OpenText Project and portfolio Management Valuable Features

Aphiwat Leetavorn. - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Director, Share Holder at Marco Technology

Micro Focus PPM is flexible and easy to use. It's simple to customize and configure workflows. Micro Focus provides a single place where teams can track and measure progress toward their goals.

It's easy to integrate Micro Focus PPM and synchronize it with our client's systems. PPM has an API for everything, so we can integrate it with whatever tool we want. I also like the Lean Portfolio Management tool.

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SW
PPM SaaS Application Manager at a government with 10,001+ employees

I like the ease of customization from an admin perspective. I'm really excited about some of the things that are coming in version 10.0.3 as far as what admins are able to do. 

I also really like how the program portfolio and project management roll up into each other. That's going to be a really good feature for our organization because we have a lot of things that are related, and it's nice to have things under one umbrella where we can go back to them. 

I also like the fact that it's not very difficult to integrate with other applications, as long as you have the right people with the right skill sets on board. I have seen us integrate with a couple of other cloud solutions and that was done fairly quickly. It's the ease of use and the ability to customize PPM that really work in our favor.

Another useful aspect is that the solution gives us a single place where teams can track and measure progress towards their goals. That it is very important from an upper management perspective. Part of the reason that they're using the application is to have a cohesive place for tracking business strategies and organizational goals, and to only implement projects that line up with them.

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RC
AVP at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

It's a very detailed tool. As far as an enterprise is concerned, it gives you the flexibility to manage everything: portfolios, projects, finances, proposals, resources, and time. It gives you everything, including reporting. It takes care of even the minor details that need to be captured. The project management functionality is configured really well within the tool. That stands out.

Also, the portfolio management dashboard for tracking objectives and key metrics is important. Every project and portfolio is categorized under business objectives.

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Buyer's Guide
OpenText Project and portfolio Management
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about OpenText Project and portfolio Management. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Mahmoud NourElDin - PeerSpot reviewer
ITSM Consultant at Vodafone

The ease of customization of the tool means I can support multiple departments in our company.

Our users find it easy to use the service and the forms. And the Project Management module is one of the best modules that they work on.

It is very important that the platform gives us a single place where we can measure progress toward goals, as we have weekly meetings with the CTO. We present these consolidated overviews and dashboards to him so that he has an overview of all the projects and can see the status of all the problems that we have and we are working on.

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KL
Project and Portfolio Management Governance and Support at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

I like the automated calculations, especially on the resource side. When project managers enter their resource requirements into their staffing profiles, they are automatically translated into labor forecast calculations. PPM automates a significant portion of the forecast calculations. Timesheets are also built-in. We automatically process time sheets and bill them accordingly. 

PPM provides a consolidated view of our teams and their progress toward goals, which is essential. The bank has invested a considerable amount of funds into these projects. The executive committee must have an overview of the value that these projects bring to the banks. They need to ensure that each project is aligned with the bank's strategy and brings value to our customers, stakeholders, or employees.

All the information decision-makers need can be found in PPM. We've integrated PPM data into other tools that provide real-time reporting to create dashboards. The audience for those dashboards is the executive committee. When they need to know what's happening, they have instant visibility. The bank uses information in PPM to decide on which initiatives to prioritize. PPM has several built-in dashboards, but we also build customized ones.

I haven't worked with the Kanban feature, but we use the other portfolio views. It's helpful, especially now that we are driving the portfolio views. Each portfolio manager uses dashboards to manage the collection of projects in their portfolio. There are many dashboards available that I am still unfamiliar with because I don't use all of them. 

The portfolio structure was set up a long time ago, and PPM allows us to have a wide-lens view of our portfolios, and we can drill down into a specific portfolio and see all the objectives within it. And within each goal, we can also drill down to see particular initiatives that belong to the objective. The hierarchy is quite clear. We also have a portfolio to view financials. 

