Planview PPM Pro Reviews

We're mainly using this solution for project management. We are customers of Plainview and I'm a project coordinator. 

The solution is valuable because it gives our executives a high level of understanding of what's going on. I like the portfolio aspect that shows all the projects and the budget and you can see the priorities and whether the project is on track or not. It has good visibility. 

Entering day-to-day tasks is a tedious process for project managers. It needs some improvement. 

The solution is solid and pretty stable. 

The scalability is very good. 

Licensing costs are competitive enough. The price is reasonable given that the solution is geared towards large companies. 

We also evaluated Asana which is not quite as robust as PPM Pro. They're both good products but focus on different things. It's difficult to make a decision between them because each covers one area extensively. If you're involved in a team working in product development at a task level, I prefer Asana. PPM, on the other hand, pulls a lot of information at the project level whereas that is complicated if you're using Asana.

This is a solid solution and I think it's well-designed for the executive level, but there's still work to do when it comes to working with teams.

I rate the solution seven out of 10. 

Our primary use case of this solution is to capture all corporate business demand across the organization then to visualize that demand in a way that can be used by the senior management team to make decisions. We use it to collect a portfolio view of all projects that were in flight and various stages of the delivery lifecycle. We ride risk and issue management capabilities, capturing lessons learned, dependencies, plans, schedules, and resourcing. 

We also use it for:

• The ability to manage and review resource information around availability, demand, and schedules. 
• The ability to report on that information.
• The ability to visualize our portfolios, that is key.
• Finally, we're using that information in order to generate meaningful reports.

PPM Pro has improved my organization through standardization. The big thing for us is that we came from a very immature state of play. Everyone had their own risk and issue management capabilities and their own different impacts for risks. We've been able to standardize that within the program delivery arena. That for us has been a major thing. We're all speaking the same language about the same things and using the same metrics in order to capture statuses.

We are exploring its ability to provide decision-makers with the insight they need to empower decision-making. The big thing for us was just to get our projects moving and delivering. We've historically been through a number of challenges and organizational changes within our area and effectively, Planview has enabled us to get a really good picture of where we currently are. The biggest challenge we had initially was that our executive leadership team didn't know how much change was going on. With Planview, we've been able to capture that and provide the metrics in order to see what they want to do and what needs to be reprioritized. 

PPM Pro has also helped to reduce project delays by 50% in terms of highlighting common issues and risks. We hold monthly project reviews where everything is captured and we go through the project managers to highlight those high-level and high scoring risks and we are then able to take corrective action. The key thing is that we're using it as a tool to help support project managers. We're not using it to beat them up because they're not delivering stuff. It's really a tool to be able to surface those issues that wouldn't necessarily get surfaced.

The most valuable feature is that it's highly configurable. It's a highly configurable solution. We can design and build stuff quite readily ourselves. It's also very flexible. We are also using it to help identify pinch points within the organization. As in, we can identify where people need support and additional help.

PPM Pro has reduced the time it takes to generate reports. That for us is a big thing. Instead of us spending our time doing collation and presentation activities, we're actually doing more value-add activities in terms of analyzing the data and trying to interpret what the data is telling us.

PPM Pro absolutely enables us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle. It enables us to quickly establish and build projects as and when they've moved through the governance lifecycle or parts of the early stages of the governance lifecycle. We're also able to configure the ability to print a standard type of project or program in some of the cases we've started exploring. In terms of the benefits, it's given a visualization to our senior management team of where things are at any particular time and they have the ability to drill down into the detail where necessary or keep it as high level as they need.

It's literally just the click of a button to create a project in PPM Pro. It's a very quick process. The key thing that we have is the governance processes and the approach for capturing enough information. In terms of that, the lifecycle is about two or three weeks, but actually being able to get a project into the system is exceptionally quick. You can build workflows to help support that. We don't use it at the moment, but it has the ability to build workflows.

I would say it's quite straightforward to build a team within a project. It's very easy. It comes back to data and I think it's the same with any PPM tool, the tool is only as good as the data that you've got in there. We did a lot of work initially to make sure that our resources were in place. It's just a case of project managers being able to select who they want on their teams and vice versa. If they're not sure, we also have the ability to set up resources as well and then our resource managers to select people that they want to start based on their availability.

