Planview PPM Pro Reviews

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.

We have been using the tool for portfolio management with the resource allocation piece being a big part of it. We are using it to generate data to try and get a real-time report out of all the information needed to prepare for our quarterly reviews, etc.

It gave us a clarity of purpose. Everybody knows what they are doing and that they are all aligned:

• Managers know what employees are doing. 
• Employees know what they are doing and the managers think they should be doing. 

That is the clarity which really helps in efficiency. 

When you look at your organization, and what everybody is working on, you now know what capacity you have to take more things on.

The biggest impact was making sure that people were aligned on what they're supposed to do. This has really helped us because we're all going in the same direction and we know it.

It makes clear what people are working on. It is not just for managers but it is also for the people themselves. They are able to see and say, "I am on this project, and it's official. My manager knows it. Everybody knows it." That helps them with their motivation.

Anyone can go in and jerry-rig it. We would like the tool to be more locked down.

We found that sometimes when they have monthly rollouts that there might be some unintended consequences. However, the program is so flexible that sometimes we're not sure if the issue is because of the rollout or because we did something wrong.

It should grow with us for now.

I don't interact with the technical support of Planview that much. We have our own IT department. Usually, we interact with them first. Then, if they have issues, they contact Planview.

We were using something called PDWare. People hated it. Then, we had a team that went out and looked at the other things out there. I'm not sure of all the things that they considered but when they showed us what PPM Pro could do, it was such a big difference from what PDWare was doing, we said, "Let's give that a try."

Before we started using a tool like this to track what people are assigned to, we would have people who the managers thought should be on certain projects but they apparently had never heard of them. They didn't know they were on those projects and they would be working on some other projects that they thought they were supposed to do. The managers were like, "No, you're supposed to be on this one." So, there was a lot of miscommunication going on. 

Now, everything is clear. They can go through the tool, look at it, and go, "I'm on this one." Or, if they see something that they don't agree with, they say, "Hey, I thought you told me..." and then at least those conversations are happening and clears things up.

The setup is pretty straightforward. 

With upgrades, we have had Planview come in and talk about what they're thinking about with the new features coming in. Some of them we see that there is a use for them. Others, we are not at a stage to really see the usefulness of them.

I would rate it at about eight (out of 10) only because we've been using it for two years but there have been some growing pains as we are learning how to use it and getting the team adopted. I definitely see that adoption has happened and people like what they're seeing. However, I also see some areas where they could make it stronger.

Some of the things that we are looking at seem to be maybe in Enterprise One. So, a lot of the talks are now on Enterprise One. We are saying, "Oh wow, they are pretty similar." Then, we start to talk with people, and they're like, "Yeah, we can do this there." So, we should maybe be looking at what the differences are and what exactly they can do

We are not using Projectplace. We have been using JIRA. A lot of our technical teams is still using JIRA and most of the type of stuff is happening in JIRA, then we do a lot of the PMO stuff on PPM Pro.

We use it primarily for the resource management function. From a use case point of view, we use it across all our initiatives, such as projects, agile teams, etc. We also use the portfolio management function to provide us with our top-down, bottom-up planning. 

On the resource management side, prior to Daptiv implementation, most of our projects were running late causing a issues with the delivery of our products due to the limited number of resources we had available at any given time.

It provides us the means to optimize our resources by role and match them to the appropriate piece of work at the right time, without the overcapacity for that individual.

The scenario planning option provides us with the means to be able to evaluate our work in a variety of different situations. 

The dashboard and analytics function helps our executives and our directors in understanding what's going on across the company from a portfolio management point of view.

The resource management feature is certainly the most valuable for us. It is the supply and demand. Like most companies, one of the hardest nuts to crack is understanding where your people are and getting them to do the right thing at the right time. So, certainly, out of all the functionality, this has been the saving grace for us because it now provides us with the insight to do future planning and stop taking on more work than we are physically capable of doing as a company.

I've worked at many different companies in the past, and the customer service and the support from Daptiv are unlike anything I've encountered before and far excel any other company I've worked with. I always say to people that Daptiv is like another department in your own company as you do not realize they're a vendor.

The agile functionality can be improved. The tool was definitely built around the waterfall PMBOK PRINCE2 methodology, and although there are great functions within the tool for agile, it is often compared to dedicated tools like LeanKit or Jira. At the moment, the only integration we would have is to Jira itself, not to another Planview product. I believe that's coming in 2022 at some point.

There should be the ability to store historical functions, but this is not just for this tool. It is applicable to many tools. It would be great if we were able to store specific historical data, such as risk management.

