Planview Portfolios Valuable Features

BO
Planview Portfolio Support Analyst at Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.

The capacity planning is great. I love the ability to forecast resource usage and to work for as long a period as I want to track. That's a really big, important aspect of resource management, and, specifically for companies that have contractors in which those contractors might only be funded due to a project. If you don't have project dates in and you don't have funding, then you don't have validation for why you have a resource. It makes it so that there's some accountability there. 

I love that using this tool gives you the ability to plan work out three, six, or even 12 months in advance very successfully. It gives us a real picture of what our organization really thinks it wants to do, what our organization is really doing, and then what our people are really doing, and reveals who's not working on anything.

When it comes to managing project plans, it works. I had this discussion yesterday with someone who's in more of a senior leadership position than I'm in. One of their concerns was the inability for project managers (PMs) to manage work in Microsoft Project and then sync that data to Enterprise One, and I said, "Well, then, if they're going to do managing the work in Project, they might as well manage it in Enterprise One," as MS Project only offers the PM visibility, unless it's cloud-based, which means it's hidden, not transparent. Enterprise One is transparent which makes it the perfect place to manage work and tasks.

I love the forecasting. It's a great tool. One of the things I'd say about Enterprise One that I love the most is it provides transparency. There's nothing to hide when an organization uses Enterprise One. You will find out what resource managers are really not managing resources. You will find out what resources are really not working, and then you will find out what PMs are not working and are working, and then you'll find out what work is relevant.

The functionality of Enterprise One, by default, is that if you request a resource to a resource manager for your project, if you're a PM, one of the actions you have to take is to submit the utilization and the effort required by that resource. Therefore, if I said I needed this person, and I just left it and submitted it to their manager, the manager would see you come across as a 100% request. If I already know the person is working on other projects on support, I’m not going to allow them to be 100% because I'm not giving that resource. It requires a PM to align the requirement for a resource, as an example, with what the budget forecasts. You only have resources based on budget.

The accountability piece that I like about Enterprise One is that it forces the actions that PMs are supposed to do. They are supposed to manage budget time and resources. If you just arbitrarily say, "Give me 10 resources at 100%," that's not managing the budget. That's not creating an effective timeline. That's not creating a realistic schedule of when you think proposed work can be done. It forces the PM to do a little work. It forces that resource manager to sit down and say, "Do I really know what my people are doing, and do I really want to give up this person for 50% of his time for the next eight months?" It forces those questions so that PMs actually know what their team is doing.

Enterprise One's view into resource capacity and availability help us manage work from the perspective of I see what my team should be working to, what they're assigned to, and whether or not I'm willing to give up a resource for other work, and kind of puts me in a place to prioritize planning of work. Every request for every resource and every request for every component of work that is entered in Planview Enterprise One requires someone or multiple people to ask themselves real questions of whether or not they know why they're doing it and whether they want to do it.

Enterprise One has the ability to create summary reports across multiple projects. The reporting tool is great. Out-of-the-box, it's just kind of black and white. It's a list of data. It's like an Excel spreadsheet without lines, and it's got sections. It pulls all the data from wherever you want to pull the data, depending on your access. It’s great for data, as the Planview Enterprise One database is huge. There is lots of data being captured. I love that. I love the ability to integrate with, for example, Microsoft's Power BI. When we do that we can take the wonderful data that Planview captures and formulate that into a more visual representation that people want.

The reporting enhances our ability to share the big picture with management. The amount of data that Planview captures for every item of work, whether it's a support bucket, a capacity, or an actual project in the project management world forces conversations. The old-fashioned corporate American model of work leadership, especially executive leadership, is to ask the arbitrary question, "What is the status?" and that's the worst question anyone in leadership can ask as it doesn't mean anything to me. What you're looking for is what you want to know - including the status which may not represent what another department is actually tracking. It's an irrelevant question.

For me, the right question is, "Where do we stand with the money?" or, "How do we look on our timeline?" or, "Will this functionality be delivered by X, Y, or Z?" Those are specific questions, and the tool has that data. It requires a project manager who knows the work, understands the timeline, is really managing the resources and their capacity, leveraging their time, validating the time being submitted in approval to give that picture.

It's more difficult, as it requires more accountability. It's not a simple spreadsheet that says "Oh yeah, we'll have it done by December 1st," without any data to back it up. Planview Enterprise provides data that almost forces the PM to make sure that the "We'll have it done by date," is legitimate based on resources and legitimate based on work. It's a little bit more complex due to the maturity of most organizations. It works well for organizations that have serious thoughtful PMS. It's not for an organization that really just has note-takers tracking tasks on a spreadsheet.

Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. For all types of work, I’m not 100% sure. Enterprise One captures capabilities or features, deliverables, something that you're enhancing, and then, also, due to its ability to incorporate into tools like LeanKit, you can track that actual work. It tracks traditional projects, what we know to be a start-and-stop funded thing. It tracks support work. If you really think through how you're going to design that model, you can track your day-to-day operations, break/fixes, emergencies, et cetera.

It tracks all types of work that are performed within technology. It's just how you're going to use the tool to track that work that is in question. There’s complexity. It requires an organization to actually sit down, to know what they're doing, know what work is, know what they're delivering, how they deliver it before they start building out their structure within Enterprise One.

Enterprise One helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. That’s true in my experience with Planview, however, it’s too early in my position at this new company to really gauge. They're new; they're not there yet. They're not at that universal, "Let's plan work across the board because it's all aligned to an organizational strategy" place yet. At my past organization, we were able to prioritize work just by having snapshots by portfolios of, "What work are we actually delivering? Can we deliver it all?” This forces executive leadership to make a decision and say, "Okay, this is the work I actually want," as opposed to the old-fashioned, "Get it all done because I said so." It really breaks that model, and I love that.

The solution provides a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people. It allows you to reserve a person so that they have access to submit time to work items, but not necessarily have to work in those items. It assigns you the ability to allocate a resource for a specific work assignment which they will be doing. It also allows you the ability to reserve a role type based on function and role, not necessarily a named person.

In terms of the flexibility of configuring assignments, from a tool usage perspective, it's easy. It's the click of a button. From the person clicking the button, the perspective of that user, the complexity comes into play in terms of whether or not you can understand the definition between what is a requirement, what is a reservation, what is an allocation, and you can memorize that and remember that every day, and know where to click a button. other than that, it’s simple.

