Planview PPM Pro Reviews

I'm with the Wake County government and PPM Pro is our project portfolio and application portfolio management tool that is used enterprise-wide throughout the County.

Wake County government recently received a second place in the Center for Digital Government award. A lot of the information that was provided during the application process was an easy export from our system. We were able to provide lots of very valuable and invaluable data with a couple of clicks.

PPM Pro provides our managers with the insights they need to empower decision-making. I don't think it's utilized enough. We make the information available and give access to those that need it. They've seen the benefit of the system. But I don't think it's utilized to its capabilities.

It has also helped us to reduce project delays by 50%. A little over a year ago, we implemented a new process for us whereby we no longer change dates within the system. We put in more processes in place for baseline tracking and held project managers and teams accountable. We've seen more accurate estimating and projects when they do miss their deadlines, we have substantiated reasoning behind that.

We're staying at an even rate with the number of projects. The projects that we do are based on the board of commissioners, elected officials, and revenues within the County. When revenues are down, the number of projects are down. So, we can't really put the two together like a private industry would.

Just about everything about the solution is valuable. I can't pinpoint one specific thing. The tool has helped us mature as an agency, has taught us to collect better data and the benefits of having good data.

It enables us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle. We utilize many different types of templates from intake forms to review processes, to standard status reporting. There are very different use cases. It's streamlined the project management process. My group is not an official PMO. We're referred to as solutions development. We are the project managers and business analysts for the organization and so, it has helped us to understand the work where it's coming from and how to organize it. It also makes the necessary information available to our higher-ups within the organization.

It only takes a few minutes, depending on availability, to create a new project. We use a standardized template to collect the information. The project request initiator fills out a short form through automation within the system and the approvers are notified. They go through the process of determining whether the project will be added to the portfolio or not. And if it's approved through workflow automation, the requester is notified. It gets added to a series of reports which get updated on a weekly and monthly basis.

It's always been an easy process to build a team within a project. The users are familiar with the system. It's not like we have to do training every time a new project is spun up. It's pretty intuitive. There is not a lot of hand-holding necessary. The tool gives us what we need and we get what we need out of it.

The task management features are very robust within the system and the other platforms like Projectplace, for example, offer more variety for task tracking and task responsibility and so forth. We don't really utilize the system from that perspective for tracking at the PPM Pro level. We use that more as high-level portfolio management.

It's very good for viewing projects and timelines. The reporting is getting better. It was good before but now, with all of the new improvements to reporting and dashboards, it's improved quite a bit.

Integrations need improvement. We have the ability now with the FLEX licensing to take advantage of the different applications. But if you want them integrated there's a really large cost associated with that. The integration should be included in the cost per license. We shouldn't have to pay these really high fees to get the systems to talk together.

We've been with Planview before it was Planview so we were actually originally Innotas customers. We originally implemented in 2015.

It's very stable. We've had less than a handful of issues over the years with the system, as far as uptime. Whenever we've run into a problem, customer support has always been right there for us.

I definitely believe that it's scalable. Just listening to where they're going and their ideation is exciting. 

We have 53 licensed users currently and they range from a project manager to system administrators, to stakeholders and senior-level management.

There is a staff of two for the deployment and maintenance: myself and one other. We are portfolio managers.

PPM Pro is primarily utilized in the IT department but we do have representation in most of the departments, not all of the departments. There is at least one licensed user per department.

Technical support is on top of things. They really know the system and we've stumped them a few times over the years. It's taken a little bit of time for them to research things and get back to us. But for the most part, we feel like we're given adequate support.

I have used other Microsoft solutions. I don't think they're on the same playing level. I see Microsoft Project as a heavy tool when it comes to project management. I think Planner has similar features to Projectplace and it's the same thing with Teams. Teams has the functionality for the cross-collaboration and they integrate seamlessly because they're all Microsoft tools. With Microsoft, you have one license and you're integrated with all of those things. You don't have to pay a fee to integrate one tool to the next. It would be nice if Planview did the same thing.

I don't think we could do what we do with Planview with Microsoft. We've tried. Planview has more functionality within one application than multiple applications in the Microsoft world. You can do everything in one place, which is a benefit for us, speaking from our experience, not having to go from Excel to SharePoint, to Planner, to Project. Having to do all these functions in different applications rather than having it all in one place is the key benefit.

We started out when it was Innotas and I would say that the setup was very complex because we built the system from the ground up. It wasn't what it's like today. We've heard from newer customers that it's a lot easier today than it was before. When the company was switched, it was like relearning it all over again. We implemented a system and then we had to relearn it 14 months later.

The deployment was started in November and we were live in February so it took about four months.