We have "theme backlogs," initiatives that have already been incorporated into the portfolio but are waiting for the funding to be approved. Theme backlogs have their own project information, including staffing profiles, financial summaries, and forecasts. Those are used in decision-making. There's a consistent quarterly review of these backlogs, and the executive committee uses the information inside those backlogs to decide which ones will proceed through to becoming actual themes.

It's easy to integrate agile tools and synchronize the execution layer back into PPM. I work with the support team providing first-level support to all the bank users end to end. When we need changes or a new feature, we raise them within PPM. That's one customization we did. We submitted our internal change requests within PPM and worked closely with the Micro Focus partner vendor, which does much of the development.

We assess which ones we can do, prioritize them, and they roll out the changes within a month or a few days for a minor change. We do a lot of enhancements. There are at least a couple every quarter. The partner vendor quickly deploys changes and new features. It's one of the features we could "sell" to the internal users of the tool. 

We tell them, "If you find something that you think would be useful that isn't in PPM yet, let us know, and we will place a change request." It's one of the most important features because our users are demanding. They want certain features. Micro Focus regularly rolls out significant upgrades and new features, but we don't necessarily use all of them. 

Our boss is satisfied with PPM, and I don't think the bank will replace it with another product soon. It is constantly evolving, and they have been responsive to our customers' feature and enhancement requests. They often come out with features we had never considered, but when they roll them out, we see how useful they are. That's one reason we are staying with PPM. It's adaptable. We're bringing in other departments and customizing it according to their requirements. 

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Attila Mozes - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Director at provalida GmbH

The most valuable feature is resource planning or resource management.

Micro Focus Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) has a very strong workflow engine.

The functionality is really good with a lot of modules, and there's almost nothing missing.

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MM
Manager application development at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

The number of different things which it is able to do. There are so many different pieces of functionality, and we use almost every single piece from deployment to demand, project, resource, and time management.

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PS
Managing Director at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Generally, we use all the modules and all features. So, every module has its own merit. Overall, they have a very strong workflow management capability. That's a very strong feature because then you can model any process easily. Whether it is a demand management process, a pipeline management process, or your project delivery methodology, it is much easier because of their workflow management capability.

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it_user568059 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Manager at a maritime company with 10,001+ employees

It is user friendly. The product has a neat and clean user interface. It serves the purpose of what we are looking for. It's a great tool for portfolio management and project management.

In our organization, we use this tool for portfolio management.

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it_user671394 - PeerSpot reviewer
Resource manager

The portfolio management and the resource management are the key features.

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AM
Sr. Technical Consultant at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I have seen PPM evolve a lot over the period of time i.e. since v7.5 days.

PPM has come a long way, since 9.X on-wards it has shown massive improvements both at user end as well as functional end. We are currently on 9.40 and are soon going to upgrade to 9.41 as well.

Most valuable features of PPM are:-

- The data provided by PPM is trusted and is available almost immediately; without trusted data there is very less scope of any tool to be successful.

- It provides real-time visibility into all the projects, programs and portfolios; it provides critical information at the right time and helps in taking the right decision at right time; decisions such as finances, resources etc can be taken on the go.

- The what-if analysis (Portfolio management) gives the organisations a futuristic view of how well the organisations are going to fare in achieving their business objectives.

- 9.40 has a massive improvements in the Program Management module, gives more comprehensive view of the programs running in the organisation. The timeline feature of the program show real-time status of all the projects.

- Seamless integrations into the Jira, Agile manager, MSP makes it more powerful - 9.41 on-wards it has been more easier than ever.

- Dynamic out of the box portlets and reports are other excellent features. e.g. the ability to view the capacity, demand of resources across the organisation via Analyze Assignment load portlet makes it more substantial.

- Compare to work plan feature is another excellent one that can be harnessed for decision making.

- The ability to track down every single dollar spent in the organisation makes it more powerful i.e. you can track down which project spent how much on which resources doing exactly what. The costs can be further classified either capex (capital) or Opex (Operating).