In terms of viewing schedules, I would rate PPM Pro's ability an eight or nine out of ten. It's a very similar interface to Microsoft Project, which I'm sure a lot of project managers are very used to in terms of the details pages. It's a very nice layout in terms of navigation. You can select your ability to view different timeframes and you can view a purely word-based view of your plan. There is the Gantt chart availability as well. It's very easy and quick to switch between the two. You can also drill down into specific details at a task level summary task and you can bulk upload or update tasks. 

At the moment, we don't actually use timesheets or its ability to allocate hours. Integrating and using timesheets is on our roadmap but we don't use it at the moment. From the exposure that I've had in terms of playing around with it, it seems pretty fully functioning and it gives us the information that we want to be able to capture. And then it's how we then suck that information out to then push into our external systems or corporate systems.

We always had a very high number of projects. We have around 30 going at the moment and they're quite significantly sized projects. In terms of the number of projects, I think the biggest challenge we have is getting resources on board in order to manage them. We can certainly capture them and we can identify where the pinch points are. It's just our recruitment process is quite a slow process. In terms of being able to run projects, we can actually identify what we can run based on the constraints that we have at the moment, whether that be financial or resource-based, and we use the information from PPM Pro in order to provide that.

Reporting and dashboards need improvement. They've got the new beta coming out now and I've been playing around with that in our sandbox environment. I'm very impressed with the flexibility and functionality. In fairness, I was speaking to my senior management team and saying that we should go ahead and enable it in our production environment because I think it is actually now in the position where we can start getting it in place. 

Another area for improvement, realistically, is regarding the financials, but it's been addressed as part of Planview's focus. That's one of the things that drew us towards Planview, that they're actively investing in developing the tool and making it best of breed. We can certainly see a lot of new enhancements coming forward that we're going to be taking on board.

We have been using PPM Pro for over two years now. 

I've never seen any issues with stability. 

We've had no issues with scalability. Being a software as a service, the amount of power that we need is determined by the number of licenses that we have.

There are 30 to 40 project managers. We have business partner managers who are the key interface in the business. We also have a number of resource leads. There are around 20 resource leads who are responsible for ensuring that resource demand can be met with the availability of their team members on that side.

Maintenance purely happens in the background. If we're developing new configuration changes, we'll do that ourselves in the sandbox and release it at an appropriate time. It's very minimal impact.

Technical support is excellent. We've had some issues that have been dealt with very efficiently. There's a very quick response time and the consultants themselves are very capable in terms of responding to our questions, not just about tool configuration, but also best practices in the wider industry, specifically for where we work.

We use Microsoft Project and Teams as well as part of this process. It's been a while since I've used the Microsoft Project tool suite. Microsoft Project has a lot of different types of applications to store different types of data within the project. For example, for risks and issues, we'd have to create a team site in SharePoint, for example, whereas in Planview, it's an all in one application. I'm very quick to be able to jump around to individual areas within the system. We're at the very early adoption stage of Teams at the moment. 

There are pros and cons to each. In terms of speed, because it's on-premise, the local application is very quick. The downside with Projects is that it is very difficult to aggregate that data together. With Planview, bearing in mind that software is a service, it has so many opportunities to configure the system and also lock it down as much as you want, as long as you can get that standard configuration. With Microsoft Projects, it's very difficult to get that standard. You'll have people managing projects in the way that they're used to, which then becomes a big issue for us to translate that into the standardized reporting. Whereas with Planview, we can lock that down. We know exactly what our project managers need to enter when they're not entering information that we need and it's just a click of a button to get a report out when we need it.

Before PPM Pro we were using Microsoft Project desktop with Excel PowerPoint. It was a case of 90% of our time was spent collating information and presenting it in PowerPoint rather than actually doing the value-add work, which was to do the analysis on what data is actually telling me.

I was involved all the way from product selection through to delivery and handover. The initial setup was fairly straightforward. As an organization, we had some challenges internally in that we were a brand new department delivering programs. We hadn't really got our processes set outright, but certainly, with the support and help from the Planview consultants who were working with us very closely and regularly meeting on a weekly basis, it was certainly a very straightforward piece. Once you get your head around how things are set up and the different terminology, it is actually quite a straightforward application to enhance yourself in terms of how you want to build it forward.

From the start of actually signing the contract, the deployment took around about three months, to the point where we had the projects in Planview and us actually using it practically.

Our strategy was originally going to be a big bang but we thought that there's only so much change that our project managers can manage. We took a few key elements and the first pieces were to get the demand requests in place so that we could see what demand we've got coming through. Then the next part was getting the projects and programs into Planview, and being able to start reporting on those projects. From there, we then started introducing the resource management side of things. More recently we've been looking at portfolio management and prioritization. Looking into the future, we're talking more about enhancing that portfolio management and demand capability and bringing the two together. That's more of an organizational thing rather than Planview. We've got the basics in there to get us where we need to be.