Our deployment strategy was to take baby steps. We bit off small increments. We started with creating the project portfolio and then, once we got that up and running, we focused on the application portfolio. 

We didn't use a consultant for the deployment, we did it ourselves.

We've seen the benefit. We've put a lot of work and a lot of effort into cleaning up the data, maximizing the functionality and we've seen the benefit. Our executive management has seen the benefit. It would be easy to jump ship and go to another product but we have that background. We've made relationships with the company. We know everybody on a first-name basis. They support us and they're willing to work with us. The main reason why we stay is because we get that support and we feel cared for. The only area that I wish that we could come to a better understanding is with the pricing,

PPM Pro is pricey. We've been with the company for a long time and the main thing is that if you're a government agency like we are, funding is an issue. If we want to expand this on a larger scale, they really need to come up with a pricing model that will benefit us, as customers. We can't afford 200 licenses. We have to really think about how we expand when we purchase new licenses because of that price point. It's constantly increasing and we have to think about how we can expand it and roll it out to the enterprise on a yearly basis.

We also looked at Captivate, Adaptive, and Innotas. At the time we were very immature in the capability and maturity that Gartner put out there. That's where we started. Those tools were for very mature project and portfolio management offices. We were just beginning and we were looking for a tool that would grow with us. That's why we chose Innotas at the time because it gave us that flexibility. 

We had a homegrown tool in the past that crashed and burned. The reasoning behind that was due to the fact that the users were given too much upfront. It just became one more thing that they had to do. We took a different approach and said that we were going to do this step by step. We had the flexibility and it worked for us. 

My advice would be to take your time, learn it, and understand it. Know that what you put into it is what you're going to get out. Just like anything, you want to nurture it so that it grows, matures, and really shows the work.

For myself and my team, it has helped to foster our reputation for accuracy, for estimating, for being able to produce or anticipate what our management's needs are, and having that information there. It helped with being able to help project what things may look like with predictive analytics.

I would rate Planview PPM Pro a nine out of ten. 

We use it to track IT project management and portfolios. It has also been used for tracking time performance on projects by our IT team, getting a better understanding of where work was going, managing resources to those projects, and setting the priorities for the projects.

We have created some reusable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle, though we haven't used that functionality a lot. It has definitely improved our relationship with our business partners. They now have insight into what we are working on and are able to help set priorities across divisions or groups within the company. We are not having to fight to say, "HR is doing this, finance is doing that, and they only have a view into what they want and don't realize that there is a greater picture." When they get that greater picture, they're able to say, "Okay, this is less important than what is going on in finance right now so we can prioritize properly and align resources better to get their projects done faster, benefitting the company better overall."

It takes us minutes to create a new project using this solution.

The process for building a team within a project is relatively simple. I don't use that functionality a lot. I think we're just starting to get into it a bit more with some of the work that we are starting to do with some of our project intake processes in some of our project management disciplines that we're starting to implement. While I haven't used it a lot, it's pretty simple to add a person and build that team out within PPM Pro.

PPM Pro provides managers the insight that they need to empower decision-making. From an IT manager standpoint, we have been able to see the impact of a large 2:1 system conversion that we had coming in. We had two systems converging into one while we had this major project going on. This tool allowed us to see the resources, even though we had a project that was supposedly shutting IT down for a six and a half month period from all other business projects We were able to use the tool to see the resource levels and fit in a lot of other smaller project work within that major initiative and continue to move the business forward without stopping work. Previously, we would have said, "We have no capacity. We can't do anything else about this." However, in reality, we can see that there were other things that we could have gotten in and moved through the pipeline to get the work into production.

PPM Pro has enabled us to set up and run a project priority committee (PPC) within the organization. Without the PPM Pro tool, we wouldn't be able to have the project information, updates, and project listings in the pipeline to be able to run the meeting efficiently, give information prior to the meeting, and also run the meeting when we meet on either monthly or on a bi-monthly basis.

The flexibility of the product meets our needs to manage project details of what we are tracking, including the level of detail which we may be tracking. 

It is a good communication tool for our end users. The flexibility of being able to meet the different scenarios for our different customers has been very good. We have come across a few different scenarios in regards to how we work with our customers.

The solution’s task management features definitely have helped to set some of deadlines expectations in a project and have them visible and trackable to know where we are headed, what the deadlines are, and the different portions of a project. These are areas in small projects that we task very lightly, which is good. This is another aspect that is flexible for us. On larger projects, which may span six to nine months, we need to get a lot more detail done on the tasking. However, the product is able to handle both scenarios equally as well.

The solution for viewing projects and timelines is good. There are plenty of reporting and Gantt views within the application.