The flexibility allows us to plan ahead for work that we aren't sure is going to be fully funded or not. We can plan a type of resource without actually knowing who would potentially do the work, which allows us to forecast a resource. The forecasting model gives us the ability to say, "Will our team that's presently in use be able to fulfill that prioritized work, or do we have to begin a process of obtaining additional headcount?"

The solution allows program managers to group work together and see resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. For example, at one of the other companies that I've worked in, they had the mindset of, "Our organization keeps our work, and you don't need to see what we're doing, and I don't need to see what you're doing." However, with this mindset, they're going to run into the constraint of, "Oh no, you need someone from my team to help you deliver that work, and now we need open visibility." This product impacts the mindset and the model of, "Who owns work? What is collaboration? Do we still remain in silos? Or is the organization the main objective?" If delivering work for the organization is the main objective, Planview delivers due to the fact that it's transparent and open to everyone.

We are mostly able to drill down into details underlying the consolidated information using Enterprise One. As an example, you can have a work item called Cool Project. With it, you can see when it's supposed to start and when it's proposed to finish. You can see the resources allocated to it. In there, you can see work items, like features or deliverables, epochs, or milestones. You can see that in a Gantt chart. You can see the start and stop dates for all of that. Planview does have the ability to let you actually see the tasks, or what Enterprise One calls the action items, for every one of those. That may not necessarily answer the bigger picture, as there's always going to be that human component that has to speak to the work, which is why a lot of teams use secondary tools, like CA's Rally tool, or Planview's new LeanKit tool, or Jira, to really give the full picture of what each individual respective work item is. Therefore, while it does give us a visual, it may not speak fully to it without the help of a secondary app.

Enterprise One has not increased our on-time completion rate. The reason is due to the fact that Enterprise One leverages true resource ability and capability as far as effort and available effort. If you leverage the tool that way, and you keep governance that reflects that, you’ll be better off. As an example, my contractors are not legally allowed to work past 40 hours, so I forecast them that way. I can see if somebody's over. I need to deal with that, due to contracts. That said, if you track outside of Enterprise One, there are organizations that may say "Hey, you're a contractor. I need you to finish the work. Sorry. You'll be doing 50 hours.” It's on a spreadsheet and no one sees it.

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RB
PM Systems Analyst at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We have different users for different modules. We manage programs and portfolios by using the Strategy module. Our project teams predominantly use the Work module. Our resource management team uses the Resource module and RMA to manage resources capacity, demand, etc. So, each of the modules is important for the respective people. We have a yearly planning process, and we use the Planning module to a certain extent to do the portfolio creation work.

RMA has been really good for forecasting the remaining effort. Planview has been making a lot of improvements. The recent improvement that they have done to provide visibility to the actual timesheets that are submitted has been really good. The roadmap that Planview has and the way they're continuously and quickly improving and providing solutions have been very positive for us. We know that we don't have to wait for six months to realize the benefits of their development. From the delivery point of view, that has been one of the best things about Planview.

It helps our management team in planning resource capacity and availability pretty nicely. We've been doing this for over two years now, and consistently, it has improved. Even though the functionality was there, we only started using it in the last two years. We provided whatever feedback we had to the Planview team, and they went in and built those additional features that we requested. For example, they created a great way for our users to search for a specific resource, project, program, or role. We were not using some of the features, and we wanted them to not be visible, and they helped us with that. They also brought a feature to provide visibility into when a resource was never assigned to any task. There was no visibility to this before. This feature was really very good for visibility into the resource portfolio. If we have about 60 resources, and four of them have never been assigned to any task or any project, we can see that. So, the search option and the visibility into the resources that have not been assigned are the quick features that they provided.

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MK
Senior Analyst - Technology at LPL Financial

The resource management and assignment features are valuable. The timesheet management is also valuable because that is a requirement for us. So, the ability to see timesheet forecasting and timesheet actual submission from resources has been very useful and valuable to us. 

The configuration of the application helps us in aligning the projects to our strategic initiatives. So, we're able to configure that hierarchy or structure.

Forecasting is very valuable because based on the user profiles and resource profiles, we can add the utilization and the capacity for the work. So, once we do the forecasting, we're able to see if somebody is being forecasted above their capacity. There are good indicators within Planview Enterprise One that, at least, notify us to say, "Hey, this person is being forecasted above and beyond what the current capacity is." So, that's a good feature for us. It doesn't prevent us from overloading resources, but at least it indicates that somebody is overloaded. In terms of forecasting, I would rate it a four out of five.

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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.
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.
JC
Director, Office of Process and Project Management at Electronic Arts Inc.

The most valuable to us is that we have a standardized schedule. We're able to put in our phase-gates and everything that we need to make sure that we're operating and running our projects effectively. 

We now use WRK14 reports and are moving to other more complex reports in order to manage our business. 

The solution’s integrated product portfolio has transformed our organization’s delivery because people are a lot more accountable. When you have no accountability, then people don't always deliver the way that you want them to. Once you get accountability, they know that somebody is watching and the way that they manage their work changes quite a bit.

It is flexible. We started off where we had a workflow that had about 150 steps in it with gates, because we didn't know any different. We went back and talked to Planview about it, and said, "We are in a really bad way. We need somebody to help us." They came back and helped us change everything. They helped us undo all the mess that we had created. They moved us to about a 15 to 20 step process. The flexibility of being able to create something, then redo it if it's wrong as you continue to evolve and partner with Planview is really important to us.

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PN
Project Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable features are the W&A screen. It provides a very useful view as well as the option to capture baselines. I can always review the progress of my projects with my team. It also allows me to capture the notes with respect to the progress. It also allows me to assign members to the task and ensure that they fill that timesheet. I know how much time they spent on certain tasks.

In terms of regular traditional project management and new product development, I would give its ability to see what stage work is at a six out of 10. Non-Project managers find the Ui and UX hard to digest. 

For Agile project management, having the feature of adding backlogs is every useful, but there are a lot of issues with Projectplace connectors as well as LeanKit connectors to Enterprise One, which hampers the Agile experience which is why it feels like a half-baked product. But I hear it has been fixed in newer updates and our Org is under process for update.

With respect to the forecast, I would say it does very basic forecasting of picking whatever we predict and just dividing it by months, quarters, and years. I would prefer to have AI technology in Planview Enterprise One to forecast and predict much better based on historical data. Since Enterprise One has been existing in Flowserve for the past 10 years, there's a lot of historic data that can be used to predict rather than forecast. There are a lot of solutions out there that would do the same.

Its ability to create project related summary reports across multiple projects is one of the best features. They have very good data warehousing.