I wouldn't be able to quantify ROI in terms of the work that we're now focused on. We're doing many more kinds of value-add activities. Rather than having to go around and aggregate information together and then try and report it, we can make those recommendations now. We are also able to highlight those risks and issues before they actually become a true challenge to the company and to the delivery of that project.

The key thing is to really get a good understanding of your stakeholders that are going to actually use it. It's differentiating between those that are going to be physically updating Planview information, versus those that are reading it and then just building your models around how you're going to use it because then you can effectively build your licensing models to support that. In some cases, you can save some money there.

We evaluated Planisware. In terms of maturity, PPM Pro was a much better fit for our organization. It was also highly configurable, so we could do a lot of it ourselves. It gave us the opportunity and a roadmap that as we mature, we can mature with Planview and still maintain our data. Whereas, some of the other tools were coming in right at the top end. Cost-wise, it was certainly one of the better value products that we had assessed the amount of functionality and flexibility that you got with the tool.

My key advice is to standardize your terminology for projects and programs in portfolios; create a roadmap. Don't be afraid to say no, because  you'll get different project managers with different experiences. Everyone will want to say, "Oh yeah, this is what I've done in the past and what I've done in the past," but don't be afraid to say no.

One of the challenges with any PPM tool is that if it's not Microsoft, then people aren't normally interested and I think the other side is that actually by centralizing this stuff, you're exposing weaknesses of project managers that they may not feel comfortable with. Try and position it as this is here to help you and to help us identify where we need to give further support. It's not there to question your ability or capability. It's here to give us that information that we can then help you to deliver.

We spent far too much time aggregating data from many different data sources. Having it in a single central place, we get one version of that truth. Everyone's aligned, everyone's standard and it makes it a lot easier for us in our management team to be able to visualize and view the data that we're capturing.

I would rate PPM Pro a nine out of ten. I think there's still room for improvement but there's a very active roadmap.

We use the solution to help us run a project management office (PMO). 

Planview integrated well into our Agile framework and methodology by adding an Agile process and features. 

The status reporting is the most valuable feature as it's easy to use; it's simple for project managers to enter their information, and the reporting features are very flexible.

Planview PPM enables us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management life cycle. We were able to garner some best practices by using Planview templates, but they are also flexible enough to modify without having to customize the solution. The distinction between ''customize'' and ''configure'' is important here. 

When it comes to viewing projects and timelines, the solution is excellent. The views are easy to access and highly configurable. 

The solution provides managers with the insight they need to empower decision-making and help them manage risk, as it allows them to see when projects are over budget and behind schedule. 

Planview helped to reduce project delays because we can see when they occur and take proactive steps to remedy the situation.  

Additional Agile capabilities, including integration with the Agile development app, would be welcome features.

I've used the solution for around seven years. 

In terms of stability, the solution is powerful, flexible, and highly configurable.

Planview increased the scalability of its product over the years, so it's very scalable now. It used to be an issue, but they've addressed it. Our whole IT department uses the solution.

The technical support is excellent and responsive. Planview has a very active user community that they promote.

Positive

I've used every leading PPM solution, and I was contracted by a client of Planview.

The initial deployment was straightforward, and there was a lot of functionality out of the box. It took three to four months. 

I was the consultant for the deployment. I was the product owner, and I also managed the PMO. 

We have seen an ROI; there's no doubt about that.

My advice is to pay attention to integration opportunities to reduce your licensing cost with Planview. There are additional costs for consulting services and advanced customer support. 

I rate the product nine out of ten. 

Creating a new project using the solution takes five minutes. 

Building a team within a project is flexible using the resource management features as long as the hierarchy is built ahead of time. It's relatively easy.  

The product's task management features are pretty basic and work fine; there's nothing uniquely special about them. They affected our project management process in that we can simultaneously have a single source of truth for all our projects.

Planview's time-tracking abilities are flexible, providing it can easily integrate with the financial system of record or a separate time-tracking solution. The key here is the integration with other systems.

Integration between Microsoft tools is not one of their strengths, though the solution integrates well with MS Teams and not so well with MS Project. I prefer to use Planview versus the MS PPM solution for many reasons, not least because the MS PPM solution requires a lot of customization and doesn't have many out-of-the-box features.