The solution has helped us to reduce project delays by 25 to 30 percent. Visibility is a big piece of what it is. We are able to see what's going on and react earlier to issues that have come up.

Planview PPM Pro’s time tracking abilities are adequate. It does a fine job as far as within the product managing it. Our users have commented that they would like a little more mobile-friendly aspect of it to be able to do it from their phones. While there is mobile access now, it's not as robust as we'd like to see, though it meets our needs for what little time tracking we do.

I would like a little more training on it.

We have struggled within the product. It has been changing the agile aspect of PPM Pro for us around the task management. This has been a struggle point, but there are a lot of things based on the keynote (in Planview's conference) coming up to address some of this. 

The reporting has some areas for improvement. It is not always as simple as we would like to get the reports we want or the information that we want. I think they are addressing this because there is a new version of the reports in a beta right now. I would assume that some of those features are coming.

Four or five years.

It has been rock-solid. I don't think we have had an issue once in the four or five years that we have been live.

I am responsible for the maintenance of this solution.

It has had no issue scaling to what we do, but we're not a large corporation. Based on how it is designed, I assume it would scale just fine.

We don't necessarily use it for the entire company, just within IT projects. We have 40 licenses right now. We have our business stakeholders in place as well as all of our workers, whether they are developers or system engineers. That level does the tasks within the project.

We typically do about 80 to 100 projects a year. We have done 637 project in four to five years.

The technical support is very good. We haven't had a lot of times that we interacted with them, but every time has been helpful. They have gotten us to the solution by resolving the issue quickly and helping us out.

We were previously using paper, pencil, and Excel spreadsheets.

It was relatively straightforward; I don't think it was a complex set up for us. Their implementation process was well-defined. The person working with us was able to easily gather the information that was needed, then configure the system to meet our needs. Even as time has gone on, and after four years, tweaking the system, whether it's a process change on our side, or maturing in the project management discipline process, it has been simple to do or easy to find out how to do it because the documentation is very thorough.

The turnaround time for our deployment was two to three months.

From a project plan standpoint, that was where we leaned on Innotas at the time to use their implementation strategy to gather the requirements for what we were trying to do and put it in place. We really didn't have that plan before we started. We worked with Innotas (who is now PPM Pro) to put that plan together at the time of implementation.

We have seen in return investment using PPM Pro since we put it in four years ago. We're getting more work done and we have not grown our IT department at all in four years.

My boss didn't balk at the price.

A collaboration of all their tools truly gets the biggest bang for the buck.

We went with PPM Pro after evaluating a few products. We were looking to get visibility into our portfolio and what work we were doing and how it was getting deployed. PPM Pro gave us the tools to be able to get that insight. When you're running things off your desks or out of a spreadsheet, you're not able to get that same visibility as easily.

We evaluated the Jira product, which worked well from an agile standpoint, but it didn't have the portfolio management side of things as PPM Pro, at least not in the way that we were reviewing it.

We have tried using MS Project. We use P6 for our construction projects and I've used it for a few of the larger IT projects a few years ago. We found that this tool did what everything that we needed it to do.

We prefer the Planview PPM Pro vs Microsoft and how it has dealt with the portfolio management. We really couldn't easily get that from the Microsoft stack at the time that we evaluated it. From a project standpoint, for the functionality that we used, it was one-to-one. There wasn't anything that Microsoft could do that we couldn't do within Planview PPM Pro.

We may be looking to increase our usage by a little bit, because we'd like to start pulling more of the company initiatives into products, but that has to do with the company culture and strategic plan. Moving forward, IT really doesn't have a direct impact on that.

Biggest lesson learnt: The importance of visibility on the work that's being done and being asked of the IT department.

I would rate it a nine 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. 

We're using Daptiv for project portfolio management.

The company finally has software to track projects. We didn't have that before that. So now we're able to measure and track our projects at a portfolio level. It has substantially improved our ability to meet deadlines.

Daptiv is a project management tool, so it's pretty straightforward. The ability to manage projects and programs has been beneficial for us.

The resource management tab is clunky, inefficient, and slow. And from a portfolio manager perspective, it would be nice if there were an easier way to view enterprise-wide resourcing to manage my team more effectively. Still, looking into other teams, I had to build my own tools.

The company has been using Daptiv for about two years, but I've only been with the company for a little over a year.

I think Daptiv is a stable platform. We've had some performance issues every once in a while but nothing noteworthy.