It is easy to create dashboards using E1 data connectors or the Odata that Planview team has created for us. One of the few reasons why many in leadership likes planview E1.

Our organization is shifting towards Hybrid project management and currently, we are facing issues to re-use the E1 in a way to track projects. We might need to rethink our setup but there is room to improve the standard offering of E1 for Hybrid Pm, as well as update the UI.

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NJ
Enterprise Architect at Qualcomm Incorporated

The most valuable feature of this solution is the completeness of the standard, underlying metamodel. We can put most of our attributes or information that we want into the standard metamodel. This is important because we don't need to think about what kinds of attributes or objects we need to create because they are already provided. If we stick to what is called the active metamodel, then the UI is on top of that and we don't need to do a lot of UI customization in order to manage that data.

This is a flexible solution in the places where it needs to be, although it is rigid in certain places because it still uses old technologies. For example, you can see this in the reporting. They started with a Cognos Business Intelligence/Business Objects, then they moved to BIRT, and now they have moved to SSRS. There are still some legacy flash components in there, so there is no clear strategy on that side.

The flexibility helps in that it has a vast amount of predefined roles. It's flexible to safeguard the areas of the platform that you open up. The new portal is flexible enough to create your own portfolios and column sets, which will cater eighty-percent to what people want. The flexibility allows it to become more self-service, and we can on-board users that do not have an IT or enterprise role, but more like an add-on list or even a business user.

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

Just having one place to put everything is the big deal. Before Enterprise One, we had multitudes of different Excel spreadsheets across different departments, and everyone kind of doing their own thing. The biggest thing that we've been able to do is get a view of all the work that's happening and then see where the hours are going. That is where we are at right now in terms of the features we are leveraging. 

Enterprise one is good for forecasting remaining effort from what I can tell. We are able to see everything from where the resources are requested, to where they are then being allocated and the hours being logged and make decisions off of that.

If I were to assess Enterprise One's ability to enable me to see which stage projects are in, on a scale of one to 10, I would give it a seven. That's partly because I'm seeing plenty of projects that don't have the right status because they haven't been updated properly. We are having a hard time getting people to use the system to keep that information up to date. The system has the right fields there, but we are still learning how to better use the system. We're trying to figure out how to get our processes better so we can keep the system current.

From a PMO perspective, Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for a full spectrum of types of work. It is too early to say how it has affected our project management. We are doing better, but we are certainly not where we want to be eventually.

Enterprise One has helped us with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. It has affected our business in that we now have a lot more transparency. We can see where the work is being done and make adjustments to align where the work is being done to priorities that change over time.

It provides a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people. I've never had any issues there. It is customizable wherever we need it to be and it is doing great.

Enterprise One allows program managers to group work together and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. It has positively affected my project management. We are happy with the selection that we have made, excluding the cumbersomeness of the user interface at times. Enterprise One has been exactly what we need.

We are enabled to drill underlying consolidated information down into details. This certainly helps me see their impact on specific projects. We can view a project both at the top level and dig into the particularities. It's given us greater visibility into the work itself. It is too early to tell if the solution has increased our on-time completion rate.

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EduardoMaya - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Office Manager at Hoteles City Express

The benefit of Planview is that you can manage all the features simultaneously, and you have the information you need online. You can change your information and manage the resources very well. Getting to view the project is the best feature in Portfolios.

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KB
Enterprise Portfolio Manager at Wellmark

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.

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

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.

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RV
Portfolio Manager at State Of Delaware

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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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 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.

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GH
Sr Program Manager at Fresenius Medical Care

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.

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HV
Program Manager at Citizens Bank

As a user, I really liked the ease of the status reporting and the one stop shop of everything being in one location. 

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

The visibility across the portfolio, who is responsible for what projects, who is working them, and where we are in terms of financials.

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

The fast-track reporting has been beneficial to us, as well as the project and portfolio management tool. We don't have any add-ons at this time. We're exploring those at a later date, such as Projectplace and connections with Jira.

When it comes to managing project plans, we are currently in a crawl-walk-run with Planview, and we're just starting to walk. Right now, stage-wise, we can see, financially, a good picture. However, in terms of the attributes that associate the different phases in a project, we're not there yet. We're in the process of implementing that right now. I know it has great features to do that. We're just not there yet. I’d rate it at about a four out of ten, however, that's no implication on the tool itself. It's just where we are as a company. We need more time with it.

In terms of assessing Enterprise One for its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects, I would give it an eight out of ten. It provides us with the ability to slice and dice the data. We have capabilities. Most companies have departments. We’re able to leverage the project portfolios to have that visibility within the various capabilities. It provides us a more granular level, and it just gives us a source of truth in organizing our data as well.

It helps with our ability to share "the big picture" with management. It really enhances that ability, actually. We have a consolidated picture of all of the capabilities captured within Planview financially. From there, that said, we're not using the reporting features fully. We just upgraded from 15 to 18. We plan to start leveraging the Power BI feature. We do have the data now at hand where we're able to extract it and provide that overall picture to our upper management.

Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. It provides our project management with one source of truth in terms of tracking projects from creation. In terms of our backlog efforts, for example, we open projects on a quarterly basis, and so we're able to have that data housed or stored in Planview. Therefore, it's end to end, from project creation to if a project is on hold, and then that effort is reassessed and then placed into open active, and the effort is then in place while the project is going through the various phases through deployment, and then we have a complete end. Right now, for example, my quality and methodology team and I are looking to revamp our end-to-end life cycle to be inclusive of some additional project closure updates, as Planview does have that functionality available, and our quality and methodology team is currently using a different site to oversee their processes. It will be beneficial with that as well.

Enterprise One has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives in terms of visibility and the ability to leverage the portfolios amongst our capabilities. It does give us a better visual into slicing and dicing that data to assess the prioritization of the efforts. It's improved our business and its structure. The processes that we had in place previously have definitely been enhanced and we have more faith in having a source of truth versus various tools and spreadsheets.

Users can assign resources and work and the product provides a variety of types the resources so that users have the ability, when they submit their timesheet, to select various work items that have been authorized for them to charge to.

The configuration of the list is really driven by the projects themselves, so it's pretty simplistic. There's no structure that I have to go in and manage. It's all project work-driven. They are added at the task level, the task is assigned, and is populated to their spreadsheet.

The flexibility on offer is very helpful in meeting the organization's needs. We have also transitioned a work authorization request process into Jira, and from there we have a good cadence where, when resources are needing a new work authorization, our project managers and program coordinators essentially are able to view those requests and implement them. In Planview, those new work tasks will be readily available for them on a Friday when they can make their time submissions. As long as the project is in open active status, there's no hindrance.

