Planview Portfolios Initial Setup

BO
Planview Portfolio Support Analyst at Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.

I was not part of either implementation of a product instance of Enterprise One for either of the two organizations that I've worked in.

However, I can say that, with both of them, I have heard after-the-fact statements such as "We should have considered this. We should have considered that." Both organizations did not know the full scope. As an example, one of the organizations I have worked with didn't want to track at a strategic level. They wanted to track at team levels due to the traditional silos surrounding work. However, now that they're getting a taste of the tool, understanding that there is cross-collaboration, they want to manage at a program level. That said, you can't manage at the program level without using the strategy functionality within Enterprise One. When you get into strategy, it's no longer siloed work. It's organizational work. That it requires planning.

We have approximately 20 people that are classified as Planview admins, and some of those are global admins. Global admins include probably five or fewer personnel. Planview admins are probably 25 or less, and those all function together as a team. It is a collaborative effort to maintain the solution. To administrator Planview properly requires a representative from every organization and/or department that will use it to act as a liaison/admin/coach. That rolls up to a global administrative group which is about 25 people at least.

Most of the maintenance is governance. It's not maintenance for the application. It's maintenance for usage, roles, access, that type of stuff. From the application perspective, the maintenance is low. Once it's implemented, it's global, it's across the board, and it's in use. That said, there is administration for governance, usage, visibility, rights, minimal rights, and that type of stuff.

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MK
Senior Analyst - Technology at LPL Financial

It was straightforward because we had great support from Planview. They do provide consultants who work with you and walk hand in hand with you in terms of setting it up. Maybe the complex nature is just the way that the tool is designed. I know they've made improvements to it, but at the time, the interface wasn't very user-friendly. So, we knew we had to do a lot of handholding and training, but the implementation was very straightforward.

The whole project exercise, from the initial inception of the idea to the actual implementation or just the actual deployment going live, took about seven months. So, it was about a seven-month project from sitting down to gather requirements to full deployment and getting users onboarded, etc. Because it was a cloud deployment, it was very seamless.

The implementation strategy was just going through meeting with stakeholders and understanding the requirements. We initially rolled it out to a sandbox environment, and we did some user acceptance testing in there for about a month or so. We rolled out all the features and full capability after about a month of the UAT from our sandbox and copying over that information into another sandbox environment. We had created a parallel environment. So, we had two environments for us. One that we actually had rolled out, and one that was a cut-over environment, just in case something went wrong with the full deployment.

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JC
Director, Office of Process and Project Management at Electronic Arts Inc.

The initial setup was super complex. We were being asked questions that we didn't understand. It was pretty clear that we didn't understand. It just wasn't a great experience. We weren't ready for it. It was more complex than what we could take in the environment. We were answering questions on behalf of the entire organization when we didn't know what the organization's needs were. It was complex and compounded by the fact that we didn't know anything, making it incredibly challenging. Some of that was on us and some of that was on them.

If they could walk you through step by step:

  • What is it that you're doing? 
  • What is it that we're doing of this stuff? 
  • You are making decisions. 

We didn't understand the downstream impact. Nobody told us this is a critically important decision, and if you make this wrong, we're going to set up the whole tool wrong. It felt like there were a handful of those. If someone would've said that to us, maybe we would've been like, "Oh yeah, hold on a sec." We probably would've at least paused, which we didn't do.

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Planview Portfolios
March 2024
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PN
Project Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

I was involved with the setup for my R&D projects. The setup was extremely straightforward. It was a single sign-on, so it was pretty good.


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RB
Director of Enterprise Program and Portfolio Management at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

The initial setup was complex. It took 12 weeks. The size of our company made it complex. We have 800 people in IT only. The help that we got from Planview was good, however. We had them on sight for weeks at different engagements. 

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EduardoMaya - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Office Manager at Hoteles City Express

The initial setup was just a little complex. I rate the initial setup a seven out of ten. Deploying the solution took two weeks. While deploying the solution, we had two instances, one for the IT team and one for the business team. And we had to connect the two and explain things to the team. Only two people were needed to deploy the solution, me and another person.

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KG
IT Project Analyst at Tractor Supply Company

I would say that we have had some issues. This might just be more of a tractor supply issue, but we've kind of had to almost backtrack a lot of how it was originally set up. This is because the people from Tractor Supply who were there when it set up left four months in, so it was set up a little off, to begin with.

