Planview Portfolios Reviews

I am part of the admin team that uses this. So we kind of help run it behind the scenes, but company-wide, we mainly currently are just using the project management system for our IT projects. We have a few business projects that have started using it, but it's still mainly only with our IT organization. And in planning for next year will be the first time that we have used it for our annual planning purposes. That seems to be working really well.

We really like how it ties into Projectplace for the annual planning. The integration has been really helpful in terms of keeping the business case files together. Once a project is created in Enterprise One, it shows up in both places and that's been really helpful. It's also a really good place to pull data from. In addition, it helps us better manage our people and get better insight into their hours.

We just started using the planning tool and it has been an improvement from each team running projects individually in different Excel spreadsheets.

Enterprise One has been helpful with prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. This is because sometimes we have upper management expecting more work than our team has the resources to carry out. Being able to use the tool to give them insight into our capacities has helped make decisions. It gives us the proof we need to show higher management how something will or will not work in terms of our team's capabilities.

The solution allows program managers to group work together and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. Setting up portfolios has worked really well for us. We are able to drill down into details the underlying consolidated information.

I would give the solution’s ability to create summary reports across multiple projects a three out of five. I think Enterprise One is great at being a source for data, but our company is still running reports externally. Currently, I'm working on setting up more specific reports and pulling into different environments, but overall I would say it's a great data source, but not the best reporting source. The best way to improve this would be to have an integrated tie-in with Power BI or Tableau.

One big issue we have been having during our annual planning is that only the creator of a portfolio can edit it. This means that only the creator of a portfolio can edit which projects are included or excluded in it. If the person who created a particular profile that we need to make changes to is out for a week, we can not put it into a big overview until they come back. Admin rights for portfolios would be super helpful.

I have been using Planview Enterprise One since May of this year. The company set it up in 2017/2018 but has been using it full-time only since 2019. 

My impression of the stability of the solution is that it is stable. The upgrades run overnight and it seems to work well during the day. We have had a few minor glitches, but nothing that hinders the broad use of it. 

Right now, Enterprise One is pretty much only being utilized by the IT program, but I know there are several other parts of the company that are looking into using it. I think the program itself would allow it, especially in terms of licensing. I think we have an unlimited license, but I think the biggest issue with adding more parts of the business into it is having enough admin staff to run it right now. There are five of us and so adding more parts of the company would just make it harder in terms of the administration side of it.

I think they've been helpful and we have never had any big major crashes. But, with any minor glitches we had, they tried to figure everything out within a couple of weeks and get it fixed on the next update. I think we get monthly or bi-monthly updates.

We previously used Microsoft Project. 

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.

We got help from Planview's people on the implementation. 

When we have teams using it correctly, I would say the solution works really well. It is really helpful in terms of scheduling and being able to look at which teams are needed on projects. We just have some issues with buy-in from some people.

I would say it works really well for forecasting remaining effort, especially in terms of forecasting the dollar amounts. We've gotten pretty good at adjusting rates because we have a lot of contract workers.

The solution's view into resource capacity and availability helps us manage workers. This is particularly true if you have a resource manager rather than just a project manager looking at just one factor. A resource manager can look at the time they have spent on every single project and adjust and talk to the parts' managers. Enterprise One makes it really easy to just pull the resource management tab and quickly look at who is overloaded. You can color code the resource management assignments page screen to make it better to look at.

Private Cloud

We have historically used it for resource management and project, so, work management. They're maturing different pieces of the resource management and the work management to leverage some of that. Other use cases that we've started with would be planning, strategies and outcomes. We have it initially built out from a beginning use case and continuing to mature that as we roll out some change in the organization of moving to a strategically managed portfolio, not just a tech portfolio.

The more we have access to data and being able to portray the reality of the situation, as long as people are managing the data right, we have more opportunity to make data-driven decisions as we move forward. As we look at what's happening in a project and its execution throughout the lifecycle, its understanding where they're at, what they're doing, what challenges they are having, and what their forecast looks like. Are they going to be able to meet some of those milestones, or do we think that the data says they may have some challenge? And then we can ask the anecdotal and the non-data-driven questions about what's happening. It helps us drive to ask more pointed questions and dialed-in conversations.

Enterprise One has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. That's what we're getting to implement now. We're working through the hierarchy and the alignment piece right now with our executive leadership. And what I'm excited about is we'll be able to show them the alignment in data and reports. As we move through the planning process, it's not just being tracked outside of that and it's not just conversational, it's about understanding what they're wanting to do, how it aligns, and then not only the strategy but the outcome because that's the important part.

We can determine if something is our strategy, what our desired outcome is, then how it aligns, and how it is going to add value. I'm excited about what it's going to bring into our planning as we move forward from here. This was something I've been looking forward to for quite a while, so I'm glad we're turning the corner to implement that.

A lot of of the value is around the project metrics so far but as I get more plugged into the strategic management, it's strategic planning and programs and then tying that into outcomes. I work with executive leadership and that's really what they're looking for, to say, "Okay, what outcomes do we want to achieve and how are we going to get there, plan that out, sequence that out, and then get the work to do that? And then track the work back to where we're headed with our outcomes."

A lot of seeing what stage work is at is based upon how you instruct people to build them out. As far as the tool, the tool has the capabilities, it's just getting the people to make the right choices in how they set up and then manage the data. That's always the challenge.

It does a great job with forecasting remaining effort. The dependency is on the people and the process. With whom the people are managing, what their future plan looks like so that the forecasting can be accurate. It's about the due diligence and the work between the resources, resource management, and project management to say, "Here's what our schedule is. Here's the work remaining." And as long as that's being managed, it's great.