We're a small outfit. We don't have a lot of people logging in at once, so I don't think we're a good use case for that. Our entire IT department has fewer than 200 people, and I'd say we have like 30 people tops in the system. They're resource managers for the most part. I've got six project managers that are in there regularly. Then there are other people who are not within the PMO doing some project management. They go in and do some updates maybe once a week. It's very few people, and it's mostly my team that's using the platform. So it's a tiny group who are heavy users. We're constantly trying to get people to log in. It's not that extensive, but I'd like to try and make it as extensive as possible.

Our Daptiv admin mostly handles support, so I haven't had much personal experience with that. However, I will say that we've had a good relationship with Planview customer service. I heard it was somewhat of a disaster before we got a dedicated customer service representative. Our client manager has been great. I don't know who her predecessors were, but my predecessor was on the verge of trying to switch solutions. That's how bad it was. So I've had an extremely good experience.

Daptiv was deployed before I joined the company, so I don't know anything about the installation. As far as maintenance goes, we have one person who is our data analyst and Daptiv administrator, but outside of that, we don't require anyone else to maintain the solution. Since it is SaaS, we only have to do a few housekeeping tasks on our end, such as people management and resource management. For instance, adding or removing user accounts when people join or leave the company. Other than that, there is just a yearly project cleanup maintenance.

Our current license is from 2019 to 2022. So for that three-year subscription, it was $60,000 for the subscription, users, platform, and connections. Then there were some add-ons. Connecting to some of our other systems like HR for that period cost us around $12,000. And then for customer service, we paid $18,000 for three years, so $6,000 a year. There were also some additional fees, including $35 annually for portfolio management and $60 for the license renewal.

I'd give Daptiv an eight out of 10. So much of your relationship with your partners is through your client partner, and ours has been fantastic. The sales guy who is assigned to me has also been extremely helpful. Their customer service is great, and the project management tool itself is helpful. 

I had previously been doing a lot of this stuff manually. When I was a consultant, I used Excel on a project-to-project basis. This is the first time I've used a project management tool since 2009, when I used HP's solution. God only knows who owns that now. So I think it's a good tool. I like it. And Planview listens. They're trying to move forward. My concern is now that another company has acquired Daptiv, will I have to move to another solution sooner than later?

For anyone thinking about implementing Daptiv, I would say don't make the mistakes this company has made. There's no need to customize anything. Keep your customizations to a minimum if it's nothing new. I can't emphasize that enough. The less customization, the better. 

The company can only help me so much because of the customization they did. Just don't customize. Customize only if it's absolutely something you'll need in the future. Don't look into the past. Because I wasn't here for the implementation, I really can't complain about the implementation partner or the tool's limitations. However, I'm kind of hamstrung with all these customizations.

I would also suggest enabling the tracking of actuals. For someone ungodly reason, my predecessor and her boss decided not to turn on the tracking of actuals, and it's the bane of my existence. It means flying blind as to what people are actually working on versus just estimates.

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.

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).

Currently, we're using PPM Pro mostly for project management and resource management and we try to incorporate last year into this year everything that's related to strategy and program portfolio management. We're expanding for 2021, trying to use the ICP component.

PPM Pro provides us an organized view of the work that is ongoing and resources that are working on those particular projects. It gives us that view.

It hasn't directly helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives directly out of the tool. It's allowed us to gather the information and then take it on the side and supplementing it with additional tools. It could be an Excel worksheet or SharePoint site. That's what we're trying to get to for 2021, to try to use ICP for alignment more and prioritization of work, based on budget planning. It helps us facilitate that, but it doesn't provide the end-to-end solution.

The feature that gives us the most value is the project management with the Warm screen, the work and resource management screen. The strategy financial plan roll-ups also give us a lot of value.

The Warm screen, even though we're not going to the deep levels and deep details of all the projects and trying to assign resources at the lowest level, it gives us a quick visual of what resources are being worked on, what projects, and on what activities they're working on. At least at a very high level, because we're not using all the assignment components to the fullest detail, but at least with what Planview gives us as a tool and how we're leveraging it, it gives us that quick view of who's working on what project and who's booking time to what project at any given time or any given a week.

Then, on the strategy side, it allows us to group our projects based on the strategy hurricane that we've configured in-house. It gives us a nice little look at how those public forecast stacks up and then also how the actuals stack up over time.

We are able to get all the features that we need out of it and it gives us the ability to see what we need to see, understanding also how the tool works and how the tool reacts to certain actions.

It does provide a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people. Although we're only using authorizations and reservations.

The flexibility of configuring these assignments is straightforward once you understand the assignment types. They're very straightforward and easy to use. The flexibility does not limit us. It helps us move the process that we had in place based on how we want and how the tool operates. It just gives us a little bit more control.