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KB
Enterprise Portfolio Manager at Wellmark

Since they've gone to the regular releases, the initial setup is pretty straightforward. I don't know that we were doing a good job of managing regular releases when it was major releases. It became a little bit more of a struggle there as we got caught up in our releases. Now that we are managing on a regular, monthly cadence, it's so much easier to take an increment than it was, skipping major upgrades and then trying to figure it out.

Upgrades are done overnight. We get it for a week or so to play in the sandbox and validate it, then they process it overnight, and then we're able to leverage it the next day. It's a very quick turnaround.

Because it's so component-based, there has not been a huge strategy that we've had to do from an implementation standpoint, but as we look at being able to deploy or mature some of the capabilities, then that would tie into the strategies at those points.

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PV
Supervisor ITSP EPMO at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

It was pretty straightforward. It sort of takes you through the step-by-step setup, so you cannot really go wrong. The tool itself guides you to the next step.

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RV
Portfolio Manager at State Of Delaware

I have been involved in the restructuring of the solution. The initial solution was not implemented by me but I have redone that whole implementation and we were able to downsize the support team from seven individuals to one individual.

The service that was implemented was very archaic. It was complex. The way that we've now implemented it is streamlined, easy to understand and identify how it's been implemented. The process took us six months. 

We went through a process improvement process where we identified the process as we would like it to be not as how it was in the system and using that, we identified a workflow in the official diagram for the various processes that we support and use.

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Mark Hillman - PeerSpot reviewer
Global Head of Portfolio Management at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees

The initial setup was straightforward. We took a very quick approach to delivery. It was simple from a Planview standpoint. The questions and approach they used worked well for us. There are no concerns about the initial implementation process. Aside from us being clear on our requirements, the tool itself is fine.

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GS
Vice President, PMO Portfolio Management at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

I was not a part of the initial setup because the original setup was done in 2013 or 2014 by a company that we acquired. In 2015, we migrated HPs' PPM. 

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NS
Enterprise Program Management Office, Center of Excellence Leader at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

I wasn't a part of the initial setup. I can't speak to whether it was straightforward or complex.

The deployment took about nine or ten months. We wanted to do a phased roll-out due to the different organizations that were involved and also due to the fact that we wanted to work with the different parts of our organization to get the sets of requirements configured.

In terms of maintenance, we have a team of about 30 people that does testing as well as configuration and deployment. There are some people that focus on the configuration of strategy information, and life cycles. Others work on configurations related to the work and any of the work-related attributes such as risks and issues and status. Other folks just work on developing Power BI and other external reports. We have other people that work on training and communications as well.

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GH
Sr Program Manager at Fresenius Medical Care

The initial part of the problem was when they implemented the original Enterprise One, they implemented the most complex version of it. Our maturity level is that we can't get people to follow basic Projectplace. So, we definitely see the roadmap for it to do transform our company's strategy, but we're just not there.

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HV
Program Manager at Citizens Bank

The last version upgrade that we did from 10 to 13 was complex because we were moving to a cloud platform from a locally hosted platforms. So, there were all of those issues. There was a significant amount of testing. However, we also had an organizational change, which changed the management of the group which was doing that application enhancement. Therefore, we had that complexity. Now that we're on the cloud, it should be pretty straightforward.

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CW
Manager, PM Tools at a logistics company with 10,001+ employees

It's very complex. Maybe it was a lack of defined processes on our side of things. We really struggled to understand how we needed to answer the questions that they were asking, so they could configure it to support our processes.

We overcame it by trial and error. We kept at it until we got to a point where we could at least deploy and start tracking time, then grew from there.

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NB
Sr Program Controls Analyst at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

I was not a part of the initial implementation. The company had set up the solution before I started working for them.

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LJ
IT Portfolio Management Senior Consultant at CNA Insurance

I wasn't involved in the setup of the tool here, but I heard was it was quite challenging specifically for configurations and to receive good technical support. It took a few executive escalations, but we were eventually assigned an excellent support representative. 