The biggest lesson I learned using the solution is that it would be a good idea to reach out to Planview's R&D department to coordinate planning with their future releases.

We use PPM Pro mainly for resource tracking and project/program management at present. Resources are tracked from the time of joining in Organization/Division until they exit. Projects are getting tracked from the conceptual phase until completion. Projects are tracked and managed through the gate mechanism. In addition to the project information, we also capture resource staffing, health, risks, status, and project stages; all of this gets updated periodically. We also use it for certain aspects of financial details from a project management aspect.

Eventually, it is supposed to become a one-stop-shop or a source of data for project information. That is what we are aiming to achieve.

Project Management requirements evolve based on how the project data is getting utilized. PPM Pro is getting updated continuously for such requirements. Through such changes, PPM Pro has evolved in my organization over a period of time.

Our stakeholders evaluate project information from PPM Pro periodically. Stakeholder's need for capturing additional data or information processing is also continuously evolving. When it is observed that additional project information would be useful for decision making, it will get added to PPM Pro. Or sometimes, the processed data will be useful to get a summarized view, we achieve this through calculated fields.

It is slowly evolving that way. The way the system is able to capture all this information is really impressive.

The project entity in PPM Pro gives a lot of options for us to capture information, manage, and control it in a very detail-oriented way.

The timesheet management features give us visibility to the overall capacity planning and how much actual effort is going into the programs monthly. The risk and project status information gives a helping hand for stakeholders to understand how the programs are progressing. We have only explored a portion of it so far. The other features that we are exploring right now are the what-if features that seem to be helpful for future planning and project program management. We are aiming to get that rolled out as quickly as possible.

PPM Pro enables us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle. This includes many factors like fields used in a particular type of project, information captured in selected fields, tasks, attachments, dashboard links, calendars, risks, roles, team members and staffing information, etc.

When a project is running, there are several aspects of this that come into the picture. Gate structure, task structure, resources, roles, and settings etc. Also, the information we capture varies from project to project. When a project is completed, if we see that something is a potential candidate to be converted as a template, we extract the necessary information/setting from the existing project and create that as a template asset, so that in future, projects can be created based on that template. Multiple templates can be taken from one project. It takes hardly a minute and a half, maximum, to create a project in PPM Pro with the system defined mandatory fields. When it comes to a project, each customer will have a set of requirements (mandatory fields) in terms of what they need to capture for it.

Building a team is tricky. There are two ways I look at the team in a project. One is based on the staffing aspect; another one is just as a team. For building a team, if it is just a team grouping into a program, it is very simple and straight forward. You can add the members directly into the team. But if it is a staffing-based team, it is a bit complex because we deal with the role demand as well as resource planning. So, we need to plan it out first before it goes into the system at present.

In terms of PPM Pro’s task management features, we have not created any complex structures yet, but recently we have identified that it is more suitable in terms of complex structure management. And also helps to roll-up the information from tasks to project to Program to BU level. As of now, we only use around 50% of the potential from a task status. The structure we currently have is very straightforward and simple from a task point of view. It is possible to capture a lot of details in the task structure. It is really impressive that task structure can capture that kind of detail.

The time-tracking abilities like timesheets and allocation of hours are good. It is efficient and practical. PPM Pro gives a comprehensive insight into projects and empowers project/program managers to make informed decisions. We create reports and dashboards in PPM Pro that show the overall status and progress of each Business Unit with the details of projects with required KPIs. Please note that these KPIs will differ based on requirements from each BU/Customer.

Stakeholders also get a view of the timesheets at a high-level and are also able to drill down to the necessary details. This helps them to see whether the team is spending more or less time compared to the original plan and they can revise the planning, which will become more efficient for further project execution. We have set a platform for stakeholders in the system with dashboards and reports based on the KPIs needed for them to evaluate. This helps them to make decisions and also helps us to improve the system to get more out of it.

If you had asked this question a year ago, I would have pointed to the reports and dashboards. We had to create a lot of reports and dashboards outside the system (like Power BI). Planview is launching the new reporting and dashboards now, which is supposed to give us better results compared to what we have now.

The calculated field section has a lot of room for improvement. There are a lot of formulas and functions available to make calculated fields but are still not comprehensive. We do a lot of processing of the data in PPM Pro through these calculated fields to represent them in reports/dashboards. It is much easier to do such calculations in excel/Power BI. That kind of flexibility or gap is still there in the calculation field aspect because we cannot create that kind of structure in the system at this point. That is a key area for improvement. 