The resource capacity helps us look at not only our future forecasting and what we need to do from a resource standpoint, but we can go back and see what we used. We can even leverage historical to understand what our future might look like and find the balance there. It helps us do both.

Its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects is great as long as you're managing the base data correctly in the roll-up. I love a lot of the out-of-the-box reporting that they have and the ability to manage the configurations within our team. To be able to say, "Okay, we want to show this or we want to slice by this." And being able to be flexible in that.

The reporting options are great because not only can you have so many out-of-the-box, but you've got the abilities to use Power BI, pull down things in Excel, and do portfolios. There are all kinds of different ways to manage data.

As we transition into using the strategies and the outcomes, I'm very excited about some of the strategic dashboards that are out there. One of the things that we've started looking at are TreeMaps. TreeMaps have taken an interest in our leadership to see the distribution of some of the information and just by showing it in different ways. The only thing I'd say is that it would be nice to see some of the TreeMaps, not just on strategy, but on other data elements too.

It provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. Historically, we've been just doing technology data, tracking, and reporting, but as we shift into the strategic management, I'm excited about the opportunities to be able to manage all work, not just tech work. We'll be able to track and understand where we're at with milestones towards our outcomes. We're looking forward to the system transition there.

It's quite flexible, depending upon how the organization chooses to use it, which I think is great. There are some different ways that we've chosen to use it that maybe down the road, we may flex and change that as we go forward. I like that there's an opportunity to use it and partner with Planview to understand what your use cases are and what's the best way to manage through that.

It can go through and group together in a strategic program on the strategy side. We've chosen to implement it so that it ties up there and then manage the initiatives. And you can see then the attachment and the roll-up, so it's an association. It sounds like there's maybe some more coming as we look at some more flexibility. We're able to drill down to details underlying the consolidated information.

It's helped us drive awareness into what's going on and then being able to manage our completion rates better.

We've been using it for a while, so it's about maturity. It's about being able to build out things in Agile groups and teams and some of that. Then really trying to drive into the direction of Lean Portfolio Management and more Agile program management, I think is where we're heading.

I have been using Enterprise One for three and a half years. 

The stability has been great. I haven't noticed any issues as far as that goes. I think anything that we've had any challenges with has been handled very quickly and it's usually in an off-hour. I haven't noticed any issues personally.

The scalability has been fine from a user standpoint. We haven't had any issues. Our biggest thing is as we switched our contracting, we looked at FLEX licensing and I think that's going to be a huge asset for us to be able to have much more flexibility in bringing people on and having roles go up and down, versus a contracted set number of roles. That'll help.

In terms of increasing our usage, we're pretty early in our expanse of the capabilities. A couple of years ago, I walked through the capabilities with our leadership team and road mapped out from a portfolio standpoint what I'd like to see us leverage across the organization for me to be successful in strategic portfolio management for the organization.

We're working down some of those implementations and those capabilities. We started by ensuring that we were reset and set up well on the handful of core capabilities. We'll continue to build that out as we go and mature. I love the roadmap of where they're headed with capabilities and what they're offering organizationally. It aligns with where we're headed in our organization too.

I don't personally use technical support but our administrator does. I know that we've been plugged into conversations that she's facilitated with them. Some of the times we have to just ask them to contact us because it's much easier to have a conversation about it versus what we think is wrong and what we're seeing in our scenario. 

I'm not sure what my current company previously used but where I had worked previously, at my other employer, we used Clarity. That was the only other tool that I had used. They're similar to a certain extent, but what I see with Planview is where they're headed and how they bring things together, more than just what I understood Clarity to be doing when I last used them. Keeping up with where things are headed.

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.

We've only used Planview's global consulting services. We haven't used an external company to do that.

For maintenance, we have one main owner of the application with her back up, so we've got two people that support Planview overall for our organization day to day. They're application owners. 

In terms of users, we roughly have 1,000 to 1,200 technology partners using it and then a handful of business partners.

We're looking at the FLEX licensing or the partner licensing for our renewal. Where we are looking at having access to all of the products in our contracts so that as we decide to continue to build out the capabilities and make changes, we have access to their other products as well.

We've got PPM, but we're not holistically using that a ton yet. As we build out our business architecture and enterprise architecture, we've got that and we've got the ability to use it. One that interests me from a portfolio standpoint is the connectivity to Azure DevOps, potentially LeanKit, and Lean Portfolio management capabilities that way. It's on the roadmap.

A big lesson for the organization was not to so prescriptively narrow their opportunities. The way they had it configured prior to me coming on, they had shut themselves off from being able to implement feature capabilities because they had driven out so many restrictive requirements that some of the things couldn't be leveraged.

We've been understanding what the capabilities are and where we would like to be, and having a different conversation with Planview when we partnered with them and their global consulting services, to understand what that roadmap looks like, so that we could be guided a little bit better about what to implement and when, and how it might work together as we move forward.

My advice would be to be open to the possibilities and not tying yourself too closely that it has to be a certain way. Be open to understanding where you'd like to head and then how that all needs to come together, and leveraging the opportunities that way.

I would rate Enterprise One a nine out of ten. We really like the tool and a lot of the possibilities that are there. We've really connected with our support, consulting, and even our sales staff. As we've worked with other partners and conversations throughout the processes, we've really had an enjoyable experience with them as we've gone through our transition. Not only that, we like using what we see every day.

We have a portfolio of 81 projects that are all related to IT. I work for an oil and gas company, but my customers are IT. So, the use cases are related to the active projects that we're currently running through the organization. We have CTOs that are working on it, so we use it for capturing time and dividing time. We use it for the entire lifecycle of the projects, and we also use it for planning our next cycle, such as 2022 planning opportunities.