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MG
Senior Director at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

The initial setup was very complex. If you've ever done the implementation it's not an easy implementation. It's very complex. We had a group of 20 people working on this project for 6+ months to implement the tool. The configuration alone was six weeks just to set up resources, initial lifecycles, and things like that. 

In terms of the implementation strategy, we had the project all laid out. We knew what and when we needed to deliver it. We knew what the scope of our work was. We had a massive communication exercise. The change management aspect of this going from no tool to a very sophisticated tool like this one required extensive communication and change management. I was the project lead, I lep up the whole implementation and worked with project managers. 

Maintenance requires three people. I oversee them. I have two full-time people.

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CM
PPMS Manager at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

With the consulting team from planview it was a good process but sometime due to our business complex to get our work processes into the system. At the end of the configuration process all worked well

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RP
Planview Administrator and Robotic Process Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

In terms of the setup, I actually got hired on in the middle of implementation, but we had a Planview representative on-site performing the configuration. She basically did training while we were there so I was able to pick it up really quickly and become adjusted to building or configuring the system through configuring screens, scripted dialogues, and the lifecycle. It was really easy. It seems like a low-code solution, so it was really easy to pick up.

I would estimate the setup took from July to December. That is when we did the primary build-out of all of the integrations. We had a previous system that was homegrown through SharePoint that we had a lot of projects and data in. We had to do a lot of data manipulation in order to put it in a format that's ingestible by Planview. That took a little while too. I wrote a robot that would automatically convert all of the data over to the new data format, and we were able to send that to Plan B to have them import it.

The big parts of the strategy were just integrations with our financial system. We have a general ledger financial system that we had to integrate with and that we had to send a file over to Plan B to enter that information. We also have a Workday integration for resource management. That is a pretty nifty one where whenever the Workday feed comes over, it either removes resources, adds resources, and creates users based on if they're in a specific hierarchy of the bank. That was really nice.

From our end, it was primarily just me and my teammates working on the deployment. We were the primaries. We actually had one other resource through application development that was helping us. That was primarily for the deal integration. The Workday was just a file feed, and that was all in Planview. My colleague is also a Planview administrator. He doesn't do the robotic automation, but he does a lot of the architecting of the system.

For management, at this point, it's just me and my teammate. We have one other person who is specialized in the reporting. They do a lot of the SQL queries, SSRS, and Power BI setups, but they don't do really much of the administering of the system. 

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SL
Senior Engineer at Northwestern Mutual

I was not involved with the initial setup.

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AH
Sr PPM Administrator with 5,001-10,000 employees

It was more complex because I came from MS Project Pro. Planview has so much more to offer, so you had to consider a lot more. You had to figure out what its capability were, what your portfolio and programs were going to be, what your teams were, how they were structured, and what type of resources you had in what roles. So, there were things that we had to consider, but Planview asks the right questions. They bring that out of you.

We did a test for three months, then we did a soft launch. So, only our PMs were on it, and they brought all their projects over and managed their projects there. We had another tool, where we had to do double-duel entry for time sheets. So, when they ended their time sheet over there, then they started doing it in Planview. That was just to get them used to it, and saying, "We're going to do our time sheets." We were a company that already did time sheets. That seems to be a big thing for other companies. How do you get your people to do time sheets? But if you're doing financials, they're going to do time sheets.

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MR
Manager, Project Governance at Clorox

It was straightforward. However, I don't think at the time we understood exactly how all the processes were integrated. So, it was the learning experience for us.

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MM
Sr Domain Specialist at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

The initial setup was straightforward. In terms of the lifecycle, it was pretty straightforward and we wanted to start small and see how it went. We wanted to see how people would react to it. We were pretty small with the initial configurations.

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TS
Manager of IT at Regions bank

The initial setup is more straightforward for us because we've had other tools in the past, so everything is there. One of the things that we're excited about with version 18 is the configuration: Some of the entry points and user experience will be a lot better when we can collapse certain information. The clean look and feel of it will be really nice.

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AS
IT Architect at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I was not involved in the initial deployment here. I've used this product at two different companies and I actually wasn't involved in the initial deployment in either one.

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KK
Project Administrator at Texas Mutual Insurance Company

The initial setup is complex but it's huge. There's a lot to configure and there's a lot to consider and when we reengaged with Planview to get us to reset back up, we spent from March to June and beyond getting things configured. I look at trying to set up Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft teams. There's a lot to it. Is it impossible? Absolutely not. But would it change my mind on going with Planview? Absolutely not.