- Web Services, integrations to other third party tool like SVN (subversion) makes it more skillful. This helps in automating a lot of things if needed.


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Islam Bayraktar - PeerSpot reviewer
PPM Services Director at OPTIIM

There are two key areas where the features are valuable; the implementation perspective and end-user functionality. PPM really has a powerful workflow and form engine that allows us to create workflow complexities and processes. There's a good balance between flexibility and best practice and it generally allows us to implement any kind of requirements a customer might have. It's a good balance of flexibility and functionality for configuration. It's a really powerful tool. I saw the other tools bending, compared to them it's really good. 

UI is user-friendly, it is quite simple and intuitive. It ships with a balanced content of the dashboards and the reporting features. There's a good interaction between modules, that allows organizations to have a full e2e cycle starting from the idea/proposals in the demand management, transform and execute in project management and track and manage grouping into programs and portfolios with out-of-the-box roll up and roll down features and data transparency. Approach management is really very powerful. It has also integrated with Microsoft Project and supports the hybrid projects with ready-to-use out-of-box agents that integrate with the agile tools like ALM Octane, Jira, CA Rally and etc. 

I like the new release approach on the Micro Focus side that turned into a rapid quarterly basis with transparency for the end-users and the ability to impact the content of the future patches and versions.

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it_user648759 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Of Information Systems at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
  • Time Management
  • Resource Management
  • Project Management
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Shirish C - PeerSpot reviewer
Works with 5,001-10,000 employees
  • Project management
  • Resource management
  • Program management

The workflow and project planning features are good. 

Highly customizable workflow is the best one of them.

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CT
Senior Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Project management, time and resource management, demand management, and workflow automation.

These are the most critical and important modules that can make the PPM usage successful.

These are connected to each other. If want to do PPM, you can not say 'I will not manage demands', nor can you say 'I will not do resource management, etc.'

These modules are the base for a successful PPM usage. If you use these modules properly (with industry best practices), you will get the most out of it.

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JH
Board of Directors; Treasurer at a marketing services firm

Being able to track usage.

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it_user704031 - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Director Benelux at a tech services company

Recent Program Management lifecycle, Program Management aggregation views due to interactive UI (selection of risks, issues, and changes in Program Overview) and “flash look & feel" of this functional chunk, which is different in comparison to other parts of HPE PPM.

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it_user677724 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager / Consultant / Global presales at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Microsoft Project integration: Microsoft Project is, in my experience, the most used project planning tool. Companies will not change to another project planning tool. The integration is seamless and on different levels. The new file-based integration, without the need of having Microsoft Project even installed, is a huge advantage!

Financial management: The financial management is very extensive, complete and easy to use without too much configuration. Extensions to meet company needs can be done with virtually no limitation.

Resource management: The resource management module is very complete and covers most of the time all needs of customers.

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it_user674328 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The demand, project and time management parts are the most valuable features. We can manage our demands very easily with HPE PPM's flexible infrastructure.

The staffing profiles and work-plan structures are very useful for capacity management. It is also user-friendly.

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it_user674328 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Demand, project, and time management parts are most valuable. We can manage our demands very easily with PPM flexible infrastructure. Staffing profile and work plan structures are very useful for capacity management and are also user-friendly.

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it_user705723 - PeerSpot reviewer
Budget Management at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Scenario comparison is the feature most valuable to us and the reason why we decided to choose HPE PPM over other portfolio management products.

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it_user704010 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT PMO at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Demand, project and time management parts of the tool are the most valuable. We can manage our demands very easily with the PPM flexible infrastructure. The staffing profile and work plan structures are very useful for capacity management, and they are also user-friendly.

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it_user674352 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Demand, Dashboard, and Reporting. These are the most powerful modules for our customers

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it_user704016 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Consultant

Demand Management and reporting are the most valuable features.

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Buyer's Guide
OpenText Project and portfolio Management
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about OpenText Project and portfolio Management. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.