PPM Pro has not helped to reduce project delays directly, but it has helped us improve decision-making. If hundred-plus programs or projects are running simultaneously, there could be multiple reasons why the projects are getting delayed. It could be either because of improper planning/improper fund management/lack of risk prioritization. The system allows stakeholders to make an informative decision, to see that we are putting the people in the right place or if we have too many efforts going in the wrong direction. Or to give priority/attention to the right program. That is how the decisions are taken to pause/accelerate a program. This way, stakeholders are given the right amount of information to make decisions at the right time and thus helping to reduce project delay. Thus, the decision-making process becomes more efficient.

PPM Pro was implemented in my company around four to five years ago. We are still learning and getting more familiarized with the system as we go further along.

It is 90% stable. At times, we have seen that some of the releases break some of the existing functioning features. We had problems with some of the reports and dashboards, and another issue was that people were suddenly unable to log in. 90% of the time it works fine, it is available. Performance-wise it is really good compared to the data it is holding at this point.

It is really scalable. The kind of information that was getting captured and the level of projects have significantly improved as of today. Scalability is not a challenge, but there is a catch. There is a limit in terms of how many fields you can introduce to the system on an entity, the more you add it may affect the system performance. This will be one challenge when multiple BUs shares the same implementation instance. If you have many fields coming into the PPM Pro, it tends to slow down. Any team that is implementing more user-defined fields, it is better to ensure that it is analyzed thoroughly and does not have many junk fields. 

We have a team responsible for maintaining this application in good shape. This team has representatives from each division. We also have an IT department to gives us advice in terms of IT aspects. Every division's requirements are different; so, we come together as a team to share inputs and take a collective decision for a system-level change.

PPM Pro has a 60% adoption rate as present in my division. We do have plans to increase usage. There are multiple types of projects we are running in our company. The R&D team uses PPM Pro for project management. It is slowly growing to adapt all the views into the system for R&D projects. And slowly other groups are also coming into the system, like the operations team. PPM Pro's horizon is slowly expanding here.

The decision to move to PPM Pro was done a long time back (before my time in the company). I am sure that stakeholders would have evaluated many options before they took a call to use PPM Pro.

I have used Microsoft Project for project management in the past. Though MS Project helps to capture tasks, it does not have an extensive capability to hold timesheets and to capture project/product information. PPM Pro is way beyond on that aspect from what we have in Microsoft Project.

During the horizon event, Planview introduced the collaborative environment and Coffee Break area for the brainstorming aspect. This is something we use in different platforms currently (like MS Teams). I believe that such features will enhance the adaptability and improve the acceptance of PPM Pro for more stakeholders/users.

We are seeing the ROI of PPM Pro as it is helping us to manage the projects/programs effectively. This is the reason we are continuing with this application. It is not a direct monetary return, but it enables the business decision-makers to make a call based on reliable information on a day-to-day aspect. That gives a lot more value and it has a large impact. So, if a decision-maker has been given the appropriate information on where each program stands and what the upcoming challenges are, etc. With this information, stakeholders can decide whether they want to stop the program, continue it, if they want to invest more into it, or cut down from it. It is an indirect enabling system that enables the business decision-makers to make a call and then commit to it.

Pricing is on the higher end. But, when you look at the system's robustness, continuous support, and its dependability, I think it is worth the price we are paying.

When we look at the budget, people, or administrative structure that we have in the system, it is too big for a single person to chew from a system administration point of view. If a system like this one is getting implemented, you need to have a workforce to manage it. Do a detailed analysis before you jump into any functionality implementation aspect because there are several underlying aspects that need to be evaluated thoroughly before a particular feature gets updated or rolled out. Once we start using a feature, it is difficult to go back and change.

I would rate PPM Pro an eight out of ten.

It is primarily to manage IT projects. The focus right now is spent on timekeeping in IT, seeing the value-add for the IT department in the projects that they deliver to the law firm.

It's primarily me for the planning side of it.

It has improved our organization because the one thing that we never had before was a single picture of all our IT projects going on. Each group within IT, like operations and knowledge management systems, all had their own list of projects. Now, for the first time, we can deliver to our organization a consolidated list of what we're working on. The portfolio management has been outstanding for us.

I feel like the pace of project delivery hasn't changed much, but being able to explain where we are and the status of our projects has definitely improved since the IT department is delivering projects for a number of other business units within the firm. Primarily, this has been only used within IT at this point. We want to prove the platform, then see where we can push it into the organization further.