Enterprise One does allow program managers to group work together and see resource demands and costs at a consolidated level, however, we're not using the capacity and utilization feature at this moment, as we've got that work to do to clean up our resource roles.

In terms of helping with our on-time completion rate, I rate the product at a seven out of ten. I say that due to the fact that we have better visibility into the financials, and it assists us in the monthly financial assessments that we conduct. The project managers are now able to understand how their projects are tracking and to hold them accountable for a timely delivery. In terms of the time that we spend syncing with these program project managers to assess the timeliness of their delivery, I wouldn't be able to speak to an exact number or percentage. I oversee the system and the tool itself to provide the functionality for my team to assess that, however, I wouldn't be able to give a good quantitative number for that. It might be about 50% of our time.

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LJ
IT Portfolio Management Senior Consultant at CNA Insurance

Real-time information. Enterprise One is good for enabling me to see what stage of work and the current financials. I'm able to see where it is during the project adaptation, project summary, and also comparison to the performance baseline. Since I'm still a little new to this, I am still learning how the organization is adapting to the tool. The Planview conference gave me a lot more ideas, in terms of what more I can do with Planview. 

We do have an in-house reporting and analytics team that are working on creating custom build reportings to generate tiles and utilizing the Power BI functionality. It has been really a very cool report that has graphics with color-coded information making it easy and user-friendly. Again, as we are still new to this tool, it has been continuous learning on how to use it better and as we continue to invest time, cost and efforts we are excited to explore what would be its full capabilities. 

We think that Enterprise One will help with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. We haven't gotten there yet because we're moving towards the product Portfolio Model.

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

The ability to capture timesheets is the most valuable feature. Also, the ability to see what the full organization's working on is probably the biggest bang for the buck.

Prior to implementing Enterprise One, we didn't have a tool to do any of that. We were hard-pressed to understand what our people were working on. Now, we have a full view of projects, allocations, and effort to deliver our portfolio projects.

Enterprise One's ability to forecast remaining efforts is pretty good. It's a regular schedule, so you can see your burndown rate and see what's left on the project to spend from a labor and non-labor perspective.

Its view into resource capacity and availability absolutely help us manage work. We can't plan out projects for delivery until we know if we have resources available to deliver them. That's been really critical. We look at our projects and see what availability of resources we have. That helps us to determine when we can start new work.

Project managers can group work together and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. They can create portfolios. 

We are able to drill down to the underlying details via consolidated information. We can see exactly what people are working on and we can see where they're charging their time. We can see their allocations and redistribute the load if we need to based on how much is being demanded for individuals.

We hope that it will increase our on-time completion rates. That will hopefully happen when the projects are delivering. Some of them have end dates coming up in the next quarter and some not for another 6+ months. We'll probably be able to start viewing that within two to three months.

I don't initially expect the on-time completion rate to be increased, but I'm hoping over time, we get better at project intake and estimation. That will help us to deliver things more efficiently and meet our timelines.

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

The most valuable features are: 

  • The resource management
  • Outcome management
  • Work management

It helps us to see resource utilization and resource needs. We get more transparency out of the system to plan the resources and resource skills to train our resources or support the long term onbording process.

We can see the budget spend for a product or release with the outcome area. We can also monitor what we have planned against what was spend, to monitor how good the programs or project is running.

The view into resource capacity and availability helps us to manage our work. It helps us with resource management and when we see have available resources we can easily start new projects. If we see with the tool that there not enough capacity available we can prioritize projects and programs according to our resources and the business needs.

In terms of reporting, we're mainly using Power BI connected to Planview data and we generate our own dashboards. 

Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool.

The system has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. Enterprise One is the only offical place for our projekt data and in this way it gives the portfolio management back the data of the projects for prioritization and monitoring. 

Enterprise One provides a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people. There are a lot of possibilities for the resource management. There are some improvments in the area of agile team managment and team assignment which could be improved in the future development of Enterprise One.

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

We have different groups that use it for different purposes. There are project managers who use it in place of Microsoft Project. So they track their project through its phases, their financials, keeping on schedule, on time, and on budget. Our resource managers use it primarily to track their resources, to see how much capacity their team has to perform different tasks or different projects, and how much time they're spending on each individual application. Technology managers actually represent the overall group who use it to roadmap, outlook,  see what's down in the pipeline, what team has what capacity to actually take on a task, see if that project is worth the money, that return on investment is worth actually doing it. Executives are just in it for the reporting to track the financials, to see how much we're spending within the technology and enterprise operations departments. Enterprise One is useful in many ways. We have a little bit under 2,000 people using it.

Another good thing is that we can create custom reports, which is great. If I created a custom report, a tile that tells me how many people have logged in today. We currently have a little under 2,000 users, and that's only users, we actually have integrations, that we created a custom form that sends hours directly to Planview. They're not using Planview directly, but they're sending their hours to Planview through an API. We have over 1,500 contractors overseas and within the United States, that submit their time to Planview, so we can track their work in their project as well. In total, I would say the amount of user input for Planview would be close to 3,000.

Inside Planview, they have what they call a "lifecycle". It's basically a workflow, it's a set of steps that each project has to go through, and with its customization, being able to match our own project process, we match it one for one. And so we can see at each stage of the project where it is either through the gate, from gate zero through gate four, and even with Agile, being able to iterate through that same gate, by using scripted dialogues, or exit scripts, we've been able to track projects exactly where they are. Each schedule can be tied back to either the hours entered, by either date, or a percentage of the effort completed on it, so it ties together pretty good.

It's being used a lot for the remaining effort. We actually create tons of reporting off of it. We've created multiple Power BI dashboards. Data feed allows us to create our custom Power BI dashboards, so that way we can track what efforts been used, what efforts are remaining in a very graphical, easy to read way. We've created this primarily for the project managers and resource managers. My manager has a breakout session that discusses our Power BI dashboards. It's really nifty for tracking that. We use it a lot. Our executive challenged us to be able to forecast and estimate hours used on each task. That's why we implemented Enterprise One initially, but we since provided what she wanted and now we're providing more. Initially, it was just the requirement and now we're exceeding that requirement to give better visibility to all resource managers and project managers.