We have been a user of Daptiv for about four years, but prior to that, we were also a user of the Changepoint system for two years. Planview bought Changepoint and Daptiv at the same time.

The solution has been pretty stable since implementation in 2018, with no real downtime due to issues out of our control.  That being said the few time we have encounter issues they have been dealt with very quickly and professionally by the company. 

A minor negative would be the time it takes to refresh data, but that could be attributable to our network traffic as much as an issue caused by the solution.

In terms of the project waterfall methodology, the scalability is there. We are seeing improvement around the agile side in the software, but it's not at a level we think we can reach in the timescale we have. However, with the Planview products on the market, we are looking potentially at something different to help us with that element of our work.

We have 250 licenses at the moment, and 80% of them are basic users. They are time-keepers who are just updating projects, etc. Probably 15% of them are in the management category, such as project manager, capability manager, and portfolio manager. So, they're the ones maintaining the workspace and the projects, and then, of course, we have about three or four users who are administrative. So, all in all, we only have three types of users in the system, and they are basic, management, and administrator.

At the moment, it is being extensively used in the IT department, which probably covers about a third of the company. We are currently trialing the software in other departments with the view of expanding out across the whole company at some point in the near future. What we are looking at is an end-to-end deployment. So, with it now joining the Planview family, there are other options we're looking at potentially to help us provide end-to-end functionality; for example, Spigit being the upfront or the idea-generating piece of tool to maybe LeanKit being with us for the agile element.

We find the platform to be very stable. The few times we've had to contact them have usually been after they had done a software update. We had encountered a couple of issues after that. Because we're a government department, and we deal with the gaming industry in British Columbia, we have a lot of firewalls and cybersecurity. So, one of the things we sometimes have problems with is their techs being able to get access to our system, but that's more a fault of our own because we lock down the system so tight. 

We have reached out to the techs a few times, and the work has been done pretty much straight away, depending on what we've asked. Any time we have encountered a problem, the customer service and the techs pretty much responded straight away, and most problems have been fixed within that 24-hour period. Those that couldn't be fixed are being worked on until they are done. So, there is nothing outstanding. The support from their side couldn't get any better. The fact that they have their own dedicated call center, that massive triage, and the queries going in also helps as well. You deal with the same people. So, when you have a problem, that individual stays with you from start to finish. I would definitely rate them a solid nine out of 10.

Positive

Before Daptiv, we used its sister product Changepoint. We switched because of the usability side. Changepoint, although a really good product, was too complex for our needs, and at the time, we were having issues. The Changepoint company had been bought out by the Daptiv company, and we switched over software at that point, which helped us with the adoption on our side.

I have, personally, used several different pieces of software from different companies: PowerSteering, Open Plan Professional, COBRA, Microsoft Solutions, et cetera.

For us, it was straightforward because we had the right people on our side to implement. We also had a customer service manager in the team supporting us. If the customer service manager wasn't able to work with us to understand what our business challenges and goals were and hadn't provided that customer success roadmap view of how we're going to get there, the implementation would've been longer than what we would've liked it to be. We became a test case for the company, and it only took us 90 days to implement the tool from start to finish, and since then, we've had a 94% adoption rate.

The actual prework, before the tool was turned on, probably took about two months. That was working ourselves to understand what we wanted and then converting that to a sort of roadmap and how we were going to turn the system on. When we turned the system on, it took about four weeks for us to get fully up and running at that point, so it took 90 days from start to finish.

We had an implementation strategy. We have our own internal strategy in regards to what we want to deliver and when and how we want to deliver it. So, from the tool point of view, it was about turning on the functions, and we did not want to boil the ocean. So, we decided to sit with our own internal stakeholders to understand the "why," that is, why we wanted this, and that was then converted into, "Okay. Then we're turning on this function first, and then 90 days later, we're going to turn on another function." The biggest problem that we encountered was when we changed our methodology from waterfall to agile, it, of course, changed our strategy and how we were delivering the tool.

We did it ourselves. We had the right people to do the job internally, as well as the support from Daptiv itself. The customer service manager and the team were there 24/7 with us along the way, and without that support, I don't think we'd have deployed anywhere close to 90 days.

The deployment and maintenance are normally with our portfolio team. They are administrators. When we do deploy, we work with the company, and the timescale could be a day to months, depending on what we're actually deploying. From an administration point of view, it's probably half a person a week on the administration itself. It is not a time-consuming piece of software for administration as compared to some other ones we use.

We've seen the drop in the time it takes to deliver a project and the amount of money it takes to deliver as well. We've not done an ROI on that, but we have seen that reduction. So, we are seeing savings.

