Planview ProjectPlace Reviews

This was an enterprise rollout of Planview, as well as a number of projects. One of them had me as the senior project manager. I had a Planview entire project, which included resources, budget, work breakdown structures, and everything else that a Project plan would normally include. Through Planview Projectplace, I ran the agile side of things.

The most useful features of Planview are its integration with resource management and the ability to commit and reserve various resources. Oddly enough, I liked how they did the time updates. Every two weeks, it would update all timelines to the current date, and you would then be sort of locked into what you had completed. That was confusing to a lot of people, and if you weren't familiar with it, that's a Planview feature that I haven't seen in Jira, Microsoft Project, or other products. That was very thoughtful. I liked how they handled current time management. It enforced best practices.

We did not purchase the agile package. I believe this relates to what we had. We had Planview and Projectplace, but not, the full agile package. We had cards in Projectplace, but we couldn't put them into Epix and then stories because they were part of the agile package.

Planview turned out to be completely useless for my use cases because I needed to be able to take large, stories or large Epix and put them on a backlog and associate them with Planview work breakdown structure schedules. In Planview, we would have to migrate application A and application B, but we would be doing this for 30 different applications. In the absence of a way to represent large sub-projects in Planview and have them moveable in time, with the resources associated with them also moving as you move them, I had to work around that limitation and mostly work in Projectplace.

That being said, I did not have access to the agile module, but my suspicions are that it would not have made much of a difference due to the poor integration between Projectplace and Planview.

Planview is a resource management and project management system. Projectplace allows you to create boards and associate some of Planview's work breakdown structure as a top-level tree under which you can place cards, but there are many limitations because when you make a change in Planview, it is reflected in Projectplace. However, except for a few specific things, changes made in Projectplace are not ported back to Planview. At this point, they're two completely different products. The flaw is that there is very little integration between the two.

I have used Planview Projectplace for one year in a contract position that recently wrapped up.

I am not sure what version number it was, but we kept up with the most recent, active contracts, and it was a multimillion-dollar contract. There was a lot of money spent, such as 2.5 million dollars.

It was deployed through the Planview Cloud.

It was highly scalable and would occasionally slow down, but this was clearly a choice in the resources allocated to the web servers and could be changed. 

In terms of usability, I thought it was far more useful than a Microsoft Project, Asana, or Jira, because, while it wasn't a particularly best-practices user interface, it was better than Jira, which is straight out of the 1990s.

Because of the project's complexity, there are probably ten different roles that span, for example, project management, product owners, various developers and testers, and so on. I would say that a couple of hundred people were involved in the initial rollout, which is probably fairly accurate.

Ideally, it will be rolled out to 1000 people, but due to the difficulties of working with enterprise, this will most likely take longer than expected.

I would rate them a four out of five, but keep in mind that we had a person that we paid available 24/7 to answer our questions. Even so, they only get a four.

I believe the environment in which Planview and Projectplace were deployed was probably complex. It required a lot of customization, Planview should have included more people, but they only included what they chose to include.

Positive

I have experience with products such as Asana and Jira.

Asana, I've used it, but I don't have any strong feelings either way. It is not something I use on a regular basis.

I have used the entire Atlassian suite, and I am very familiar with it. I have set it up for startups and established businesses numerous times.

The initial setup was very complex. They made us take a month of classes, and at the end of the day, it could have probably been explained to me in three hours, but because a lot of people need the same type of comparative experience that I have, perhaps they needed that month-long immersive class.

The deployment was done in-house. However, due to the size of the contract, Planview provided a lot of assistance. We had a Planview representative on call, that could cover everything with us. It was simply someone from Planview who was available to us 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

There are two approaches. The first was a failure, and the second was what I used. The overall strategy to implement Planview was across the entire enterprise, which failed due to silos and pushback. My strategy was to take a small group of people and a small project, only two or three million dollars, and win hearts and minds by having people adopt Planview and Projectplace. My project was a success, and I believe it is now being reevaluated for the use of Planview and Projectplace across the enterprise, and they will hopefully choose the approach I took for future implementations.

It will take a decade to see a return on investment because enterprise adoption requires the consolidation of the five or ten other competing tools into Planview and Projectplace. If that does not happen, the project will fail and the return on investment will be close to zero.

That is also where the sale is. You need a full-time person to maintain Planview and Projectplace, as well as a technical person who can solve problems and do new implementations. You will need three people to manage Planview and Projectplace alone. It's a fixed cost, and each of these will most likely cost a couple hundred thousand dollars per year.