It is flexible, because so far we haven't been able to figure out anything that it cannot do. It's highly configurable. We've added custom field design screens to fit our needs, develop reports, and dashboards that give us the ability to deliver much better information, especially to senior IT management.

Connecting funding and strategic outcomes with work execution is a challenge right now for us. Part of what we are facing is we have a couple of drivers of where projects are coming from. One of them is our innovation group. They are just sort of tangentially using PPM Pro for recording the status of projects and not really planning them within there. We need a stronger link between our current financial reporting system and Planview PPM Pro, so we can start to more easily record our external costs in the tool.

There may be Planview products that already fill this niche. I would like a better collaboration platform with a better view at the individual level of, "What do I have to do today?" Some of the Kanban card tools and things like that are definitely next in line for us.

It has more of a classic UI instead of a more modern looking user interface. Especially IT guys are like, "How come I can't just drag my tasks from one column to another column?" We're just using PPM Pro and some of the other products may carry this. We are at Horizons to take a look at Planview's other stuff.

It has been very stable.

The tool can growth with us.

We've only had a few instances where we contacted technical support. The experience has been excellent.

We were using a blend of products. We're using a Microsoft Project, Microsoft Planner, and Microsoft Teams. There was nothing that tied them altogether. We looked at trying to implement some integration tools. They worked, but you're on your own with trying to keep that all running.

So, instead of managing our project portfolio, we are managing the process. This is a much better tool for that.

I thought the setup was quite straightforward. We worked on the implementation for three to four months. One thing that was very challenging is we are really new to project management in the organization. This was not only just putting in a platform to manage projects, it was sort of instilling project management principles throughout the organization. Our implementation manager helped with a lot of those questions too.

We tried other tools, like Microsoft Project, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Planner. What I like about PPM Pro is it puts all of those tools together into one integrated platform. So, you have a good overview of what is going on in the project space of your organization.

It is a solid eight out of 10. 

We do not use PPM Pro with Projectplace.

We use it for project portfolio management in the organization.

We are using the latest version.

We're still finalizing our implementation, but our hope is that it can prove our prioritization process and strategic decision-making.

We are expecting it to connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. For example, we are looking at planned cost versus actual cost holistically for our portfolio projects. That is the objective. We're at a place where we can finally start seeing that, and it's a good thing.

While we are still in the implementation process, the biggest impact has definitely been the visibility into time tracking, demand, and capacity planning.

• Time tracking
• Portfolio management reporting
• What-if analysis

These features create visibility into project planning, resource capacity, and demand planning.

The solution is reasonably flexible. We can do all sorts of customization. We can tailor it to TradeStation.

When I say the solution is moderately flexible, it's really that it takes time to configure out-of-the-box. It takes some work to implement.

Some of the visualization on the reports should be a bit more modernized. I know with the newer reporting module, this might be better. Just a bit more intuitive reporting would be great.

I would like improved integration between PPM Pro, Projectplace, and LeanKit.

It's been very stable to date.

It's definitely scalable. There are a lot of opportunities to customize. It's just how you implement it. That's why we think we have to use LeanKit, because of the agile integration, which is why we're here attending the conference.

The technical support has been good to date.

We use JIRA, but we have had some challenges with using that. That's why we had to implement Planview PPM Pro.

I have a background in implementing PPM solutions and building PMOs. The company knew that we needed a visualization tool to streamline our processes. 

The initial setup was a little complex. There is so much to customize. It'd be good to have some templates out-of-the-box.

We used a Planview consultant for the initial deployment who has been excellent.

Because we're still in the implementation phase, ROI is not at a 100 percent.

We have their Flex plan.

We did due diligence on a multitude of companies that offer solutions, then we narrowed it down to Planview and moved forward with it.

We evaluated six different firms, including CA Clarity, KeyedIn, and Microsoft Project Server. 

The Planview customer service and sales were excellent. Support was really good. We've been very happy with it to date. 

There were other solutions were a bit more cutting edge, but Plainview was more robust. We could actually build it out as we needed, e.g., the visualization, reporting, and integration.

CA Clarity has the Jaspersoft integration for reporting. Its ability to have plugins and integrate is a bit better, but we love the stability and growth potential of the Planview product.

Make sure you do good due diligence on LeanKit and the integration with JIRA. That is something that we didn't look into as much, even though it's part of our offering, and we need to understand it now better.