The pricing for me is more about understanding your own needs in the company because it is one license for one person model. So, you have to really understand how many licenses you need and what may be the influx of your staff. The good thing about Daptiv is that we just need a quick telephone call to our customer success manager if we want to increase our licensing and we can upscale very quickly. We've never downscaled, but I'm guessing if we had to, we'd have to wait till the contract completes or renegotiate a different licensing cost. 

There are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. We have the reporting functionality for which we pay separately for 10 hours per month. To help us design and build our customized reports, we require the system. There are hundreds of out-of-the-box reports and dashboards, but we have some very specific requirements, so we bought that extra functionality.

We're also a premier customer. So, we do have the customer success manager and the premier support from the other staff within the company.

It was just a straight swap because it was a sister product. It was in the same company. Before that, we went out to RFP, and we looked at several different solutions that were certainly in the top 10 of the Gartner, Forrester Magic Quadrant. The Daptiv/Changepoint company won hands down on all the different asks we had.

I would advise understanding your requirements and asking what the "why" is. The very first time we implemented a piece of software in the company before I got involved, they failed because they didn't understand what the end goal was. It was all about trying to get a tool in to provide support to the PMs. The reality is that a company has many different facets, and for me, it is definitely about understanding what your north star is and what you want to deliver. You then work backward to understand how you're going to do that. Once you've done that, the implementation becomes very quick and easy with the tool. I've been at many companies where they've implemented and tried to do the "why" at the same time, but it doesn't work. That's where the support from the customer success managers in Daptiv is helpful. They provide that roadmap at the very beginning to help you get there. We spent two months prior to even turning the tool on in doing all the prework so that when we did turn the tool on, people knew what to expect, they knew what the tool was, and they knew how to use it.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Daptiv is to utilize the company's experience, and when you do your implementation, in the beginning, try and use as much out-of-the-box functionality. The more you customize, the more chance you're going to fail initially. So, for me, the biggest thing is just to use the ability that you've got in the Daptiv and do a phased approach. Try not to turn everything on at once. It doesn't work. You should also get your senior managers involved straight away. You should get your executives on board and then fill that down for the company.

Overall, its rating has to be a 10 out of 10. 

Right now, we use it mainly for project tracking to create our task list and go through the entire project life cycle to be able to provide dashboards and report in real-time to our senior leaders.

We also just started last month being able to submit project requests for the upcoming year. Those can go through the gating system in order to be approved and prioritized prior to starting any assignments on the projects.

The product is providing more visibility by providing real-time dashboards so that you're not seeing incorrect information. It's all live within the system and their ability to drill down and view real-time events on a project is great. The visibility really makes a difference.

It provides managers the insight they need to empower decision-making.

I like that it's so customizable and it's so easy to customize. It's not overly complicated. We can get pretty much whatever we need out of the system. If it's not there, we can add it.

For example, the whole request process was built from scratch. We customized all of the fields that we wanted to capture as part of our initial submission and then the fields that we wanted to add on through the gating process to gather more information before final approval is submitted.

The solution enables users to create reusable project templates that reflect their own project management life cycle. We have only a few templates set up right now, however, that's something that we'll develop further as we go.

It makes our project management process more consistent across the board. We have probably 13 different project managers, from an FTE perspective, and we have a lot of consultants. Therefore, having the template already built-in keeps everybody on the same page.

It does not take long to create a new project using the solution. It's fast due to the fact that they all come through as a request and it's just a matter of adding it to the project and everything is pretty much there. You're just talking about turning a request into a project which takes less than five minutes. Previously, we were on spreadsheets and Word Docs, et cetera. As far as having the template with the tasks already in it, that obviously saves a lot of time for the project managers.

Task management features are so customizable that they're working for us based on exactly what we need. We also can always build as we grow as an organization. I like that tasks can be assigned to specific individuals so they can work on things themselves and update them in the system, as opposed to the project manager having to go in and manually do everything themselves.

With this solution, in terms of time savings, we're averaging a savings of three days per month, if not more.

The solution's time tracking abilities and allows for timesheets allocating hours. Before, we used a spreadsheet where we had to find the project in a list of 100 other projects that were going on at the same time. Being able to pull up a timesheet and only feed those projects that I'm assigned helps me as far as tracking my time. 

The solution is great for viewing projects and timelines. Their reporting feature is so robust and they keep adding to it all the time and the ability to set up your individual portfolios - however you need to - and being able to report on those, is a huge advantage.