Enterprise One helps with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. It makes conversations easier and leads to more effective communication. Instead of having to go through all the details, we can just look at the tool. We can have multiple people look at the same set of data and then work through and prioritize the list of opportunities that we have, for instance, for next year. We create a subset of data; for example, we create an opportunity before it becomes an active project, and we input all the data. By having standardized data inputs, it becomes easier to compare multiple opportunities because you have all the information at hand.

Enterprise One allows program managers to group work together to see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. It makes life simpler. They have an easier overview. To some extent, it is Planview's influence, but then it is also because of that dashboard capability that we have to apply at the backend so that the portfolio managers can look at their portfolios through a dashboard. So, it's not necessarily 100% within the tool, but it has made our life easier. It is a 50:50 contribution of Planview versus Power BI. We are able to drill down into the details underlying the consolidated information. So, we have better data accuracy and, therefore, better metadata.

The sheer amount of information available in one single interface is valuable. Everything is there. It is also a lot of work to maintain all the information, but generally, you can find everything you need within this one tool.

Its reporting needs to be improved. My main complaint when it comes to Planview is that it is good to maintain all the data but to actually use the information that is in it, you actually have to use a different tool. We use Power BI. So, we pull all the information, and then we use a Power BI dashboard to stage or look at the information.

I can look at one project to see what its stage is, but it is not easy. I would be able to get the information because it is a part of the work and assignment detail, but it's not something where with one click of a button, I have the information. The information is not too easily or readily available to see the stage of work.

In terms of Enterprise One's ability to create summary reports across multiple projects, 
I can input the information on a project-to-project level. So, I have the information in there for each project, which goes to a central database. However, getting the information out of the tool is not so easy. So, entering the information input is great, but I'm not sure I know how to get the output. I'm not sure if my company knows how to do that. We have a Planview team, but I doubt that they would be more knowledgeable on this particular aspect. That's because they're more data and tool-oriented. They're not for user support. They're more like tool support.

It works for large work efforts, but it is too complex for smaller work efforts. Planview has a different tool that they want you to use for less complex work. They want you to buy both tools, but I don't know how the integration would work. Having to have a second tool for less complex work sort of gives you the idea that the original tool, Enterprise One, is too complex. It should be simpler to use so that I can also use it for less complex efforts.

In terms of forecasting the remaining effort, if it is expressed in dollars, then I'm pretty okay with figuring it out, but when it is expressed in tasks, that information is not necessarily there for me. The timeline doesn't really give me that overview. So, from a financial perspective, it is good. From a scheduled perspective, it is not so good, and from an execution perspective, it is even worse.

I've been using Enterprise One since 2018. In our company, we have been using other products from Planview way before that.

It is better this year than in previous years. There used to be data issues and duplication issues. The snapshots weren't taken every month. So, the snapshots wouldn't work. There was some sort of MuleSoft software being used that was creating issues last year. This year, generally, we have had fewer issues with the tool itself. That may have something to do with the fact that we have a release schedule. Planview releases an upgrade or update every month, and then our team combines the updates for three or four months and rolls them out all at once. The quarterly update schedule is probably working better.

It works for large work efforts, but it is too complex for smaller work efforts.

We have an operations team within the company, and they work with Planview.

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.

We probably used a consultant, but I cannot be sure. It was done too long ago, and I wasn't involved.

They do ROI all the time, but I don't know if they've done it for the implementation of this tool.

I would advise making sure that your data is up to speed and your data is clean before you start implementing it. That's because once it is implemented, it is a lot more difficult to clean up your data.

Using Planview Enterprise One has made me aware of the sheer amount of data that is there to classify for a single project. When you look at a project, you generally think about the normal stuff such as what is the beginning date and end date, what are the stages, how much you spend, how much you spend per stage or per month, whether it is an actual or a forecast, etc. There are just so many different data points to one single project. I wasn't aware of them until I started using Planview Enterprise One.

I know that Enterprise One has the capability to view resource capacity and availability, but our company is not using that capability to its fullest extent. That's because, in the previous versions, it wasn't there. So, it is hard to get that paradigm shift. People use other tools to look at resource availability. About 50% of our projects run through Planview, and the remaining 50% of projects are managed out of the organization itself. So, they are not necessarily tracked in Planview. So, when I look at resource availability, I always have to look at the general overview. I have to combine those two sources to see how many resources I have available for a certain period of time.

Enterprise One doesn't provide end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. It is good for projects, but it is not good for non-project work. At least for us, it does not provide that capability. That's why only about 50% of our projects run through Planview, and the remaining 50% of projects are managed out of the organization itself.

Enterprise One provides a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people, but we don't use it.

I would rate Planview Enterprise One a seven out of 10. I like the tool, but I am looking forward to getting that reporting and analytics part fixed. For me, that's not working right now.

Private Cloud

Microsoft Azure

Our primary use case is for all of our agency's IT work that will be recorded as projects and/or contracts that we have with our agencies from an IT department perspective.

We are using Enterprise One to record all the new business-case intakes. Any new project that comes in from my agencies is being recorded in Enterprise One. That gives us a better view of what's out there, what needs to be done, and what the requirements are for my agencies. It also shows us how we can focus on the demand for those agencies.

We are not using strategic objectives yet, but we have a custom prioritization calculation that has been done for each project that comes in. Work is prioritized based on a specific scoring with some markers on each project. It's affected us to a point that we can react to demands.

Enterprise One provides a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people but it's only as good as you've set it up yourself. You can set up Planview in any way you want to use it. The type of resource that you assign is based on your own company's requirements for that. It can be anything that you want. It's flexible in configuring these assignments. This flexibility enables us to look at demand from agencies and with our own productization system, allow us to assign the resources that are needed. 

