Planview Portfolios Room for Improvement

BO
Planview Portfolio Support Analyst at Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.

The issue we had was during a test case and had to do with Enterprise One linking to third-party apps. For Enterprise One, for what it's supposed to do, I don't have a problem with it as a PM. It does what I need it to do and the issue doesn’t necessarily impact traditional project management. You can manage budget, time, and resources - the three key pillars of project management - and IT can all be managed within the tool, Enterprise One.

For the more granular visibility that people expect, there are always third-party applications, like LeanKit. That gives you that more granular picture for managing the work, however, that doesn't necessarily take away from the scope of what project management is in Enterprise One.

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

We've been encouraging our users to manage their schedules directly in the Work and Assignments module. So far, it has been good, but we've been in conversation with the vendor product team to improve the performance of the Work and Assignments module. Right now, it is a bit slower.

We don't use the Progression feature. We will use it at some point in time. Until then, we want to have a way to set time to help decide what's in the past, present, and future. It is one of the things we've been discussing with Planview.

It provides flexibility for configuring assignments, but one of the things about which we've been talking to Planview is related to certain resources that are associated with a project. When the project extends, their demand also equally goes up. There are also resources where if a particular task has to crash, it may need additional effort. So, it is between the fixed effort versus fixed duration. Planview is more duration-based. For example, if you crash a task, the system rightly thinks that you're crashing the task, and you need to finish the work by doing overtime or working additional hours. If you are taking 30 hours to finish a task in three weeks, and for whatever reason, you have to crash the task into two weeks, 30 hours need to be fulfilled within those two weeks. If the task moves to four weeks, instead of three weeks, you still have 30 hours that get distributed among four weeks, so you will be able to finish the task. That makes sense for those resources that are associated with the task, but there are certain resources, such as a project manager or project administrator, for whom when a project extends, the demand also equally goes up. So, if somebody is assigned 50% for a project, and assuming that the project is moving out by a month or two or three months, the effort shouldn't go down. Currently, the allocation goes down, and our resource managers have to go and update the effort back up to 50% or whatever the demand is. We are interacting with Planview to provide a solution. Right now, we have to go and update the additional demand because of the change in the project.

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MK
Senior Analyst - Technology at LPL Financial

Its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects is very limited. In terms of the out-of-the-box reporting for summary reports, the reporting that we typically leverage is around forecasting for resources, timesheets, and actuals, and just looking at what is the capacity. There is no real summary of what work is being done and how work is being accomplished. So, what we typically do is that we get a copy of the data files from Enterprise One daily, and then we have a team that manages the data mod outside of Enterprise One. They use data from Enterprise One as well as other additional sources to provide the reporting that we share with the management. So, we leverage a lot of Enterprise One data for reporting, but we don't use the reporting capabilities within Enterprise One. So, reporting can be improved, and they could help us make more customized reporting. I know it is very configurable out of the box, but we have to leverage an outside data mod that pulls in a lot of data from Enterprise One. So, the reporting function, and being able to customize reports, is the area that could be very beneficial.

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Buyer's Guide
Planview Portfolios
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Planview Portfolios. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
JC
Director, Office of Process and Project Management at Electronic Arts Inc.

When you get a tool, you have to know your business before you get a tool. We didn't know our business. We put the tool in and tried to wrap the business around the tool. That doesn't really work. So, we need to continue to work with them to figure out:

  • What do we need? 
  • What is the best solution? 
  • How do we work with this tool when we just trying to figure out our business?

We're finally at a good place. Now, how do we restart with it the way that the tool thinks about work. Sometimes, it's just not the same way that we do. Therefore, how do we manage that within the business? How do we manage our internal customers? That's what we really have to work through.

The first step was to have Planview come in and retrain our organization. That was really helpful, at least to make people not so mad, because they hated the tool. They were really nasty about it. When we rolled it out to the organization, we rolled it out in a way where we didn't ask for their help. So, there was a small group of people at the leadership level who went in and said, "Okay, this is the tool we're going to use." But, we didn't really ask the people who are going to use the product. When you do that, they get angry.

They don't love that knowledge. Then, we had to go back, and say, "Okay, we're going to start over. Tell us what your grievances are." We had to identify whether the grievance was with having a tool or as a grievance with Planview. They are two very different things. Once we identified what their grievances were, Planview was able to come in, help retrain, and get some of the sentiment better just about the tool and using a product in general.

Primarily, we were only focused on the project side of it. This year, we are trying to roll it out to more operational people, which is different from project side. On the project side, these are people who are sort of career project managers, product managers, and program managers. They're willing to work with us a little bit. When you move over to the operations people, this is not their business. They don't know about tools. All they want to do is help the customers. They don't want to have to deal with tools. 

Our challenge will be this tool is complex. It is not necessarily easy to start and learn from the beginning. How do you get people who are not professionals to adopt it, use it, and not be mean about it? That's what we're trying to work with.

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

Its view into RCCP and availability does not at all help us to manage resources. It is one of the worst features of Enterprise One where everybody in our company hates the tool and are sort of forced to use it for RCCP, some teams have moved to use other tools for the same and use E1 as recording tool only. 