Projectplace is good for visualization and collaboration. It's a little tricky with how it syncs between the two. However, our plan is to have Projectplace for more of our collaboration space and PPM Pro do more of our reporting. We are looking to implement Projectplace in LinkedIn.

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

We use PPM Pro within our IT department to manage enhancement requests that are small, medium, and large.

Our request process for how our users request enhancements from IT has been the driver for us. We have a lot of people coming in to request enhancements who are using Planview and we customize those fields as we see fit. For example, if you're in a pandemic, you need to track different things on those requests. It's easy to add those fields to build a report on those fields which has been a nice feature for us.

PPM Pro provides managers the insight they need to empower decision-making. The data is always in the tool. It's just making sure people are using it correctly. We track the requests as they come in. We track our demand by each of our teams within IT and then estimate that effort so that we can see if we are getting a lot of requests to certain teams. We check the demand versus capacity as those items come in. Then as we plan out the coming year, we're doing a lot of that demand versus capacity and also looking back at historical data. We check how many hours it took us the last time we did something similar. That's where the tool has been helpful for us.

It has also helped us to reduce project delays. I wasn't here before the tool. When I came on, the tool had already been in place, but I think our utilization of the tool has changed a bit. I think it will be changing again based on the enhancements that are coming out as well. Overall, we've seen some improvement and I think we'll see more.

I really enjoy how easy it is to get to data in the system like when doing searches with custom filters. EasyBuild reports are one of the best features, it gets what people want to look for.

We have several templates that we use in the system depending on the type of projects that we have. That really quickens the pace of getting tasks set up for a project.

It only takes minutes to set up a project in PPM Pro. We use the templates and then just put in the details for it, so it doesn't take too long to set it up.

The process for building teams within a project goes pretty smoothly. I find it pretty easy to use. You can build your team at different levels, either at the overall project level or by building it up through the task level. It has good flexibility.

This flexibility really does help our project management process because every project is unique and we have different kinds of project processes or techniques that we use and the way we structure the project may be different. It's nice to have that flexibility in the tool to be able to handle that.

Overall, its time-tracking abilities are good. One of the things we've looked at is potentially Projectplace to help out our users with their timesheets. It would be nice to be able to track more while we're in the work rather than having to go to a separate timesheet. From a timesheet perspective, it works fine.

PPM Pro is good for viewing projects and timelines. Some of the items that they're working on will make that even better and I know those are hopefully coming out in the near future. The whole timeline view and the ability to select and show what you want to have on a timeline will be a really nice visual component for showing a project.

Reporting and dashboards need improvement. I know they're doing a major revamp of that. We're really looking forward to that because that's something that is really being requested by our customers to give them better visibility, reporting, and dashboards that are easier to understand. 

They're looking at moving the spreadsheet editor into other areas of the system. Those have been key updates. They're not available on all the screens yet and all the locations of the system but that will be a nice add-on when they get that because we can have one screen, but when we go to the next screen, that won't have the same editor.

It hasn't increased the number of projects in our organization because that's more based on the demand of our customers internally, rather than the tool. It really hasn't changed our throughput overall with projects.

I have been using PPM Pro for over four years. 

Overall, we've had very few reportable issues on PPM Pro so we've only had to submit a few tickets. I usually submit the tickets within Planview, so I know personally that we've only had to submit a few over the last couple of years and that speaks to the stability quite a bit.

It's definitely very scalable. We've seen growth in our business. I know we've seen a lot more users using it for requests. As our governance structure has changed over the last couple of years, we've used it quite differently and scaled it to a lot of different users and a lot of different uses. It's done just fine.

We have our request users who are submitting requests for enhancement-type items. There are over 6,000 request users. Then for full users, these would be folks who are doing more than just requests, they might be tracking time, working in this system, providing updates, or doing approvals. For those types of things, we have over 250 users.

For maintenance, we have several of our project managers, including myself, that are administrators of the system.

PPM Pro is being used quite broadly in our IT department and for requests coming into our IT department. We use it for all of our enhancements as well as projects. It has a 100% adoption rate. We have to use it. That is our IT tool for tracking time and handling new requests. We use it all the time with IT.

What we've used of their technical support has been good. We hit some technical issues with an API that we utilize and we got the right people on the phone with us to work through it and get it resolved. Overall, we've had a good experience with their technical support.