PPM Pro is good for forecasting remaining effort. It's accurate. 

It helps us to manage work but I think it also helps us manage our resource's time, and know what they're working on and how we could spread them. I think it's a mix of both. It helps us in both roles. From a project management or a work management perspective, it gives us the ability to know who's available to work on what projects. Planview gives us the ability to have different attributes so that we can group or be able to do a quick lookup whether it's a skill, whether it's a role, whether it's a team and allows us to do that roll up so that we can quickly identify who's the AR of a particular project and if that person is available to work on the project.

It also allows program managers to group work together and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level because it gives us that consolidated view at the strategic level but not at the project level. It doesn't affect project management because here the role of a project manager is just to focus on their project, not to focus on the entire spectrum of the projects that are going on along with them. That's more than the responsibility of the program manager. I don't think it affects them in the long run.

PPM Pro has increased our on-time completion rate. It's above 8 over 10, so 80%. 

It does not provide end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. I don't think it does because that's why there's Agile. It would be too cumbersome to try to go to Planview to the lowest deep down level that you could capture JIRA. Where in JIRA, you could capture pretty much a task.

It does not provide an end-to-end solution. In our case, we're going through an Agile transformation. Where we want to have mostly 90% of our portfolio working in an Agile state. Planview does not provide us the end-to-end solution at this point.

Based on my experience, the financial management screens have gone a long way, but I think there's still some room for improvement in terms of how you model them and the different version controls. 

I would like to see more dynamic screens, most of the screens are static. That has room for improvement.

At my company, they've been using it for almost three years. I just joined the company a year ago, but I have about 15 years of Planview experience across different companies.

It's very stable. Performance-wise in regards to being available, if I had to compare it to the way Planview was back in 2005, I would say it's very stable now.

I've gone from a company that used to manage about 8,000 projects simultaneously. It was a global solution here at LPL, which is more of a nationwide solution. It can handle it. Maybe the one problem on the global side is when you have teams that are working on a particular project all around the world, the whole time zone issue becomes a problem. Sometimes because of how the reporting solution that has been put in place it cannot provide real-time reports for people that are on the other side of the world. It gives them a lag where they don't know what to do or what not to do.

There are 1,500 users in my company. The great majority are just time entry contributors. They are around 75% are contributors, time entry folks. Then the rest of the 25% are between project managers, program managers, and financial people that go into the tool and approve capitalization. 

Right now, we have two dedicated and two shared staff members who work in regards to configuration and ongoing maintenance. In regards to any changes that need to happen in the tool or, and proof of concepts, things that we want to test out. And then we have two that are shared, which are more like admin activities who add remove users, add value to existing structures, and all that.

It's heavily used, it's the project management tool. This is where all project data and financial data is related to a project are being stored. It's a brand new project management and technology. I would say it has a 100% adoption rate. 

Technical support is good based on the level of support level that we get. There are different tiers. Planview provides different tiers. We're in the second from the top, we're not on the top, top tier. The response rate we get is good. I can't complain.

My company previously used Innotas. One of the reasons they switched is because Planview purchased Innotas and then they saw Planview as being a more robust solution than Innotas.

In the past, I've used Oracle PPM, which is the Oracle demand management tool. In creating reports, I think OPPM is very easy. It's Oracle-based so they have a very straightforward database and their reporting capabilities are pretty much a plug and play. That's very straightforward in terms of user interface and the user experience but OPPM is not as great as Planview. They were lagging on that side of the fence.

I've gone through multiple versions of Planview, multiple instances of Planview, and multiple instances of how reporting was done in Planview and there's a lot of human interaction with it as well. You need to build a universe and how you build that universe and what reporting tool you're going to use to be your reporting input, endpoint tool or reporting solution plays a lot into it. Planview gives you a variety of different options to go with. Some are great, some are not, and it just depends on the user experience and the knowledge of the person. Even though pretty much all of them are intuitive and all of them do the same. All of them have to give you the same solution. It's also usability. I'm going to compare that between an iOS device versus an Android device. They do the same thing but the user interface is completely different.

There is a return. It's not a very high-level return because of the cost, but it's a lot better than having an Excel spreadsheet.

The biggest lesson is that it's a three-legged stool. One component of that three-legged stool is the tool. One leg is Planview Enterprise. The other thing is the processor that you have in-house. To the organization, you're trying to compare the culture of the organization and the people's willingness to use the tool and to be able to adapt to changes with Planview as that as a third leg of the stool. It's one of the best that's out there on the market, but it goes along with those other two legs of the stool. If you're missing one, even if you have the best stool, it's not going to work.

I would rate PPM Pro an eight out of ten. 

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.