Licensing, in my opinion, was absurd. There were share licenses, one-to-one licenses where everyone with a Projectplace license could access Planview, and licenses where everyone could access Planview but couldn't do a certain set of activities that were really necessary. I would say the licensing maturity was probably a three out of five. They have a long way to go before they can scale out and retain enterprise customers.

You have to pay for Projectplace access, for example, and then you can choose between a few models. It depends on the model. If you have to add per user, then each user has an additional cost. If you choose different modeling, which I believe is more, or you get a certain amount of resources and the people are not counted was one approach, but it was extremely confusing. As a result, the way it was implemented seemed to incur additional costs everywhere.

If you want to drive adoption, my advice is to negotiate with Planview and get all of the licensing you need ahead of time, so you don't get nickel and dimed, choose some best practices for adopting any new project management tool and an agile tool, which means you start with a small group of people, win hearts and minds, and then extend it throughout the organization.

It's one of the better tools that I have ever used. I would rate Planview Projectplace a seven out of ten.

We use Planview Projectplace for project management.

Clarizen's slide publisher is one of my favorite features. That is something I frequently use, and that is also highly valued within our company.

What I also like about the system is that it is custom-made. As a result, you won't have a lot of features that you won't use. You can also tailor it to the users' needs in order to provide them with the access they require, which is fantastic, in my opinion.

The graphics could be improved. I know they've been working on it, but the visuals could be more organized and easier for the eyes to read.

Sometimes it's slow. I get complaints that it's slow in starting up.

In terms of speed for up and downloads the performance could be better.

In the next release, I would like to see easier functionality for the calculations. When it comes to the reports, I like to see the graphs in a different way or an easy to manage the graphs.

I believe that the graphs, reporting, and connection with the slides are areas that need improvement.

I have been using Planview Projectplace since 2017.

Planview Projectplace is a stable product.

It's quite easy to scale. Simply add more licenses to have more people added to it.

I would say that up until about a month ago, I was very pleased with the assistance. Then I got a new person on board, and I've been confused about the support since then.

What I also like, and what I am also struggling with is technical support.  While it was Clarizen I received great support, but now that is Planview the level of support is less, but it could be bad luck because my technical support person has left the company, and I have a new person. As a result, the technical support is somewhat reduced.

One of the things I liked best about Clarizen was that they provided excellent technical support even after you'd been using the system for years. You knew exactly what was coming, what the updates were, and if you had any support questions. 

The support allowed us to differentiate between the other solutions. Also, it was one of the reasons we chose this solution and would recommend it to others.

We were originally using Clarizen, and Clarizen has been acquired by Planview.

We were a division of a larger corporation. We were sold or divested. As a result, we needed to select a new system. As the system we had was very broad, and we only used a small portion of it. When you notice that it's becoming too complicated, and we simply made less use of it.

We were concerned that we were becoming smaller, we conducted an investigation to find something that would suit our needs. It would be easy to scale as well as adjustable.

If there is anything you will not use, I believe you should not use it at all or not show it to the project manager, rather than taking a very corporate approach and receiving a lot of extra features that you will not use. That is one of the reasons that we have chosen Clarizen instead of Microsoft Project. 

We have reviewed also three other systems, and we stepped away from the system that we were used to because we also found it too broad.

It was complex for me to set up because I don't have a background in ICT. Even though they said it was simple, I found it difficult.

I needed an ICT person to assist me in the system setup.

I believe it is a good value for money for the service they provide and the tailored program. When compared to Microsoft Project. In my opinion, the pricing is reasonable.

We evaluated Microsoft and two other solutions. Also, we came from a corporate company that had another system in place, and we have chosen Clarizen because you can customize it to your requirements. You won't have a lot of additional features that you are not using, you can really make it, your own.

I would absolutely recommend the system to other users.

I am very pleased with the system right now. Based on the knowledge, and the experience that I have with other project management systems; I would rate Planview Projectplace an eight out of ten.

We use it for a lot of large strategic projects from an implementation perspective. We used to have rather large Excel files that we were managing task and project work to be done. Then, we transition all of those work plans into Projectplace. We use it for large strategic project implementations, the new cancer center, we are currently using it for a new hospital tower that we're opening up this fall, and things like that. So large strategic projects is primarily where I use it.

We have some service line leadership teams across our healthcare organization that we use to manage their work that's aligned with our mission and vision and so we use it for a lot of those teams. Across our organization, we have a lot of teams that are using it for a myriad of different reasons and it keeps growing. We have an accrediting body called "joint commission." They'll survey your facility and show where there are some opportunities for improvement. When our quality team gets that, they've used Projectplace to create some standard work using those ways within that combined view to really manage their work. That's the same work that needs to be accomplished once one of those surveys comes back in. They've set up that standard work and now they use that for every survey across all of our different facilities.