We have a really large organization, 22,000 associates total, including the 3,000 people using Planview. Being able to group projects into portfolios based on specific filters, either the project manager or any other approver organizational hierarchy, once you set your portfolio, you can either share that with your team or whomever so that they can all be on the same page. With the Power BI dashboards, we have a very open information model where we want everyone to be able to see the same thing. There's only one section where it's confidential and we as administrators have to provision that separately, but everything else is open for everyone else to see. So if you're just a time reporter or just have a reporting, you can go in and see the same information as a manager. Being able to group projects in the portfolios, filter them, and being able to see all of that data graphically using the Power BI or the standard reporting that came with the FastTrack setup has been very helpful to our entire organization.

For all the work that we perform, Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. We have our technology projects. We have what we call non-technology projects, which are basically projects that don't necessarily have a technology component in it. It's things like branch opening and closures, even though sometimes they will have the technology, but it just depends. We also have what we call OTW, which is another planned work. This is primarily for resource managers so that they can track their applications like how much time is spent on their applications doing upgrades or break-fix. We also have programs of work, another resource manager tool that tracks Agile programs, and we also have Roadmaps. For all the project types that we, or work types that we have within our organization, it does great.

We just started doing the on time and on a budget since we are in infancy with Enterprise One, we weren't really holding the project managers to that. We were holding them to it through the governance, but not through the Enterprise One. Now that we're a little more mature, we've started tracking that grader as well as being able to use those change requests to track as scheduled, budget, or scope changes. It has allowed us to definitely increase our on-time and on-budget awareness.

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SL
Senior Engineer at Northwestern Mutual

Some of the most important features that we find are the ability to relate assets to one another (applications to software and hardware) and associate capabilities to each of our assets, as well as to whom the users in our user base are, whether they're internal/external customers and which departments. From this, we can create reports which can help identify for a particular department the applications that they use or own. Then, from there, the capabilities they offer.

We do find the solution flexible. Having the ability to make customizations to the product offers a great deal of flexibility to buy business requirements as well as meet the needs of our clients and customers.

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

It's easy to use compared to other platforms that I've worked on, e.g., Microsoft Project. Innotas was one of our contenders, but they ended up buying them, so it's good to see that those features are coming out across Enterprise One. 

  • I love the requested intake.
  • I love how you can do calculations of fields. 
  • We put in the lifecycles, which I love. 
  • Love that you can get notifications within Outlook. 
  • The reporting: How you can do subscriptions of the reporting. So, you don't have to sit there and send reports manually. That's very helpful.

These features save me time. Anything that you can automate is always helpful. When somebody doesn't have to come and ask me, "Hey, can you do this for me?" They can do it themselves, then it's easy to use. You can show them one time, and they go through it the next time by themselves.

It's flexible and very easy to use. Just having all of our projects centralized and all our programs in one place so we can see what the PMs are working on. Now that we've gone global, we can bring in the other PMs and PMOs easily because we've already configured stuff. Although, they may have things that they're reporting on, we can easily integrate those into our current system. 

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JC
Planview Administrator and Portfolio Management Lead at Koch Business Solutions India

The best aspects include:

Work Management. Work that gets added to Planview captures all the key information, including t-shirt sizing, key stakeholder names, financial information, and most important of all, Resource allocations and role requirements - all in one tool.

Resource Management. We have visibility of all the resources as to where they are spending their time and how they can be utilized better to meet the vision and business strategies of the organization.

Leankit. The kanban board has really helped us be more agile and we can keep track of everything that is ongoing.

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AF
Cloud system engineer at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

Planview Management enables our organizations to make data-driven decisions. The centralized platform offers robust reporting and analytics capabilities. 

Planview Management integrates seamlessly with other tools and systems used within the organization, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and collaboration platforms. This integration enhances data visibility, streamlines workflows, and eliminates silos between departments. All other services are sophisticated

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VP
Specialist Project Solutions at Flowserve Corporation

The integration stuff from tool to tool, like Projectplace to Planview, to manage projects is the most valuable feature. It keeps all our tasks up-to-date. It closely follows up with everything, which is really cool.

From a reporting angle, it is flexible. We can use it in multiple ways, like with the in-house dashboards inside of Planview. With the security and all its options, the data can be limited to the extent of that user's need based on their roles, which is awesome. There is a lot of connectivity to a number of tools.

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MR
Manager, Project Governance at Clorox

It's an end-to-end integrated tool. We can look at resources, finances, tasks, etc. 

It is very flexible. It's almost too flexible and lets us do stuff we shouldn't do.

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KW
Associate Director, PPM Governance & Operations at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
  • The work and assignments
  • We can track the financials.
  • We can do portfolio management. We can look across the portfolio at several projects.

I find these features valuable because of their visibility.

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

The portfolio management gives you a view of all the projects as well as all the information about the total amount of effort, time, and cost being spent on the projects. It gives the organization how much money and effort should be spent towards projects so they can budget and do better capacity planning in the next fiscal year. It gives them visibility into their resources and if they have capacity.

I have found this solution to be flexible. I have found it flexible enough in terms of tweaking different configurations for helping the customers doing VMs.

I can access the system anywhere. I can manage my project wherever I am. Since it's web-based, it's flexible enough for making any changes. I can go in at anytime. I can just login from my cell phone.

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TS
Manager of IT at Regions bank

I like that everyone is able to see the same data. All of our users who aren't just time reporters have read access to all the data that is out there. So, it is one source of truth where everybody can go in and see the exact same data that everybody else sees. It is transparent.

To see work, resources, and ICPM and those different cuts and views is very beneficial for us if we just want to focus on resources. E.g., here are all the resources, but here are the projects that they're working on. If we want to look at the work, then we can look at the work and can bring in the resources. Being able to slice and dice that way is really good.

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

The financial planning capabilities are very useful. We have integration for an SAP system, and so we load financial data from SAP into Planview for prior months. And then we use the forecasting capabilities to get a complete picture of the cost of a specific project. The financial management is very useful.

The resource management is also useful to show us resources utilization, as well as capacity and it gives us a picture across our employees as to what capacity we have, which helps us plan what work we can take on. It helps us with scheduling when certain things might begin or not begin. It also gives us visibility into if we need to consider going external for contracting or consulting resources to perform certain tasks.

Enterprise One does a very nice job of telling us what stage a project's at. We also use it from a portfolio management standpoint to gauge the health of an overall portfolio of projects. And from a planning perspective, knowing when projects are going to be ending helps us in planning future work.

It also does a nice job of letting us forecast effort either by an individual person or by skillset. If I have an individual person assigned, I can plan out their work into the future. If I have a need for a certain skill set, but I don't have anyone assigned yet, I can still plan the work being done.