The most valuable features are scheduling, resource management, and, from a project perspective, the functions like issues that change orders. They are valuable because, from a project management perspective, we use the workflows that we build for project management and do active risk management and issue management for the projects that we want for our agencies.

We use a phased approach for our projects: plan, initiation, planning, execution, implementation, and closure, and all those processes have their own lifecycles. Then we have some customized cycles in support of that to ensure that if a contract is needed, that the contracts are being signed off by a security organization as well. Any network and infrastructure changes will be reviewed as part of that process. We use this end-to-end process for our project managers.

The forecast for remaining effort is something that we are starting to use. The challenge with that is it is only as good as the resource managers are editing and entering the allocations for the resources. An effort was started to refocus the whole resource management. With that automatically comes the forecasting. We also have some custom reports that allow us to look at our workload.

From the perspective of what's in the pipeline, what is currently being worked on, and what's needing help, we are able to know instantly where we are.

We use custom reports and we use portfolio management to look at it from a forecast perspective like who's been assigned to a process and what the workload is. Then we use it for resource portfolios for each team. They use it to assess the ability to reassign or assign resources to upcoming work. But most of the reporting is done through custom reports and some Power BI reports that I've created.

Its view into resource capacity and availability definitely helps us to manage work. It allows us to react to a new demand. It also helps to provide end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. We use it for resources like hardware licenses, software, and such.

Program managers are enabled to group work together and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. Because we use portfolio management or resource portfolio management, with that setup, we can look at it from a program perspective. If you identify portfolios within a program or projects within a portfolio program and the same with resources, you can classify them by type, by departments, and desk to see where your availabilities are.

We can drill down into the details underlying the consolidated information through the individual resources and we also do that through a custom Power BI report. Then based on time entered on projects, we can see where resources have spent time in the past, up until the current day. We have a statistical overview of where our resources have gone.

Our on-time completion rate has been reduced but it all has to do with the size of the project. When we do our planning for projects we tend to deliver it within a timeline, but there's also external influence that you can't control. From a project management perspective, we always deliver what we tend to deliver.

The biggest room for improvement are the scripted dialogues. The scripted dialogues are a logic that you set up to force a certain workflow or process to happen. It's very old in respect that there are no clauses that you can apply to that logic. That definitely can use a lot of room for improvement. The amount of text that you can manage within a scripted dialogue is limited as well. That can use some room for improvement as well.

We've been using Planview Enterprise since 2013 and we moved to Enterprise One in 2018 with the latest version.

I'm very impressed with the stability. We are a client that uses the monthly updates. So far, we have not had any issues when it comes to the new versions that have been released. I'm very pleased with the stability of the cloud platform that we use.

Scalability is not an issue because we can always add more licenses when we need to. We have almost 400 licenses that do not impede the workflow or the process. It's able to cope with the amount of users that we have.

There are about 400 users. The majority of those are people that enter the time or are the actual resources working on projects. They may have a section of project managers, then have a section of managers and resource managers. We also have a section for a specific business case.

The deployment and maintenance are all done by me. We heavily use the sandbox environment to prototype changes, then test those changes and then implement those to production. We continuously make enhancements to the system and we use a sandbox and production approach.

For the specific tasks that we do with respect to business case intake and project management, it has a 100% adoption rate. We have plans to expand the number of users in respect to time entry. That'll happen over the next year or so.

Their support is great. When I open a case I can always cut the responses within a couple of minutes, depending on the severity of the case.

My company used a different solution before my time. I think they used a custom solution that was built in-house that was replaced with Planview.

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.

We didn't use a consultant, we just did the deployment ourselves. There is an in-house team who worked on it. 

I can't quantify the ROI because we've been using it for so long that we really can't go back to an older system and compare it.

Pricing all depends on how many users you have planned to use. It's kind of expensive but at the same token, it's worth the investment for the functionality that it delivers.

We evaluated ServiceNow but based on the Gartner review of the marketplace of Planview, there really aren't any other competitors that can provide the same service that Enterprise One provides us.

My advice would be to have one or more individuals become experts in the use of Planview, in terms of how to set it up, how to maintain it, and how to create a lifecycle. There are scripted dialogues because the more knowledge you have within your own organization, the easier it is to accommodate change requests from within your organization.

If you have to call a consultant for services it's rather expensive and they might not be able to react to the changes that you want to implement sooner rather than later. So my advice is to create experts within your organization.

Make sure to test a lot. It can be very complex. Have a second set of eyes that can see the pitfalls that you, otherwise, might run into.

I would rate Enterprise One a ten out of ten. 

Public Cloud

We use Planview Enterprise One to capture information about all of our IT projects, IT resources, and financials associated with those projects. We then use information from Planview to understand how we are progressing in plan delivery, what our pipeline of work looks like, and what resources are required to deliver that pipeline of work and the execution. We are utilizing a broad range of capabilities across what Planview Enterprise One provides.

We don't use it for task management, and the work breakdown that we keep in Planview is relatively high. As a result, it is at key milestones rather than individual activities.

In terms of features, the financial planning modules are quite good, and they are the ones that are used the most. For us at this stage in our use, the financial planning feature is the most valuable feature of Planview Enterprise One.

The reporting is poor and requires improvement.

The tiles and exception-based activities in the application are sufficient to get by. However, when it comes to producing executive reports, MI reports, or any other type of reporting, we must exit Planview and work offline. We have been working with them to improve on that, as well as using some of the Power BI capabilities that have been available for a while, but it's still more difficult than it should be.

In the next release, I would like to be able to use the data in the tool to gain insight much more easily.

We have been working with Planview Enterprise One in our company for the last two and a half years. Prior to that, I implemented it in a different organization. I strong level of knowledge of this solution.

