Planview Portfolios Reviews

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 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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.