In terms of strategy, we were trying to re-initiate and figure out how we can mix the traditional sense of what we've used Planview for in the old waterfall method, timesheets, and all that. How we can blend it into this new, Agile methodology they were using. And we still have some teams that are very Kanban-oriented work comes in where it goes out, that type of thing. So that was our strategy to how can we mold all this together and be able to get the necessary information out of the tool that we want for upper management. We have a reset goal yet.

If it was up to management, we'd have it yesterday. We're getting back into some traditional project status things like what's the current health of the project, what's the current red, yellow, green status? We're trying to financially cost things out through the financial planning details and stuff like that. Our goal at least for projects data thing is hopefully by the end of this month with hopefully some more customized reporting, hopefully by the end of October.

We brought together a good cross-functional team between our PMO, which we have five people that write five or six people on the PMO. We brought in some scrum masters and product owners. In our core team we have about 10 employees working on it from a day to day maintenance perspective. There's one that would be me from a data maintenance perspective. It's falling mainly currently on the PMO members, which is to get to three contractors. There are seven or eight of us on the PMO.

In terms of how many people use this solution, we have all of our contractors entering timesheets, so we can do timesheet reconciliation, which is about 50 or 60. The number of people that are in it week to week are around 30 or so. That's going to increase as we're trying to move our project status thing back into the program manager, product owner space as well. 

We have time reporters, team member roles, program manager roles, mostly most of the users that we have set up are in the program manager role for being able to see statuses and updates statuses, we have about 10 people that are in what's called the requester role or more the executive I just need to be able to see the information. I don't need to be in the weeds entering data or anything like that. 

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DD
Team Leader at Wellmark

The initial setup went smoothly. It was straightforward. I don't think we had a whole lot of tickets.

We do a lot of upgrades. It's usually overnight and it doesn't take long. We had a major reconfiguration about two months ago and it went pretty smoothly.

From our side, I think we had about four or five analysts involved.

For the management, we have two people that help support and manage Planview.

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EB
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

I was around for the upgrade and it wasn't overly complex, but it's not an upgrade. It's an installation and a migration of the database, which is into itself complex. If you could just do a simple upgrade and not have to worry about that, that would be so much easier, which is my experience with other applications.

A typical upgrade takes four to six months and costs half a million dollars. 

In terms of strategy, we have to use swing equipment and we set up a parallel environment all the way from pre-production into production. Once we are confident in each environment level, then we can move on from dev to QA. Then once we're happy with QA, we've done our full functional system testing, integration testing, and all-inclusive regression testing, then we can promote it to production. There's so much configuration that's done after and because there's so much configuration done after you install, that's what makes it complex. Planview does a configuration upgrade because all of their configuration is captured in the database. They'll take an extract of that and then they'll work on it and provide it back to us so that we can apply it into our environment. It's not the easiest thing to do.

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KK
IT Project Director at UT MD Anderson

The initial setup was complex because we also implemented it in a three month time frame. This was a pretty aggressive timeline for us. We got it done.

We didn't get all the integrations done, but that was sort of our phase two. We started in December with our build portion and went live in March.

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TG
Director of IT at a educational organization with 10,001+ employees

The initial setup was complex. I think it was because of the consultants that were sent out to help us. They didn't understand our model and I think they were a little junior. They sent us a brand new person. We were his first assignment and he wasn't sure of how to set it up properly so we went through several consultants and rework those over about a six month period. Our deployment took six months. 

In 2012 our implementation was the basic Planview which we used the request to intake the work projects, to capture our approved book of work for portfolios work and resources to understand the capacity of our workforce.

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MS
Platforms Administrator at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees

The initial setup was complex. We didn't know the tool in the beginning. So, it was harder to understand what is being done and what information we need to gather. Planview helped us gather all the information and deliver it. However, in the beginning, it was so blurry. We didn't know what was happening. We just went with the flow, then suddenly, "Ah!" Things started clicking. We started seeing things as they became live. Then, we were like, "Okay, now I'm getting it."

Configuration-wise, we took six weeks. Then, we had some issues after the configuration. It took us four more weeks to get it back into shape. Overall, it took us about 10 weeks.