We are six months behind because we had a few problems when we took current releases. While we didn't do any customization, some of our configurations failed in some releases and required re-work.

We haven't run into any scalability performance issues. We have over 500 work items and 2,500 resources, and it's been fine for us. 

We use this solution across the company's IT and have approximately 250 users.

We've opened a few tickets with Planview due to bugs, defects, or configuration issues. Because it varies so much, I would have to put their rating somewhere in the middle. They are sometimes excellent and sometimes poor. It all depends on the circumstances.

Neutral

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.

We weren't looking at this as purely a return on the investment project. The return is generated by the projects themselves, allowing us to deliver the projects more efficiently. It's difficult to quantify the improved performance of our project delivery. 

We went through an RFI and RFP process before going to market. We specified our requirements. We went through a series of presentations from vendors to determine who could meet our needs. And we looked at five, and we narrowed it down to three: KeyedIn, Daptive, and Planview. The process we went through there made it clear that it didn't really matter which tool you chose; what mattered was whether or not you felt the implementation process was going to go well. In addition, we compared user feedback to how well the user would interact with the tool. Against those two key criteria during the implementation process, Planview outperformed the others at the time. Based on user feedback on the UI and usability, Planview came out on top.

My advice would be to be very clear about requirements and the associated value. Planview, like many other tools, has a broad range of capabilities, it does some things well and some things not so well. If the things you want to do are the things it excels at, then use it. If you want to do other things, this is not the tool for you. I would be focusing on the requirements against the capabilities, the core capabilities of the tool, rather than the features that may or may not have been added.

It does what it says it will do, and the majority of it is fairly simple to do. I would rate Planview Enterprise One a seven out of ten.

Public Cloud

We use it for change control for all IT changes in the organization. It is used to do the project work for anything that is changing from the technology perspective. We also use it for forecasting and planning work on the projects. We don't do detailed planning in Planview.

We are using the July 2021 version. It is a cloud version. We use Planview's cloud. They host it for us.

Having a single source of the truth, specifically with the integration with Power BI, enables us to give leadership more relative content for decision-making. From being just a local project manager and reporting status type of a tool, it is now being leveraged heavily in the executive decision-making process. They meet every month with summary reports that we generate to make decisions.

It has helped with the prioritization of projects. That's a part of the reporting process. From an IT perspective, we've gotten better at the delivery process. We're not, by any means, near great yet, but it is a journey that we're starting. Over the last two years, we've had a lot of adoption because of senior leadership's involvement, and therefore, things are moving more aggressively towards that point where it is more relative to what we do on a day-to-day basis.

It allows program managers to group work together and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. It puts the data that the program managers need right in a single source. However, they don't do capacity planning and capacity management in Planview. So, while they can see their burn rates, the resources that they're using, and the roles that are being leveraged, they don't actually use it for capacity planning.

We use it for high-level milestone management. We use it to see if projects are falling behind. We also use it for change control and financial reporting. Our senior leadership makes decisions based on the data that is reported out of Planview. So, it is used not for detailed project planning but rather for executive reporting and consolidating the information down into manageable pieces.

It definitely improves the change process when things are running behind. When we didn't have a tool or when we didn't use Planview necessarily, data was more or less the opinion of the project manager or the program manager who would then say that we're just going to push this date out. Because there was nothing locked in stone, it was just reported that we're going to make a little change here and a little change there. They moved dates, and everybody agreed verbally. There was no question of you didn't complete on time, whereas now, the system asks about your target date. If you change that target date on a huge project by a couple of days or two or three weeks, it is obvious. Previously, where you wouldn't notice it because there was no real firm tracking mechanism, today, it stands out. When the date goes from January 1st to January 29th, the system shows that as a variance or a change. Now, it is obvious when things move, and you know when things aren't completing on time. With the reporting that we're doing to the leadership team, they can see when things aren't going as planned.

We use time reporting. We convert time reporting into financial costs and do contractor and capacity planning for our resources. We track our work. That's the module we use extensively. As a matter of fact, we have upwards of 300 open projects at this given moment. It is pretty close to 300 open activities that are working.

It is not an end-user-friendly product, and that's really the biggest thing. The hardest or the biggest hurdle I've ever had to face was adoption. I did the installation of the HP product in 2011. The company used it from 2011 to 2015, and the adoption was very high. When I was given the Planview product, adoption was very low. It wasn't as extensively used. We actually had people who wanted to go back to HP PPM because the interface of Planview was so broken, and it still is to some degree. It is not user-friendly. It doesn't flow the way a project manager thinks. What we did with HP PPM was a lot more manual programming. It wasn't as nice in terms of the interface, and it wasn't as pretty, but you could design it and build it so that everything flows with the way you worked, but Planview doesn't quite do that. There are a lot of screens. You have to jump back and forth. There are so many different places you have to go to just to do some basic tasks. That's the biggest thing that has really hindered adoption.

We use it for forecasting and planning work on the projects. We are able to leverage the data that it provides to do some more concise consolidated reporting, but we mine the data using other functions. The data is collected into Planview, but its reporting is just not quite what we're looking for. We don't use it to do reporting directly. So, we create data sets or pull the data out of Planview, and to get the data down into a view that leadership can then work with, we reformat it by using tools like Excel, PowerPoint, and those kinds of things. We do quite a bit with Excel. We export the data and run it through certain functions. We deliver that data to different groups for feeding into other products because we don't currently allow direct interface into our financial systems. To eliminate the need for exporting data into Excel reports, for the most part, the Power BI capability will eventually replace the external reporting that we do by using other tools. Power BI interface is a huge improvement in the capability, but it is new in our organization, so we probably have a learning curve there. The SaaS reporting is obviously more complex and less user-friendly, but the Power BI solution has definitely more reporting, and it is leadership-data focused. It easily allows the creation of dashboards that executives can manipulate and work with themselves.