I've used MS Project at previous employers. Compared to Microsoft Project, PPM Pro is quite a bit different. We used Project previously just as a standalone to build a project, put in our tasks, do our work breakdown structure, and that was it. We didn't use it for a server or enterprise base where we did any capacity, demand planning, or intake like we did in PPM Pro. We do enjoy that functionality, that there's a lot more going on in PPM Pro and a lot more use cases that we can use it for. It's served us well, and we're looking forward to seeing what else we can do with it.

I was not involved in our initial setup. We are moving to the new request process, which is a pretty major revamp for us and I am involved in that. That work is currently underway.

For the revamp, we have a lot of historical data and custom fields in the system, so there's a little bit more thought process we have to do around what we set up in the new request process and then how we migrate or what data we migrate over to that new process. And then also communicating that out to our request users, which we have a couple of thousand of, and making sure that they're aware of the updates that we're doing to it. I'd say it's a little bit complex just moving into the revamp, but I think overall the help we've gotten from Planview has been really helpful in mitigating some of that.

I'm really not familiar with the pricing structure that we have. We do like the fact that we have all those requests users for the licensing. Our default for our users across the enterprise is to set them up as request users so that anybody can submit a request to IT. The fact that those requests users are a free license is definitely a key item for us.

My advice would be to have multiple administrators involved in your teams. Learn about the capabilities of the tools so you use it to its fullest. Involve other areas in developing those processes and procedures around it so you can get buy-in and utilization.

Solutions always have a lot of capability. It's really how you use the solution and then how you show the value to the main users of the solution as well, so that they have that buy-in and that they're not working around the system, but rather working in the system. That gives you the best data for tracking, and it gives you the best utilization and reporting capability across the board if you have that buy-in and utilization.

I would rate PPM Pro an eight out of ten. 

The primary use case is resource demand capacity planning.

It has helped us make good decisions in terms of what projects to take or how to prioritize projects when we have multiple directors from the business or product. It has definitely helped us prioritize and work on our critical things.

The biggest impact from Planview has been prioritization, planning, and taking on the right things.

I like the resource demand capacity planning module. I don't think we are using it to the fullest potential yet. There is a lot more benefit that we can get if we use it right. I have seen the dial features, which are quick. There are capabilities within the tool that give it a quick read on how the teams are loaded, and we still haven't used them to that extent.

Day-to-day, once we understand what to do, it's very easy to use it.

We don't use their existing dashboard functionality. Hopefully, with the new reporting release that is coming out in November, we will be able to evaluate as to how we can leverage that. What I hear, "Everyone has either a Tableau or something else because Planview doesn't provide a dashboard." We should not need to use another tool. Planview has the data, so it should be able to give us what we want. This would also reduce costs since we are paying licenses for those tools too.

It is definitely stable. I haven't seen any major issues.

We haven't had scalability issues too because we don't have that many entries in regards to performance and scalability testing so far. 

We have had both ups and downs with the support. We have been with Planview for three years. We have the new department that is just implementing Planview. They have been complaining about the support that Planview has provided for them with respect to their implementation. So far, our department hasn't ran into any issues. That's why there have been both ups and downs.

It was pretty straightforward. There is a lot of work to do in terms of setting it up the first time, but once setup, it runs smoothly.

We are implementing Planview for another department right now.

While it has been helpful, we are not taking advantage of the tool as much as we should be.

I was talking to the Planview Chief Marketing Officer earlier about trying to see if there were opportunities where we could pilot this, even if that means getting some licenses that we can use to pilot and show the value before we actually purchase those licenses.

The top contender was CA Clarity versus Planview. We went with Planview because Planview had a lot more flexibility than Clarity. 

Most of the attributes are configurable. We can change it to our own needs, which I didn't see with some of the other tools that I evaluated before starting Planview.

I would rate it at somewhere around a seven out of 10. We haven't used some of the functionalities, so that is where I'm not going too low on the rating. It definitely serves the purpose of what we wanted it to do in terms of resource demand capacity. However, we are still not able to use the dashboard, which we will get onboard. Now, within my team, I have 18 project managers creating dashboards every week. That's almost 18 hours per week, then multiply that by a number of weeks. That's where I am reducing the rating for Planview right now. I'm hoping that will change with the dashboard release. We'll wait to see.

We don't use Planview for strategy planning. We could use the tool a lot more, and that's my takeaway from the Horizons conference too. We still use a lot of spreadsheets because it's all in people's mind. We haven't had the leadership buy-in to use the tool to support us.

We don't use PPM Pro with Projectplace.