We are planning to go with this project now that we finished the configuration. We are planning to go live on the second week of January 2020.

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NM
Sr Information Technology Supervisor at Solar Turbines

We found it the best to hire the Planview team and get the setup done through them. It took a couple of days.

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DM
Sr PPM Service Manager at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

The initial setup was straightforward. 

The deployment took us three and a half months.

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CM
PPM Services Manager at Roche Diabetes Care

The initial setup was straightforward.

We plan to upgrade to version 18 next year.

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MK
Sr Analyst at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

It was a bit complex due to the change nature of the product from where we were with our old legacy application, then moving onto Planview. Once we settled in, it became easier to use and manage.

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JC
Director of Operations at UK Santander Technology

The initial setup was quite straightforward. We had a very special launch that took three months during its configuration cycle. This was unprecedented compared to similar implementations that we had in the past course. It was brilliant.

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GG
Project Manager at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

We found it straightforward. Some of our end users found it more complex because they were required to get in and do new things. The expression we used is, "We're all growing new muscles together. We're working out new muscles and we're learning new things." Like when you start a new workout routine, you're sore in the morning. You're going to get sore from Planview until you build up muscles to do this. There is a learning curve.

Our business users are still overcoming the learning curve, not as fast as we would like, but they are getting there.

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LM
IT Business Office Group Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I did not enjoy the setup process. It comes with a set way of thinking that is sometimes limiting.

We started the last deployment in June of last year and we deployed early November. Employees started using it a hundred percent in December of last year.

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JH
Director IT at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

The initial setup has been pretty straightforward. The deployment process has taken us four to five months so far. We are hoping to wrap up by year-end.

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BH
R&D Project Management Coach at Johnsonville Sausage

It was fairly straightforward. We understood it pretty well out of the gate. We understood the format. 

The format of the tool worked well for us, but there were some things that we were not too familiar with in the tool. We probably didn't learn some things and some training in the tool before we actually got into implementation would have been better. There were some things we were agreeing to ask along the way where we didn't quite see the end picture because we were trying to implement the tool. We were trying to make decisions when we were not sure what the end game looked like. Once we started working on it, it was pretty intuitive and worked well for us.

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GT
Planview Administrator at AXA XL

Our initial setup took seven to 10 days. 

We started with a sandbox environment, went through all the test cases, and then moved to production.

We have about 2,500 people using Planview Enterprise One. They span the roles of team member, project manager, through to portfolio manager. We also have about eight staff who are admins for the solution.

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LM
System Administrator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The initial setup was very complex. It was rushed and there wasn't a lot of follow up after the configuration. Our consultant was very knowledgeable, he was very good. But there's only so much he can do in so little time. The configuration was basically the consultants setting everything up with very minimal help or interaction with our administrators, and because the configuration and go-live are so far apart, there was not any followup. To improve after configuration, there should be a series of follow-ups with the system administrators and the product owners, as well as going live, make that available.

The configuration was about six to eight weeks. We had our plan B consultant about that long. But after the system is configurated, we didn't go live until December, because after configuration we also have to take time for the creation of training material to train our end users because it was a completely new system. After configuration, you need a couple of months to just create the training material and provide training and adoption of the application. We were not able to go live until about December because of the time it takes to do the training and adoption of the application. By that time when you go live, you're not really using the system right after configuration until then. There are going to be things that come up that a consultant should still be available for the solution as the company goes live.

We had implementation strategies based on the user role. To start, if you think of end-to-end projects starting with the requester, all the way down to closing the project. The strategy was starting at the initiation of a project and continuously moving in the training, the order, or at the same workflow that a project goes.

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DN
Senior Consultant / Project Manager at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees

We worked with Planview consultants to configure Planview to the organization's needs. So, if there's something that is important that the customer, namely ourselves, understand what we want so we can help Planview to configure it well. Investing in knowledge before starting is quite important.

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it_user644253 - PeerSpot reviewer
Planview System Admin/Project Coordinator IT PMO at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Initial setup seemed straightforward but was relatively complex. As I've mentioned elsewhere - the system has a lot of moving parts. Additionally, their terminology is different from other mainstream tools.

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Buyer's Guide
Planview Portfolios
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Planview Portfolios. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.