We don't find Planview's guides and documentation extremely useful. There is room for improvement. It is very difficult to find things on their website. There is no easy way to find what you're looking for. Everything appears to be broken and in small snippets of data. When you go to their customer success center sites for documentation, everything is just a little snippet of information. There is no clarity about how something works, and how something should be configured. If you're an administrator, it is even less useful, and it is very vague. We end up spending more time taking that snippet of information, and then we have to actually go and figure out the details ourselves. It is not something that tells you how to make something work. It says this is what this does, and this is what it can do. You have to then go and figure it out. They have a consulting arm of the organization, and I think they expect you to call up and ask them to come and show you how to configure something.

I have been using this solution for five years.

It is very stable from an operational perspective. In the five years that I've been managing the product, I've never had an outage of more than 15 minutes.

It seems to scale very well. We had migrated 1,900 users from HP's PPM to Planview, which was a user community of 300. We now maintain an average of 1,800 users in the system. So, we went from 300 to 1,800, and there wasn't any impact on the performance of the product.

In terms of the roles of its users, we have project managers, portfolio managers, developers, release people, architects, engineers, and a management team that does overall oversight.

I do use technical support. At the moment, I have to. Most of the time, they're knowledgeable. They tend to be responsive. I'm the product owner for the company that I'm with. So, from my perspective, they're never responsive enough, but when I think about how bad it could be, I want to say they're reasonable. Sometimes, the turnaround time is a couple of hours, and other times, the turnaround time is months but not from an actual impact to resolution. Sometimes, it takes weeks.

There was a merger of two companies. One of them was using HP PPM, and one of them was using Planview. The company that was running HP PPM decided that it was better to go to Planview, and that's when I became the owner of the Planview product. That's when I started the current path that we're on for migrating to the way the product is used. They switched because it was cost-effective.

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. 

We're starting to see a return on our investment. Obviously, it is a journey, and you have to first get adoption. We're starting to get some serious adoption. Now that leadership is starting to adopt this solution, they're looking for more from it. So, as we grow, we get more from it. 

We got an organized environment in the beginning in terms of project reporting and project management to a clear set of guides and principles. We have a single source of data for that kind of stuff, and that was a huge piece because it was all broken before. So, on that journey, return on investment has to be looked at from an individual company's perspective. We're seeing the return on the investment more so today because the leadership team is now using the data to make real-time decisions. They're forecasting their work for the next year. They're now using the data that's actually in Planview. Three years ago, we didn't do that.

Planview is a little pricey. From a licensing perspective, for just a simple timesheet user who does nothing in the system but reports time, the licensing is a little pricey, but you have to look at it from what it is that you get.

We have 6,000 users, and I don't manage the system at all. I just have to add them to the system. The servers, maintenance, OS levels, security patching for the OS, and all other things are not something that we maintain. So, you have to look at it from an operational perspective. It is not just the product itself. A holistic view has to be taken when you look at the product and how you're going to support it. I would have to hire an entire operation staff to bring it in-house, and at the end of the day, that might cost me more. The license might cost me less. I might get a whole lot lower cost on my contract, but at the end of the day, I'd have to have all of the backend resources and the knowledge on the backend resources to support the app locally. So, the cost is strictly going to be looked at from a company's perspective.

We've looked at other options. We've looked at the possibility of a different product. As a matter of fact, our current agreement is about to expire. So, we're looking at other options and other capabilities to see if there is something out there that makes more sense for us.

We've looked at Clarity and Azure. We have Azure and Jira in the organization today, and they are used widely. We also have ServiceNow in the organization. We are evaluating whether those products meet what we get from Planview today and whether we can reasonably migrate to that type of solution. It is really more about the migration to a new product in terms of adoption and training.

Its view into resource capacity and availability helps us to manage work to a degree, but we don't use it extensively. That's the one area where we're looking to improve or increase the capability of the product from our own internal perspective. It is not necessarily in terms of the way the product works; it is in terms of the management and administration of our resource pool. That's the step that we're working on now.

We don't use it for end-to-end work management, resource assignment, and creating summary reports across multiple projects. All the reporting is done in Power BI.

I would rate Planview Enterprise One a six out of 10.

Public Cloud

Other

My company uses the solution to do investment planning, project and program management planning, and they do some resource management using that primarily for cost forecasts.

I work on one of the support teams here. I do some configuration and I do some training as well as some design work that involves configuration within the tool.

It's helped the company due to the fact that it does a reasonably good job of tying in those resource forecasts. We're able to integrate with cost information from other systems that we have. It does a pretty good job with that. Also, the ability to tie the risks in with the work is pretty helpful. I like that. Having that being sort of a single source of truth for the risks and for the resource forecast, that's been very useful for us.

The solution has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic initiatives or objectives. We are now funding incrementally, planning for shorter periods, and doing reviews more frequently instead of doing yearly reviews.  We're able to do that using Enterprise One. That's helped us a lot.

I like to work in the resource assignment view. I like the ability to plan tasks out and sequence them. The risk management is great and I appreciate how you can tie risks to the work level items. It helps us forecast resource costs and we’re able to tie the risk to those aspects which helps us keep those items on track.

We're not using the solution for forecasting remaining effort. We use it just to forecast resource costs and other direct costs that are entered.

The solution view into resource capacity and availability helps us to manage work.

For example, we're currently moving forward with what we call capacity-based planning. The tool is integral to how we're doing that.

The solution provides a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people. It does allow us to have different assignments for resources. It does have some limitations, however, it does allow us to do that for the most part.

