What advice do you have for others considering Planview PPM Pro?

I would rate the solution a four out of ten.

This is a solid solution and I think it's well-designed for the executive level, but there's still work to do when it comes to working with teams. I rate the solution seven out of 10.

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.

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 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.

My key advice is to standardize your terminology for projects and programs in portfolios; create a roadmap. Don't be afraid to say no, because you'll get different project managers with different experiences. Everyone will want to say, "Oh yeah, this is what I've done in the past and what I've done in the past," but don't be afraid to say no. One of the challenges with any PPM tool is that if it's not Microsoft, then people aren't normally interested and I think the other side is that actually by centralizing this stuff, you're exposing weaknesses of project managers that they may not feel comfortable with. Try and position it as this is here to help you and to help us identify where we need to give further support. It's not there to question your ability or capability. It's here to give us that information that we can then help you to deliver. We spent far too much time aggregating data from many different data sources. Having it in a single central place, we get one version of that truth. Everyone's aligned, everyone's standard and it makes it a lot easier for us in our management team to be able to visualize and view the data that we're capturing. I would rate PPM Pro a nine out of ten. I think there's still room for improvement but there's a very active roadmap.

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.

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.

You need to have a very clear understanding of what your requirements are, the use cases that you want to implement, and what is that you would like to develop in the tool. Based on that, you need to ensure to put the right configurations in place so that the right kind of data can be populated. Doing a thorough analysis of that requirement is key for putting up the right design and right configuration for the tool. I would rate PPM Pro an eight out of ten. There are still features that the product needs to deliver. The standard project management, in terms of the capacity of the use cases related to the portfolio, capacity, refills, time-tracking, is all good. Other features that are key from a project at a portfolio perspective in terms of auto-calculation, managing contingencies at a project level and the portfolio level need improvement.

Overall it's been a great tool to use as far as project management. They like the tool. I have a couple of PMOs who like MS Project but they're given the PPM Pro. I have other PMOs that love PPM Pro. It's just a matter of taking time to get used to when they're used to MS Project. PPM Pro is a great tool and you can get it to your needs for the most part. There's not an application out there that you're ever going to find that's going to fit your needs 100%. You can only get the application to your status that far and then you have to adapt to its status as well but overall, it's a great tool. I would support it. I would hype it up to have people use it. I would rate PPM Pro an eight out of ten in terms of the overall application, what it supports, what it can do, and for me, a project that I have only took me a couple of minutes only because I have a couple of tasks, but for me, this was the first project management application I've ever dealt with. It's fine for me. Especially since I only have to support it and not do projects.

I would have changed the project team that implemented this and I would have found someone much more technical if I had known that Planview wasn't going to do it. I'd probably try to find somebody who knows more about reports and dashboards because that's where the real bread and butter of it is. Right now we're getting by with some reports. Having that resource, which we just don't have right now, would have been helpful for us to really knock it out of the park when we went live with it. My advice would be to find someone technical to build it and then I would rearrange some of the implementation workshops. It felt like we did things out of order a little bit with going to admin training and setting them up. I'd want them to do a much more thorough assessment instead of relying on Planview to tell us how it was going to go. The way that they said it was going to go and the way that it went was completely different. I think having somebody that maybe had been through an implementation like this before on the team would have been helpful. I would rate Planview PPM Pro a nine out of ten. It's good for now. It's the right stuff for us for the next three years. We may evolve and grow into something bigger, but right now I think we're in a good spot and it's been deemed a success and a successful project so far by our leadership.

A project management tool can be this intuitive and this customizable. PPM Pro has great customization capability, which makes it suitable for any product or any business. It has scalability, flexibility, and customization. I can customize it the way I want, especially for the projects or the permission analytics. I think it has an intuitive interface and customization capabilities. If you have a cross-management team or a bigger team that has great project management capabilities go for PPM Pro. If you're also into reporting, dashboards, and visualization, I think PPM Pro is a great tool. It has great customization capabilities and is very flexible. I would rate PPM Pro an eight out of ten. It's highly customizable and flexible. That makes it a little bit difficult also because we have a lot of divisions and a lot of users who are utilizing PPM Pro and they go ahead and customize something based on their liking, but the other divisions don't like it. Then it becomes a little bit of a challenge. You have to call a committee and establish a process that is the process everybody is going to utilize. That makes it a little bit difficult. The customization is good but also a little bit difficult. That's where those two points are lacking. Otherwise, it's great.

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.

Always try stuff in the sandbox before you try it in production. My advice would be to definitely have a charter built. You need to know their processes before they start using the tool. Don't think of the tool as a way to build your internal processes. Have your processes in place before you start using the tool. The reason I say that is because we had people creating a business sponsor when it should have been a project manager. Then, we had project managers that really should have been team members. We had a lot of cleanups to deal with after we got everything in there. I helped document how projects should be entered, how fast should we set up the naming scheme for things. We had a lot of back and forth about what the costs were and how to get the cost onto the portfolio. Know what you want to get out of the tool and know your processes before you put anything into it. I would rate PPM Pro a seven out of ten because of the little glitches that can be worked out like the copy and paste feature and scheduling reports to run and adding it to the calendar.

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.

My advice would be to know your business case and make sure you test that in the sandbox environment. The biggest lesson I have learned is that the current editing capabilities and the task list are really difficult and arduous and that it's much easier to build out a project plan in Microsoft Project first and then upload it once it's completely finalized. So it's not really somewhere to build a project. I would rate Planview PPM Pro a six out of ten.

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 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.

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.

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).

I would give PPM Pro a rating overall of nine (out of 10). What would make me feel like it were a 10 is a simple, silly thing, but if the application had a little more color to it. It's very monochrome. With the advent of a Kanban boards, especially with the new request module, there is some color. I greatly appreciate that, but there needs to be a bit more color added to it. We are not using the solution’s Lean/Agile delivery tools.

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.

I would rate it a good nine out of 10. We are still working on how the solution’s collaborative work management will affect our operations. We are not yet using Projectplace.

There are changes in the product roadmap that I am excited about, including improvements to the reporting and enhancing the dashboards. I think it will help a lot. My advice for anybody who is researching this type of solution is that Planview is definitely a good option. Whenever you're setting things up though, try to think of things at the big picture because once you start creating your solution, you're kind of in that solution. It's really hard to backtrack. So, just make sure you're thinking it through. Don't just give everybody access and tell them to give it a try, and then try to work backward whenever you figure out which one you want. Use sandbox environments. The tool works very well, but because it does have the ability to be extended and configured pretty well to what you want to do, you can make a mess of it as well. This is obviously a leader in the market and there's a reason for it. It does what it's built to do very well. There are a few places where it can be improved, but overall, it definitely seems like it's in a good spot and it's going in a good direction. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have heard about some of the upcoming features and we are looking forward to them. For example, we are interested in more detailed card management within the Projectplace arena. We're still in the infancy stages of using this tool, so we're still learning a little bit about the features and functions. I am interested in learning more about LeanKit and hope to do so in the future. My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is not to be afraid to change your business processes. We thought we had optimized our project management practices but when we implemented PPM Pro, we realized that we needed to make some adjustments and for a bit of time it was a struggle. However, leveraging best practices from an industry perspective is really starting to pay off. It was necessary for us to take a step back and think about what the best practices are and how can we use a tool to enforce them. I think that it will pay off enough in the long haul. From a portfolio manager's perspective, right now, I'm getting what I need. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

It is a solid eight out of 10. We do not use PPM Pro with Projectplace.