It does a very good job of providing summary reports across multiple projects if there are different options of reporting available within the tool itself. It also connects with Microsoft's Power BI. That's integrated as well to provide some dashboarding KPIs.

Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. We use it for different types of work. We use it for project work. We use it for production support monitoring and production support work. We also use it for managing smaller work requests that don't require a formal project driven by a project manager.

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MF
Enterprise Portfolio Analyst at Wellmark

The most valuable feature is resource management. You get to work with a lot of resource leaders for capacity planning. Although, we don't use capacity planning to its full potential, we would like to go there as well as financial management for the projects.

All of the features that we get out of Planview, it just helps us to provide information back to our senior leadership and have those conversations to get insight. When we have that information, we get insight from them on what it is that they are looking for and what they need. Then we can transform that information from the tool and get them what they need. All the information is helpful for me to be able to provide the data that they need. We want to help them make the right decisions that they need.

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KK
Project Administrator at Texas Mutual Insurance Company

In terms of the most valuable features, the strategy view is something we never really did in the past. It shows us what all of our strategies are, what programs we have under those strategies, what work is happening, and what the current status of that work is. It's all at varying degrees, whether percentage complete, effort complete, hours expended, those types of things. From an overall corporate perspective, so far I've seen a high-level strategy program view into the data.

When it comes to managing project plans, Enterprise One is awesome at enabling us to see what stage work is at. I've always thought it was awesome because it's good whether we're doing a traditional WBS or we're linking in epics into projects that are supporting the programs and the strategies, I've always thought it was an excellent tool. We do want to try to capitalize a little bit more on some automation. Percent complete is the high-level metric that we're really trying to drive to. So if we have a large effort, we can see how far along in the process we are based on a high-level plan that we think is going to run from August to December, we can see where we are in the process. We can't have a plan unless we work it. And so we're struggling with that just a little bit, but from an overall status of things, I think it's great.

The Enterprise One view into resource capacity and availability does not help us to manage work because we don't know how to work it. It absolutely cuold and that is one of the things in our current use case that we're really struggling with because the pure Agile folks say, "You don't plan. You don't estimate. You just do." And management, managers, VPs, and above are saying, "Okay, what is our capacity to make all this work?" So we're struggling with that just a little bit. I think once we settle on something that Planview does give us a view into what our capacity is and how much work can we really take on.

Its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects is pretty good. Planview has invested a lot of years and a lot of money in creating a lot of out-of-the-box reports. It's just us trying to learn them again and really trying to find out what's available. We've been providing reports and information to our upper management, and our CIO said, "That's too much information." We're trying to find that balance between a one-page summary of everything going on versus providing all the details that might be needed. So overall, Planview is very good at providing whatever level of information we want.

In terms of sharing the big picture with management, this feature has really helped because there are certain strategy reports or certain work reports that do provide a one-page overview of everything. It's just that management is trying to decide what information they want to see. Then, in turn, can we from an administration perspective, modify the report enough to be able to provide that information.

It provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. Admittedly, when we're looking at all the different products that Planview provides, whether it be LeanKit, PPM Pro, or whatever, they do bend toward a certain type of methodology. Obviously, Enterprise One has been very traditional work and resource management focused, but I think over the years that we've been with Planview, and especially with the introduction of the Enterprise One model, they're really trying to make it to where you can have different types of projects. Whether they be traditional waterfall, Agile, Lean, SAFe, etc. Planview Enterprise One does a good job at all of that. It may not give you the capabilities of everything that you want, but that's why they've introduced these integrations with other tools like Azure DevOps, JIRA, Micro Focus, and those types of things. So that you can get that overall big picture of what's going on.

Another example of how it's been able to improve the way your organization functions is that we can now look at the strategy view to say, "Okay, what do we all have?" Because you've got this group doing something, another group doing something, and another group doing something, but overall what is everything we're doing? And as we mature in the use of the tool, not only from how much work we have out there, what can what our capacity is to do everything. But looking at the ICP portion, the investment and capacity planning portion of it to say, "Okay, we think it's going to cost us this much to do this work," but "Oh, by the way, we need to shift something around." What does that mean from mainly from the way we use it, from a capacity perspective? Because we're completely internal. We don't draw revenue directly from the internal work we do. But hopefully, we can get the benefit perspective where something may be big work, small benefits, whereas something else is small work, big benefits, and we can see where we need to re-adjust our priorities there. Overall, I think it'll help.

We're not doing direct assignments but if we were, I think it is a very flexible tool. Probably the only thing that I really struggle with is doing allocations at a certain level. And you have to do it at what they call the lowest leaf level. That's probably the only drawback I see. I'd like to be able to see allocations happen at a higher level and to where we're dealing with Epics. 

In fact, I had a scenario this morning come up where we had an Epic that was created. Some allocations were put on the Epic, and when somebody tried to put a story or a task up underneath that Epic and we couldn't. And so that's the only feedback on the whole resource assignments, how I'd like to stay flexible enough to where I can go at a higher level to where I don't have to do that. A developer is going to be working on this story and we're allocating X number of hours to that particular story. I'd like to know that, I know Jane and Joe are working on a project or this work. And I think over a course of two, three sprints, months, whatever, I think they're going to be working about 75% of the time. So it is flexible, but it's not flexible.

There are pros that we're seeing from being able to draw down and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. I'm a product owner and when I look at an overall endeavor and I know that I've got five Epics and 10 stories across that, from an investment perspective or a cost/benefit perspective, they say, "Okay, Epics are like features. Which feature is going to cost me more to provide?" And then hopefully I've got an idea in my brain if I'm a product owner of "Alright, this Epic is going to give us more value than then another Epic and Epic A is only going to take five story points, whereas Epic B, isn't going to give as much value is going to take us 30 story points or something like that." 

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DD
Team Leader at Wellmark

I just took it over about four or five months ago, as part of my responsibilities. But from what I can tell it's pretty robust in terms of flexibility.

It maps back to our SDLC process pretty well. I'm able to see the stage of where things are at. We also use Azure DevOps for all of our requirements and our coding. 

The work is in Azure DevOps but the planning aspect of that work, the financials, and the resource allocation are done through Planview. I'm trying to figure out how to connect the dots. Meaning, if I have a project where I've burned through 50% of my financials, and I've done all my resource allocation inside of Azure DevOps, I'm able to visualize and see the data that says, "Hey, I'm 50% through the development work of the project. I have this work that I currently have in flight, and I have this much planned for the remaining amount of time, which represents the remaining 50%." And then I want to see how that then maps to Planview. Because Planview could say, "Hey, you know what, we burned through 80% of our money." How do I then use the data coming out of Azure DevOps to then either go ask for more money and more funding or to do something to make decisions?