The solution allows program managers to group work together and see the resource demands and cost at a consolidated level through reporting. The reporting is pretty basic in that it allows us to export the data. It requires project management to undertake some additional analysis outside of the tool which we're able to do at this point.

When it comes to managing project plans, the solution works fine. It works well for that. The challenge that we have is that, in our environment, we don't necessarily use it as designed, we use it a little bit differently. That's not the tool's fault. We don't advance the system time every day or every week. We do it monthly. We currently are not doing extensive dependency management within the work.

The out-of-the-box reports, as far as I can tell, are weak. We've had to build a lot of reports using Power BI, which we connected to it.

Reporting is not my focus area, however, one of the things that would be nice is if we could connect our Tableau to it. We do use Power BI, however, we have also been using Tableau. It'd be nice to be able to use that toolset as well for reporting.

One of the problems that we have is that any of the data that comes out of Enterprise One is a point in time. We can't show change over time. Therefore, if we're looking at, for example, progress on work, and we wanted to know if a schedule has gotten better or worse versus last month or last year, we're not able to do that directly on Enterprise One. We have to use a reporting database and extract the data periodically and then use that as a basis for our ability to show change over time. That's a hassle. It would be nice if Enterprise One was able to show change over time, by having the ability to report on data from prior periods.

The solution doesn’t provide end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work. It doesn't work that well in and of itself for planning Agile delivery, for example. I know that they have LeanKit, and we have LeanKit licenses, however, most of our enterprise is using Jira. We are interested in connecting to Jira. That should be coming out in the next year. That said, at this point, I would say it doesn't provide us the end-to-end work management or resource management that we would like without that Jira plugin.

If it could provide historical data or prior time period data, then we would be able to have fewer integrations. That would be an improvement for us. It would probably mean an ability to shrink our footprint on some other Hash Apps, which would probably mean cost savings for us and a simplification of our reporting. 

There could be some simplification on how we manage the users on the system. When you have a user for the system, you have to manually provide them grants. It's not like you could clone a user and provide those same grants to somebody else on their team. You have to do it all manually. That's a hassle.

The inability to paste in data, or do bulk data updates is a little bit difficult as there is no bulk update for work and resource working assignments. You have to manually enter all that information. That seems unnecessary.

If somebody's allocated at a certain rate for a certain time period, you should be able to copy that across and say, this is flat for the rest of the year and then modify it with any exceptions. It's not easy to do that sometimes.

We are not able to drill down into the details and align the consolidated information with this tool. We’d like to have that capability. Every time a project manager or a program manager has to export information and then do pivots and do whatever else in Excel, it means that there are copies of data floating around that we'd rather have stay in the tool. We’d like them to be able to do their analysis and reporting directly out of the tool. We're not there yet with that.

I would not say that the solution has increased our on-time completion rate.

I'd like to see some of the configurations simplified. There's a lot of weird duplication of fields when you're looking at the alternate structures. There's inconsistency around field naming conventions.

I've been working with the solution since 2018.

The stability is pretty good. It's a little bit slow. In particular, we have some projects that are pretty sizable, and then there's substantial performance issues. For some projects where we have hundreds of tasks with hundreds of resources to open, it might take on the order of five minutes to load up, which, to open a screen, is not a reasonable amount of time. That's not normally acceptable.

We've had to artificially break things down into smaller projects, even though that's not the way the work is being managed. That's been a challenge in terms of when we've had to execute workarounds.

There's a scalability problem around very large projects. If you get a large project with a lot of resources and you want to project out for several years, we've had to change that forecast due to the fact that it wouldn't scale. Opening it now takes five minutes, however, in the past, it would take 15 minutes to open and then change things. It was really slow to refresh. We've had to break large projects down to something smaller to make it still somewhat unmanageable, but better.

We have 500 or 600 staff that use the product. We have some people that really just manage risks. We have some people that do resource forecasts. We have other people that really are focused on reporting. We also have other people that do project management and others that manage programs. On top of that, we have some people where their extensive usage really has to do with certain life cycle approvals.

Usage may increase slightly. At one point we had almost 800 users. We were able to cut that down a little bit. We may go back up above 600 in the near future, I don't know for certain. If we have any growth, it would probably be 10% in the next year. That is my expectation.

Technical support has been pretty good. We had some challenges as we were not on the latest platform, on the latest release, however, we just did an upgrade. We're on the July release now. We're two months behind. We are not yet accepting the monthly releases.

Overall, technical support is usually pretty responsive.

Positive

We used Microsoft Project Server for some things, and for other things we used EPPM, which is from HP.

We switched from EPPM to Enterprise One. It had a good review and we wanted to give something new a try. I wasn't at the company at that time, so I don't know if it's the best alternative to EPPM. For the scheduling stuff and detail planning at the task level, we switched from Project Server based on cost. We knew that Enterprise One had the functionality, so there was no reason to support two tools any longer. By focusing on Enterprise One, we were able to simplify the assets we had running our software platforms.

I have not used SAP or Oracle products for project management in the past.

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.

We worked with Planview directly.

We didn't implement this product to expect some specific financial return. We were just trying to enable certain functions that we have not monetized. We don't have a payback period or anything like that.

I do not have information about the pricing. I know that we have on the order of 600 people on the license, however, I don't know the costs around it.

The company may have evaluated a few other options. Project Server was one of them.

It's my understanding that Project Server has better integration with SharePoint, which is in some ways similar to Projectplace. Project Server is easier as it requires a desktop client, or, at least it did previously in order to maintain the schedules, which was very convenient for a lot of users. That said, in a lot of ways Project Server and Enterprise One are similar, however, honestly, I like Project Server better.

We're just a customer and an end-user.

We're using the July release currently.