In terms of the process for building a team within a project, I'm not a project manager, so I don't really build the teams within the system. I do know that there could be some improvements, on the staffing side, such as adding staff to projects in order for those folks to track time. The way the time tracking works, we miss a lot of that if the tasks aren't set up appropriately which makes it so that the end-user can't track time accordingly. We're still figuring it out. There's a bit of a learning curve.

The downside to the way the solution tracks time is if your project manager doesn't add you to the project, you won't see it on your timesheet, even if you did do work. If that happens, it's a matter of having to reach out and have the project owner add you to the project so that you can track the time. I have a feeling a lot of people aren't tracking time to the appropriate projects due to this. It is a downfall that you can't add your own projects.

The company started the implementation last October. We have not been on it for quite a year yet. We rolled it out to our IT department for time tracking in January of this year. I would say January is probably when we really got started using it for projects and time tracking.

The stability is great. I haven't had any issues so far. The only downtime we've had is due to our own issues as we have our restricted to internal IP addresses. If we forget to add new IP ranges to our setup, then we have issues. Again, that's internal, and not the fault of Planview.

We're a small organization, however, from what I've seen, is that the other clients the product has are a lot larger than us. The things other companies are using it for, it just amazes me how it can accommodate everything from a small organization to something much larger. Having seen its capabilities with other companies, I would assume it's scalable for us in the long run.

Our organization has over a thousand users, however, we have only 130 licensed users. We have our stakeholders, which are our C-suite partner or employees, and that's just basically to approve requests and view dashboards. Then we have our entire IT department and our team users that utilize it mostly for time tracking. We also have our business team members, who also use it for time tracking, however, they can also get in and view the reports and be able to drill down into specific data on the projects. 

We plan to increase usage by adding more users to the system. We've tried to stay focused on the people that work on projects probably more than half the time, however, we want to make sure that we're capturing all project team members so they can record time as well. 

I've never seen customer support like them before. I can put in a case and I usually have a resolution within an hour or, at most, the same day. They're always quick to respond and if they don't, I know where I can go to at least escalate the issue to get a resolution.

Previously, the project managers would use MS Project, which they're now really doing in the PPM Tool. We would also have the Charter and Word Docs and stuff like that we'd be trying to incorporate that into the product as well. We're not having multiple things off-site or outside of the system anymore.

We switched off MS Project for consistency - so that all of the information is in the tool and we can provide the status of the project schedule on the dashboards that are sent out to the project team members weekly. The added bonus to switching is all of the roll-up capabilities, having it all in different spreadsheets, and having to pull all that together without all the manual processes. Just having the ability to run real-time reports and have those delivered automatically is a huge benefit and offers great time savings.

There's not any direct syncing between the two tools. This product does have the ability to export into an XML file that you can upload into a project. You can do that on both solutions if you need to. I don't know how many of our project managers do that. I would imagine most of them just keep it within PPM Pro.

Overall, PPM Pro is easier to use. It's all in one place, so I'm not having to go locate several different documents to pull the information I need. It's all within the tool. I like the task list so much more than I do MS Project.MS Project has way too much other stuff that we probably don't need for our size organization.

The setup was pretty easy. We had our implementation person from Planview working with us. We really didn't have a good foundation for what we wanted prior to our implementation, so it took us a little bit longer. That isn't the tool's fault. Once we did make our decisions, it was pretty easy to implement.

In terms of deployment, we started in October and we were up and running in a few months. That deployment time also included importing all of the existing projects that we had going on into the tool.

We didn't really have an implementation strategy. We just knew that we wanted to stick to projects, requests, and time tracking. There were some tools that we haven't quite started utilizing yet, such as PPA. They're available for us, however, we just decided to hold off on that. There were some things that we said we would wait and implement down the road.

We also purchased LeanKit and Projectplace, however, we have not really started using those yet mostly due to the change management. We wanted to make sure everybody was comfortable with this PPM Pro first before we started implementing something else.

We have one assigned main administrator for the system and I'm the backup. I do a lot of the calculated deals and some of the more complicated stuff. The other person sets up users and runs the reports and dashboards for our C-suite partners and just handles questions that come through. Our team was only maybe four people making decisions in regards to this solution.

Planview assisted us during the initial setup. Our implementation person (Steve) was very responsive. He helped us set up everything that we needed to. I know we probably asked him lots of questions and he likely contributed more hours than he probably was assigned to, just to help us out as new clients. We were very pleased with his assistance.

From a quality perspective, I've heard our chief strategy officer loves the ability for him to go in and look and see what the progress is on certain projects on his own. He's very tech-savvy, so he's not scared of the system. He goes in and all I had to do was show him how to log in and it's intuitive enough that he could figure out where to go from there. Quantitatively speaking, I don't have any data on that yet.