Resource capacity helps me to ensure that I have the individuals needed to complete the work. We basically go in at a high level. We know we have a project and we know we might need around 500 hours of a cloud engineer. And so we'll go out, we'll make the request, and the allocation is done for it. Then you have a person that's allocated for those 500 hours. The only thing I don't have is when they've burned through those 500 hours, I understand that they're burning it against the project, but I don't know how to tick and tie that to the features that they burning it against. 

It provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of the types of work. From a project view, I'm able to see where things are at by the financials, the allocation of resources, as well as the lifecycle of the project.

It also provides a variety of types of resources assignments for assigning work to people. It's pretty flexible. We could set up a variety of different rules within Planview across organizations. Each team sometimes has different roles that they need to pull in for the project or for the team. And so having the flexibility of adding roles is good.

Another thing that it has helped us with is our burn rate of dollars, more than anything else. We're able to look at things and say, "If we're coming towards the end of this year, we know our burn rates higher than it should be." And we can look at certain projects and say, "Let's remove certain work streams that we don't want to work on."

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

We use expenditures quite a bit. We put in forecast expenditures and then we actualize them below the line in the little box in the bottom tray. Being able to track the project with relevant milestones is also valuable. Milestones are valuable because it helps us to keep the project on track. The expenditures are valuable because we need to be able to understand expenses that are beyond the regular resources in the projects.

I don't believe we're using the resource capacity to the highest extent. The project managers and resource managers are managing that outside of the tool. There are a few select Planview experts areas that are utilizing resource management to its full extent, not in my company though. 

Its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects is good. Our solution on-premise is a bit hamstrung though because we don't have Power BI. It's on the Oracle platform right now. It's not at that level for some of the reporting, but the reporting that we do have is good. Even our Planview administrators can make new reports if required.

It feels like Planview is moving away from Oracle and guiding people towards SQL server. For us to do a migration like that, it's going to be very costly. I don't know if they'd be able to support their analytics solution through Oracle or not. We'd love if there was a way to do that.

We don't use the summary reports on-premise to go to upper management. At least in my case, there are some areas within the bank that are using it. I know that we've got the data flowing out of Planview on-premise into our own recording database and we're using Tableau to report up there. We've created the functionality that we didn't see in Planview on our own.

There's integration with Planview Enterprise. We've created an integration with all the data out of Planview and we pull all of our other project management tools into this database, as well as other relevant interfaces, such as HR. We're looking at getting JIRA in there as well.

To a certain extent, it does facilitate end-to-end management but we have to use multiple tools. We're using our MIS in-house tool along with Planview. That may not be a limitation of Planview. It's likely one of our company's needs.

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KK
IT Project Director at UT MD Anderson

The most valuable feature is the reporting. We are able to extract monthly reports out of Planview Enterprise One. We then report out to our leadership and executive committees. It is a combined report that lists all of the issues, risks, our schedule, and milestone. It gives leadership as well as all the committee members and everyone a one page view of the progress of the project.

The tool is easy to use, and that is good.

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

The work and resource planning are the most valuable features. We are able to track our IT portfolio of approved work and assign named resources to the work level, have a better handle of our resource capacity, and the ability to take on additional work. The financial planning helps us with making sure our investments in IT are aligned with the strategy of the company.

Enterprise One provides a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people. It's very easy and straightforward to configure these assignments. Planview allows us to see the entire workforce. We can see where our skill sets of people are, what they're working on, and allows us to make informed business decisions based on priority. 

We don't use the full project management piece at this time, but we're working towards that and becoming a more agile workforce. We are working towards tracking our work better. We're just getting started on that piece of really understanding the phases of our work and conjunction with our spend.

Its view into resource capacity and availability helps us to manage work by entering our resources into the work and assignments to understand where our resources are working and looking at the skill sets, aligning them to our priority work. Some of our higher paid resources are working on our new development and understanding how to align our resources better through the financials and the skills that we have attached to those resources.

Enterprise One does a very good job of allowing us to create views across different projects of our resources who are working on multiple projects to understand the capacity of our resources. This feature affects our ability to share the big picture with management. We are able to show our management our extended views, our forecasted views of our approved work, and help make suggestions on where we could better align our investments and our resources.

It also provides end-to-end work management but we are using it with a combination of another tool, JIRA, to get that full picture. It gives them a better insight into the projects that are going on when they're scheduled and the available resources they have for the work and their budgets. 

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HP
Senior Project Analyst at Otpp

The forecasting and time reporting functions are the most valuable features. We have about 200 people and can accurately forecast to the penny how much it's going to cost us for the year.

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

The most valuable features are the control and visibility that you have for portfolio management in terms of projects and capacity planning for resources along with strategies and outcomes, etc. It's so easy to access information for sharing analytics and reporting.

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JM
Associate at BlackRock, Inc.

We are able to see where everyone in the team is in terms of hours, where there is capacity, and where we can actually add them, e.g., other projects that they're not currently staffed to.

It is relatively easy to manage the workflow.

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it_user661212 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The overall interface is very easy to use. It puts together strategy and execution across all your investments. The demand, organizational resources, financials, strategies, project execution, and ideation elements are all brought together in this solution.

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NM
Sr Information Technology Supervisor at Solar Turbines

We do a lot of big projects which are pretty expensive to structure the product development around and see the progress. Every time we start a project, we have to expense the spends for certain amounts. We need some baselines, like predictive versus actual.

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

I like that it's an enterprise environment. I can look across everything that's going on and have a sense of what is going on within the organization.

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RK
Business Analyst at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

The most valuable feature for me is the ease and customizability of reporting. We can get different reports and customize them to do different things.

I also like business objects capabilities, although I haven't used them in my current role.

This is a flexible solution.

This tool is easy to use. I have used solutions such as SAP and Oracle and compared to using those products, I picked up up this tool right away. Once I had a little bit of training from our admins, I thought that it was really intuitive. It was easy for me to go in and build reports, where I didn't constantly need other people to do it for me. That is nice because I have administrative access, so I can do pretty much anything within the tool that I have the knowledge for. That is a plus for a business analyst. You can get the data you want quickly, export it to Excel, and slice and dice it the way you want to.

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CM
PPM Services Manager at Roche Diabetes Care

I like the Excel interfaces that we have and use it for. 