The solution meets our needs at this time. It has some limitations with respect to some functionality we're not using yet related to team-based assignments. Maybe it's an area that is not fully applicable since we're not using it yet. It's a feature that was rolled out a year or so ago, or maybe a little bit more, and we have not yet adopted it.

One of the things that I did hear, although I wasn't part of the decision, was that the Gartner Magic Quadrant was a big factor in swaying management's decision. Enterprise One was in the Magic Quadrant. It was well-reviewed by Gartner. I would advise others to give this less weighting and to really look at how configurable the tool is. Project Server is easier to maintain in terms of configuration and operations than this product. 

If I had a colleague at another company and they asked me, "Hey, do you like it?" I would say we do like it, however, it's not perfect. Nothing's perfect. However, users need to really think about how easy it is to find resources that can configure it or how easy it is to actually do those configurations.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

Public Cloud

Other

We're a global company. The biggest thing for us was to find a digital solution that enabled our global company to see everything across the globe. We have a lot of different groups at this point going up on it. We have manufacturing facilities, quality, human resources, IT, etc. The whole gamut is using Enterprise One, then beneath that we have certain groups who are using Projectplace and we will be implementing LeanKit as well.

We can see all the different initiatives that folks are working on and have been able to hook groups up, to say, "Let's not redo that. We're already working on that." Instead of having all this duplicity, we have one streamlined group working on it together.

The solution’s collaborative work management has affected our operations. We were in a place of using a billion emails, Excel templates, etc., so project documentation would get lost and no one knew what was going on. From a time savings perspective, the fact that we have Projectplace specifically, with everything in one place and we are part of a workspace where we can go and see what's going on, that has had a major impact in the way that we work.

It helps make sure stuff is aligned to strategy.

The biggest impact has been getting all these global groups into one space so we can even have intelligent conversations about what are we trying to accomplish. Before, it was just different regions doing whatever. Now, we're all talking the same language, and that's good.

It gives us the visibility and ability to see exactly what is happening for our organization. Even though we're a global company, we had our Asia Pacific and EMEA groups doing whatever they did. Then, in North America, there was no visibility across the board. So, there was a lot of duplicity and duplication in different projects, initiatives, etc. So, this solution is really giving us the ability to say, "Wait a minute. You're about to initiate this. We've got another group who is already doing that. Why don't we link you guys up together to figure that out?"

This has been a huge win because of the collaboration piece. Unfortunately, our organization has two different tenants of Microsoft Office, which means we can't communicate on teams, as an example. So, we have groups utilize Projectplace in place of that. Therefore, we can all talk, understand what's happening, and communicate that way, which has been amazing.

The colloboration between Enterprise One and Projectplace has been good because we didn't have a standard place to do this type of collaboration. There are a billion emails with Excel sheets, etc., and the way that we've utilized it is from the PM up. They are in Enterprise One, and they build their plans, doing whatever provides good reporting for our executive level leadership. Then, at the team level, there is Projectplace. The fact that we can integrate our Enterprise One down into Projectplace or sync the spaces has been really helpful.

I don't find the solution flexible. We have almost like a third-party group who has to do a lot of our configurations. It's a bit painful for us anytime we want to make a change. The other issue is that we have different groups all in the same instance. So, if one group wants to make a change, it impacts everyone. Then, we all have to come together, to say, "Yes, we approve this change, or no, we do not." Thus, it has not been as flexible for us. However, I don't know how much of this is a result of the way that we set up the configuration versus the true flexibility within the tool.

As an organization, we implemented it four years ago. Recently, they created another group, which I just joined. Hence, why I've only been using it for about two months. We're in the process right now of taking out what was put in because they didn't put it in well. We're redesigning our whole Enterprise One configuration.

I've only been in it for a couple months, so I haven't really noticed any stability type issues. 

Some of it's a bit slow. We are starting to get some Power BI dashboards built into it. Sometimes, we have to stay updated or refresh them, which I have noticed that in comparison to other BI solutions I've used, there seems to be a bit of a lag. However, I don't know how much of this is because the way it's hosted or if it's a true issue.

Because we're in this process, I know that our organization right now doesn't have a very positive view of Planview's scalability because of the way it was implemented initially. So, we're in this whole process of ripping the whole thing out, reconfiguring it, and putting it back. 

So far, the support has been really good. We have a third-party through whom we submit most of our ticket issues. 

We got to sit down with the technical support face to face to sort of crafting what our solution would look like. I thought that part went really well. They seemed to have a really good understanding of what we are trying to accomplish and what our prior challenges were. So, I feel really confident that the solution they're proposing is going to meet the basic needs of where we need to go. 

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.

We're going to be doing a fast track deployment with Planview. We have our first meeting to talk timeline on Monday following the Horizons conference.

We went to a roadmap meeting with this very specific thought in mind that if we couldn't figure out how to do this in the way we needed to, then we were prepared to walk away from it. But, we did not have another vendor selected because we recognize and can see the power of the tool. It's just figuring out how do we best use it for our offices.

I would rate the product an eight (out of 10). I've seen enough use cases from other organizations who have really transformed the way that they work. It's just clear that my organization is just not there. I have a lot of hope that this product will be what we need it to be once we get this initial configurations figured out.

The biggest advice is to make sure you've done a maturity assessment on your organization. Whatever you initially implement, you're implementing at the lowest common denominator. For us, they tried to go immediately after things like capacity planning and resource management, but our maturity isn't fast. As a result, our users ended up being very frustrated. The other piece would be, when you implement it, think about the users who are doing the work. We implemented based on what we thought our executives would want to see, and that is backwards. Those are the two biggest things. The tool is so big and powerful that it is very easy to say, "I want to do all these amazing things." But, if your business maturity isn't there, you're going to fall and that will hurt.

Public Cloud