That was a really cool use case that I was involved with helping them design but that's being used across the organization as well. There's some work intake because we also have PPM Pro. From a work intake perspective, there are a lot of teams that are managing work intake and then creating projects in Projectplace or cards in the workspaces as a result of that. That's just the tip of the iceberg of what our organization is using it for.

Using PPM Pro has improved our work intake but then funneling that into Projectplace helped to facilitate that work intake. It's just clarity of the work and visibility that needs to be done. The upgraded visibility across what's in process or what needs to happen across the organization has been helpful. That means the transparency, the ability to drive that ownership to the person that actually owns the task has been very helpful. We're in the fairly infant stages of using it but it's quite a bit with many strategic projects that we have going on.

I love the collaborative nature just from my role to help. I'm a strategist. I help manage those large strategic projects. Implementation is one significant piece of my role, but I love the collaboration that can exist within the tool. We're still trying to work through that but the ownership and trying to get people to really gauge and use the tool when you have 13,000 to 14,000 people across the organization isn't easy. It could be challenging because not everyone jumps right in the feet and feels comfortable with the technology, but the ability to drive ownership and visibility into what's going on is just wonderful from my perspective as trying to empower the teams that I manage. That's been very, very helpful.

I like Projectplace for working with detailed implementation plans for projects. Early, when I first started using it, it was just trying to get over a mental hurdle of how not to lose the details. There are so many different ways in which you can set up a workspace, the activities, the cards, and using a checklist on the cards. There are so many different ways in which you can set it up. It's fun to think through how to best transition those detailed work plans into the Projectplace environment. Its work. It's almost like there's so much ability to set it up to meet the team's needs or a specific project is good and bad in terms of having the options available to you. It's challenging at times because there are so many options but it's very flexible.

I think it's a very flexible tool for detailed work plans because we have a new hospital tower that we're opening now. I used to have a 350 to 400 row Excel file. We were considering rather large files that we got narrowed down into some more concise workspaces in Projectplace. Flexible is a keyword I would use.

Projectplace tracks work details and completion milestones. I normally try to set up as many milestones as possible. One of the challenges is the data that's from it if you try to mix people. People want to see more operational metrics or KPI finances, things like that. Things that aren't really project or task-related. I would say they're concerned about how other things are going related to a significant project and those things aren't always available but we can, obviously based on the activities and things, report cards, progress, milestone completion, and some other things. I know it's just a challenge. I know our leader that manages the tool and collaborates with Planview is really focused on metrics, reporting, and how we keep making that more robust. Finding a way to take it another layer down into a more detailed look at metrics and things outside of project metrics is a challenge. It's a challenge getting that fine layer of detail.

It definitely supports collaboration in real-time. The only challenge there is, is trying to manage the change of the way people do work. It definitely supports collaboration in real-time, and there are many people that have jumped in and use all the time. But then for my seat, I also need to know that an individual is not quite there yet. I may need to follow up with a separate note. I may need to follow up with a phone call or something to check-in. It does work. It's getting people to buy in and actually use it and get over the mental hurdle of understanding that it's not additional work, it's just a different way to do work. 

We also use Microsoft Teams as an organization so people need to understand how the different tools work and how they relate to one another and that sort of thing. Yes, it works, it's just getting over that hurdle as an organization of getting people to buy into, to using it in that fashion.

The overall visibility in the project status provided by Projectplace is okay. It should be a little more robust. I know we have some of it set up. I don't know all the details for certain types of projects. We can put in a specific project status, but for many projects, we don't have that functionality turned on and it's very vague. I don't know the behind the scenes of what someone is doing, but there are certain projects where the only status that people could see is very vague in terms of task and tasks completed. It doesn't talk about the details of the three potential barriers. Some people want to know a little more detail. We do use some functionality that is turned on for certain projects that we use that people can submit a project status and that's helpful. But we don't use it across the board. I don't know the details of what someone's turning off or on and why that's the case. I'm seeing that across different projects and different workspaces.

This ability to allow other teams to see into our project status affects my organization. One of the huge benefits, even just with the integration with PPM Pro, since we use that as well and Projectplace, we've had a huge leap forward in terms of visibility across the organization of just what's out there. What's available in terms of projects, what's currently going on and we organize that, based on the hospital service line. We organize those things that people could easily drill down and say, "Hey, what's being worked on"? We slice and dice that in numerous different ways. The visibility has been great. It's just so we can have a huge initial step and our internal team's done a great job to work with Planview to help build some of those dashboards and things and actually do that in PPM Pro. I think there's some room to make it even more robust down the road. But there is great visibility early on. There are things that never existed before.