It gives us the vast ability to churn out-of-the-box reports and have an overview about approach rates and resource utilization.

The product is flexible. E.g., the work infrastructure is easy to adjust. Some other structures are really easy to configure, adjust to our behavior, and adjust to our processes.

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JM
Report Architect/Developer at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

The most valuable feature of this solution is reporting.

The integration with Power BI, in particular, makes it very easy to get information in a useable format out to our stakeholders.

This is a flexible solution. The flexibility allows you to take care of your stakeholders in different ways. Depending on their way of working, you can accommodate several different processes.

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

The most valuable features are the resource management, the time sheet entry and usage, and the financial planning. With our projects, we primarily focus on resource assignments, as far as determining the actual forecast and actuals of our projects. A lot of it is based off of the resources utilized on those projects. The time based helps us capture the actuals. The amount of time people are spending on working on their project tasks. Because they've built this into the schedule, so we can build the forecast. With financial planning, we're able to look back on what our variance is and if there is anything between the scheduled forecasted hours, dollars against the actual hours, and the costs that they utilize.

We are able to adjust it based on any process changes that I've identified as far as our work types and the way our workflows work. We're able to go in there and make those changes ourselves. It's helped us because we can do some self configurations.

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JC
Director of Operations at UK Santander Technology

It gives us room to grow because it's very flexible. It gives us a lot of configuration that we can do on our own, so we can set up at our own pace. 

At the moment, the company goes at a slower pace than the capabilities offered. So, we can develop a lot until we hit its limits. This is a very valuable thing for me.

You have more capabilities. You can do things more quickly. It is helping us to transform the way that we are organized, communicate with each other, and interact with one another.

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VS
Sr IT Consultant at a university with 10,001+ employees

The reporting, Power BI export are the most valuable. The dashboards & reports that we provide out of Planview are priceless when compared to any other tool. The tool itself has a variety of built-inr eports. The dashboards that we publish to our executive leadership been very well-received.

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

Nothing is the most valuable. We're really just tapping into what Enterprise One will do for us, such as, the ICPM. planning, and data that comes out of the system right now.

The flexibility of the solution would be around the reporting, resource forecasting, work breakdown structure and how we build out a project, and the lifecycles at the beginning of a project.

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

The most valuable feature is capacity planning because only Planview does that. 

The resource capacity and availability have helped us to manage work by preventing us from starting work that we cannot consume.

It gives us flexibility in configuring assignments. We can do both Agile Teams and non-Agile Teams. This flexibility affects our ability to meet our company's particular needs by allowing us to work in a hybrid model, some Agile Teams, and some non-Agile Teams.

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AJ
PVA at Prime Therapeutics

We are in a very transparent company. I like that the data that we store is available for everybody. We're not trying to hide anything. Being an administrator, I know a lot about the tool. It is very easy to show somebody how to use the tool and get used to it. Hopefully that user doesn't come back and ask the same question twice is really what it is about. It's a very intuitive product as well. For what we use the tool for today, it's easy to learn and pick up.

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AC
Analyst at Blue Shield of California

I like is how customizable it can get and how detailed some of the data you can get out of it can be. A lot of the basic reports come through it. I am a resource manager, so I slice it to see things like time sheet completion, compliance, etc. It's really useful to dig into some of the reasons why people aren't compliant.

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

The reporting looks pretty good. Although, we're not into it yet, so I can't say for sure how well that will work.

The look and feel of it is pretty clean, so that's good.

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BH
R&D Project Management Coach at Johnsonville Sausage

We've brought our portfolio altogether. We have had multiple ways of reporting out what our portfolio is, whether it's in Excel, Word, or in different places. We brought all of our projects together in one place. That has worked out well for us. We've been able to manage the work on Gantt charts and our resources better. The big thing for us on research and development is around managing people's time, on which projects they are working on, and how much effort does it take to launch our projects.

I have found the solution to be flexible. It has the ability for us to have three teams working on it, plus we're going to have capital planning coming onto to Planview next year. The fact that we can all be working on it: MIS folks working on their projects at the same time that you have research and development, new products coming in, and we'll be doing capital projects. We've all been able to work on the same platforms, and it's very helpful that way.

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GT
Planview Administrator at AXA XL

Resource management and project management are the most valuable features. Recently they included the Resource Management and Assignments stream which is very helpful for seeing results related to the resources. It is connected with reporting and helps us create reports easily.

Regarding project plans, we are using the workflow life cycle and create templates, using them to create a process. Some of them are Agile while others are Waterfall, depending on the workflow template that is selected. They are automatically triggered and the task is then created.

Its view into resource capacity and availability helps us to manage work. It also helps to see how much we are using. We derive that information from the work and resource management screen. That is very helpful.

In terms of its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects, we have done summaries of projects in PowerPoint presentations for our leadership team. This helps to highlight things regarding our program. We are able to show them summaries with the help of SSRS. This saves time and is helpful to management so that they can track everything.

It also helps managers see the performance of particular resources. They can see the resource utilization. For example, if we create requirements for a role, such as a developer, tester, or a technical architect, they can see how those resources are doing.

In addition, we can drill down into the details underlying the consolidated information. If a project manager finds he needs one more developer for a particular requirement, he can drill down to find a developer for that requirement. The drill-down approach means managers can completely utilize resources, each one to 100 percent of capacity.

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

The resource capacity planning is the most valuable feature because you can evaluate your team's capacity by team and what projects they're working on and you can forecast easily by team.

The resource capacity and availability help us to manage our work. During portfolio planning each month with new projects that are presented, we're able to use Enterprise One to measure the capacity of each team that's being requested to be on the project. And obviously, the resource managers and project managers are still getting used to using the tool. But I think that as time goes, it's a good tool to measure, to see the capacity and overloaded resources, as far as projects go and taking on new projects.

Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. It does do end-to-end project management. It's a good thing that we can do end-to-end project management as far as monitoring the project resources, capacity, and timeline, and the schedule of the project. But that's all we use it for. They get what they need from an outside system in order to manage the project end-to-end.

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

We're still in an early stage. Things will change as we use it more. I did program reports that are important and that will provide us with value.

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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

The most valuable features are the resource planning and tracking.

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it_user171948 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Enterprise Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The layout of objects can be easily modified and customized based on the meta model requirements or user needs.

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it_user808140 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Solutions Architect with 10,001+ employees

The portfolio and technology management are well built, however the lack of templates harden the initial learning curve.

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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.
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