I would advise new companies to make sure that they really understand the differences between the user types or licensed types as we had a little confusion in that area at the beginning. The mix-up was all terminology. We made assumptions that time users could do more than they really could. Once we realized that, we ended up converting a lot of people to different user types or licensed types after the fact. New users just really need to understand what functionality each user type is allowed to do.

We did look at two other options before choosing this solution. One in particular just seemed a little more intuitive from an end-user perspective.

We don't have a business relationship with the vendor. We're just a customer.

This solution has not yet helped us reduce project delays as we're still a young PMO and we just have a lot of projects going on and the same resources working on all the projects. I don't know if the system is going to help that, however, having those reportable timesheets allows us to really see how long it truly is taking us to complete a project so that if the company plans on adding 50 projects next year, they're going to know that we can't possibly do all those based on the numbers that we have right now. It makes projecting what's possible more realistic.

It hasn't helped to increase the number of projects in our organization, although it's likely going to help the company become more focused and we'll get through more projects once we start putting them into a pipeline, as opposed to trying to complete them all at the same time.

New users need to make sure that they have a good roadmap of what their current processes are, whether they are done within a tool or not. If they're still doing them within Word, Excel, or MS Project, that's fine. Just make sure to have a documented process. It will make the implementation go a lot smoother.

It's a good idea to try everything in a sandbox first as well. Some things don't work as you would have expected. A lot of the gate logic, et cetera, is a little tricky when you work in requests. I play a lot. I'm in the sandbox a lot, just trying out different things before I put anything into production.

Overall, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We've been waiting on some stuff that's on the roadmap. I would say once they get some of the things that are on their roadmap out there, it'll bump up real quick to a rating of ten out of ten.

The primary use case is for managing all our products and programs, along with resource management. That is a key. Those are the two main reason: resource management and project management.

In my current company, it provides a quicker ramp up to understand what it can do for people by taking away all their barriers to entry: time, managing resources, and linking projects. It's made it so easy that people no longer say, "I don't want to do this because..." Other than "because", there is nothing else for them to say.

It is slowly maturing the company in the project management space by:

• Understanding the value of the project management as a function.
• The data that comes in and the structure that it provides.
• The predictability that it's providing. 
• The transparency in terms of the analytics.

It is adding to the maturity journey that the company is going through.

From an IT perspective, it has transformed the IT strategy. From an overall business strategy, we are not yet connected there. That's influence we are trying to get. We want to get those things connected.

We are planning start using the lean/agile process, especially on the business side, because they're into waterfall. We are trying to get into agile. We have done a lot of iterative development or fast track development. The issue is not from the IT space. We are trying to more to the business processes.

We're still using it in a sandbox area.

The flexibility is amazing. It is UI driven.

I would like them to improve the reporting and tying in the strategy more easily. Planview has already made some updates, so I'm trying to learn what those features are. 

I would also like to see integration with third-party applications, like the JIRA, Microsoft Project, and financial applications. That is where we get our data. We want to look into these integrations, but I don't think these are there today, but I can see those things down the roadmap.

I don't directly deal with the technical support because I'm a super users. 

We have an admin team for PPM Pro. They are the ones who use the technical support. From what I've heard so far, they open tickets and get good feedback very quickly. We have a dedicated customer rep, Katie, who works with us and addresses all our concerns. So far, so good.

This is the third company that I have used the solution in. I was the one who was instrumental in managing the tool at the previous two companies.

Because it's cloud-based, it's behind the scenes. The setup is pretty seamless since it is done in a sandbox. From a user point of view, we don't feel it at all.

The biggest ROI is the adoption of the tool in the company, not just by the worker bees, but also by the senior leadership. Now you have access to the data at the tip of your finger. It's dynamic data. They don't need to wait on anything. There are all types of the canned reports that we have created and anybody can access the data. There is this huge transparency.

Microsoft project is always out there. Project Server was horrendous. However, for the desktop, a lot of people prefer Microsoft Project for managing their project tasks. 

The PPM Pro tool is where the portfolio program management and the milestone plan of the PM is done, but the detail project plan is still maintained by our PMs in the Microsoft project. 

The product has grown a lot in terms of the resource management, what-if analysis, and now, in terms of the intake process. I've also seen a lot of Spigit. Planview is now able to integrate with other things that they offer on their platform.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. There is room for improvement but they have come a long way. It's quick to use, but the performance is still sometimes slow because of the cloud or whatever the reason. The reporting also needs improvement. Outside that, I'm pretty good.

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 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.