It has helped to track resources allocated across multiple projects. Within PPM Pro we have some of that visibility. I don't know that we see that within Projectplace, they've been splitting hairs, but I don't know that Projectplace allows us to see that. For example, with the projects I'm leading, I'm aware of who's on all of them and the usual suspects right across our organization. But I don't know if it's organization-wide, if we're there yet, by using Projectplace.

Projectplace definitely dynamically updates schedules as progress is made. It's great. The real-time nature of it all is a great piece to have real-time changes. People are able to see those activities and how they may have changed. That visibility is great. Then I use the conversation piece and really communicate with the team there as well. That real-time change is really helpful from my perspective.

The reporting end of it needs improvement. There should be more reporting, more data at your fingertips. It should be easier and a little more user-friendly. I know there is some there, but it's just how do you get more meat on the bones, if you will, of what's available. If I were to be an executive wanting to see a summary of my project, how do I better understand what's really going on? Is there a way to do that? Projectplace is the right place to do that, to store some of those updates and KPIs and that sort of thing. 

They should make more robust reporting.

Anytime our organization submits some feedback Planview is awesome with thinking through it, making changes, and putting in future releases. It's great to be able to provide feedback and our internal team has done that and there have been numerous changes. It's great. 

I have been using Projectplace for one and a half years.

I've had no issues with stability. Occasionally I'll see something that looks funny, I refresh it and it's fine. As a user, I haven't had any issues with the performance.

Scalability is performing fine. It's the cultural change management side of bringing people along this journey because we're really in the infant stages, it can only have been a year and a half or so, we're still early in that journey. It's bringing people along. I think the tool's working wonderfully. I know we add more and more stuff to it every week if not every day. The tool's working fine from that perspective. It's the other end of it and bringing people along in that journey.

We're not looking to increase usage. I know there are some rather significant initiatives coming forth that we're going to roll out as an organization that's going to be hundreds of people engaged and we're going to use Projectplace as the primary collaboration space to manage that work. I know there is some big thing that's coming up that we're going to use the tool for as the primary source of truth in terms of what the work is, the work that needs to be done, and the status of that work.

We're looking forward to getting that going and nothing else specific outside of that that I haven't mentioned already in terms of the types of work. I would have envisioned more portfolio usage to organize multiple projects or workspaces along with some bigger initiatives. I could potentially see that in the future.

I haven't dealt with technical support. I go to our internal team and they help me get the answer. I haven't had to reach directly out to Planview. All of the help information on the website is wonderful, straightforward, short, and sweet. I can usually find the answer I need and just go onto the website.

Prior to Projectplace, we were using Excel spreadsheets. Then we used Microsoft Project. It's a fine tool for what it is. It just lacks the collaboration, lacks visibility across different projects and across an organization. It's fine for a specific project in what it does but there are a couple of key differences that make Projectplace a pretty powerful tool.

I don't know the behind the scenes set up that had to take place to make it happen but from a user's perspective, it was seamless. It was a couple of pieces of information, it links to our single sign-on for our organization. From a user perspective, it's super simple.

The setup took around six months. It felt fairly short from when I started hearing about it from our internal team to when that was getting rolled out. We rolled it out to certain groups first and started using it. It took around six to nine months.

It's pretty minimal in terms of day to day maintenance. There's a team of four, however, one doesn't work in there a lot. I think it's really only a director, one staff, that's working behind the scenes and some of that's PTM-Pro related too, it's not all Projectplace.

We have hundreds of users. We're over a thousand in terms of people that have accounts but it could be someone is not using it.

Any department that's used it has seen the value. It's just the change of getting people to buy in, use it, and look at work in a different way. That's the key. Anyone who's used it has had a very positive experience, to my knowledge. It's very broad in terms of our organization of who's getting the value out of it.

From an organizational perspective, the transparency and accountability across a project, and the work that needs to be done is just wonderful. There's a ton of value as an organization for the transparency and accountability of work that needs to be done.

My advice would be to focus on the communication on the change side of it. The tool's awesome. It works. It's a wonderful tool, it's a great way to manage the work and do the work. 

I would rate Projectplace a nine out of ten. It's been a nice tool. I like seeing things visually as well. So I think it's the ability to have some detail, but the visualization of work and activities and things like that is very helpful and very powerful.