first instance, the user interface requires some familiarization. It takes a while to get familiar with it. It could be improved.

We have used Troux every day over the last three years. 

The portfolio and technology management are well built, however the lack of templates harden the initial learning curve.

Visualization and reporting areas could use improvements by having canned reports.

Its support to legacy paying customers is something PlanView is not handling well. We were unable to implement due to lack of professional support by PlanView. 

The layout of objects can be easily modified and customized based on the meta model requirements or user needs.

It's used as the source of record for the application portfolio so it allows information about applications to be linked to functions or projects giving a better picture of its impact.

Allowing users to have a link that opens a specific sub-tab or folder is a challenge. You can deep link to objects but it won't show the object in the context of the frame.

3 years

We didn't have any issues with stability.

We didn't have any issues with scalability

7 out of 10

7 out of 10

Troux has an easily extensible meta model and UI which other tools don't have.

We implemented it through a Vendor and they were excellent.

Not sure since I don't deal with the contract.

Not sure since I don't deal with the contract

I didn't personally but other options exist for EA repositories like Mega, Enterprise Elements, Adaptive

EA portfolio management is only as good as the data and people driving it. If the data is bad then a tool can't fix the issues or address the business needs. If there is no buy in from stakeholders a repository won't be of much use.

The most valuable features are the resource planning and tracking.

Project planning: The work plan is a bit kludgy and difficult to use. It does not work like MS Project which irritates a lot of PMs. The learning curve is pretty steep - this is a robust application with a LOT of moving parts - and most users do not have the time, or inclination, to dig in and learn it while in the middle of managing a project.

I have used it for 15 months.

We only encountered deployment issues in the user up-take area.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is hit and miss. GREAT front-end c/s; not so great once you're up and running. They have a difficult time determining, as do new customers, if an issue is a system error or knowledge gap. Most of their support team will not respond to requests for real-time conversations and the gap in email responses drags what turn out to be simple solutions into days-long aggravations.

They have a huge number of articles, videos, and documentation which they constantly refer users to. The amount of time that is taken researching an issue which would take a minimal amount of time for a support team member to answer is staggering.

I rate technical support the same as customer service.

We previously used Excel spreadsheets and MS Project plans, and everyone used them differently. There was no systematic shared approach to project management or resources. Most of these docs were not shared, which made any sort of accurate, or even best-guess, projections nearly impossible and extremely time-consuming.

Initial setup seemed straightforward but was relatively complex. As I've mentioned elsewhere - the system has a lot of moving parts. Additionally, their terminology is different from other mainstream tools.

A combined in-house/vendor team implemented it. The vendor team was excellent!