Enterprise One does  not provide any insight to respective resources on the available work and the left out work when he or she goes to the timesheet. It is like filling an Excel sheet from 15 years ago. New solutions out there actually do a better job.

The solutions I am referring to are JIRA as well as Confluence. With that connectivity I see many of my IT teams doing Agile timesheet planning with sort of a background timer capturing the time being spent on a activity. 

Enterprise One has got a very rap in the organization due to its bad UI and complicated UX. The steep learning curve and inability of other non project resources finding it hard to use the tool makes it hard for people to recommend the tool.

The number one thing that needs improvement is the UI. It should be easy for even casual project managers. It should provide customizable screens that look modern and can be a choice for project managers to choose at a professional level, medium level, and a very easy level. I am thinking 3 separate standard Ui that you can choose as per level of users. 

Many PM;s track projects using different tools and sometimes they end up using PV as a record system.  

Enterprise One does not provide a good risk assessment functionality and does not provide a good what-if analysis functionality, it would be preferable to have this in a good UX. 

It does not provide end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. It's 50/50. It is very difficult to use Enterprise One as a tool that one would WANT to use to better the project. It is at this point, a record system that we are bring told to use as it gives nice metrics for leadership to make decisions. 

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NJ
Enterprise Architect at Qualcomm Incorporated

Configuring the UI in the content management system is too elaborate and too time-consuming. The look and feel are outdated because it's more than ten years old, so it's not that flexible when it comes to using the real estate that you have on the screen to cater to certain persons. If you look nowadays at web UIs, they are more intuitive than what is currently provided.

The workflow engine needs to be improved to provide for easier configuration and better functionality. Creating workflows needs to be done in multiple places, and the process is elaborate and time-consuming.

We would like to see improvements made on the CTM side and the survey engine. We are now doing app rationalization and we took all of our applications out of Planview CTM and put them into a different tool to run the surveys.

All the parts are there for a low code platform, it needs some uplifting in the UI and workflow. this is the real untapped possibility of CTM.

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

I would say that Enterprise One's ability to create summary reports across multiple projects is cumbersome. I know that they are making changes to the user interface. It was talked about in the conference they're having right now.

I think the capabilities are there, but it seems difficult for me to even create a report as I am not a Planview technical expert. It is not particularly intuitive. It slows us down in reporting the big picture to management. 

I would say that they should continue to dig into usability and user experience because it can be hard to find things. The system could be made more user-friendly and robust with perhaps a more interactive help section. It is difficult for someone like me who does not use Enterprise One every day to find what I'm looking for. It's just not intuitive.

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EduardoMaya - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Office Manager at Hoteles City Express

The box reports are too limited. If you want to configure it, you must consult someone, which is sometimes expensive.

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KG
IT Project Analyst at Tractor Supply Company

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.

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KB
Enterprise Portfolio Manager at Wellmark

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.

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

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.

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RV
Portfolio Manager at State Of Delaware

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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GH
Sr Program Manager at Fresenius Medical Care

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.

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HV
Program Manager at Citizens Bank

There's still a lot of reluctance within the organization. We're not using all of the capabilities that we have today. We're still doing our strategic and capital investment planning on spreadsheets rather than using the capabilities that exist within Enterprise One. I definitely need to leverage the experts here at Planview to help drive a culture change. There's just a lot of reluctance on behalf of people within the company to put data into the tool.

We have some transparency in where people are spending their time, but we haven't done a good job of resource management in the sense of predicting demand. We have a lot of opportunity there to improve.

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

The integrations need improvement. We have some data exports. They're not even live app integrations. They're just data exports that run with our SAP instance. They either fail, hang up, or aren't configured correctly to operate. Those are the issues that we're running into now.

Some things that we're looking forward to are alerts and monitoring notifications for active notifications. We would also like more about the history of actions which are happening within the tool, so more recordable history.

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

The only area that I can see currently needing improvement is just the modernization of the look and feel of it. I just attended the Accelerate Conference and heard that that is underway. The configuration for the front-end user can be a little antiquated and it needs a facelift. That said, overall, I'm definitely impressed with the tool itself.

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LJ
IT Portfolio Management Senior Consultant at CNA Insurance

When I just joined, it was very easy for me to pick up. I was able to get myself familiarized within a month or two. I think it's a very easy tool to use. Although Enterprise One is easy and user-friendly, currently the learnings have been more via trial and error, I think if Planview could provide better consistent training like a tool demo, structured training, how-tos that would help tremendously.

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

The scheduling's kind of clunky in terms of its ability for us to see what stage work is at. They could have done better with that. It can be difficult to use.

We don't use its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects. I think it's poor.

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

There is improvement space in the handeling of agile teams and team assignments in the work planning and the resource reservation. 

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

The content management definitely needs to improve. We don't really use content management for projects inside Enterprise One. We have actually switched to a SharePoint site. We have a feed from Enterprise One every night of all the projects that are created. And once they're created, we run our process that goes out to create SharePoint sites for each project. Because of the inability for drag-and-drop file ingestion, the best thing about it is the versioning, but that's also done in SharePoint. We just don't use it because it's HTML and it's hard to use. It's a little bit more cumbersome than it should and then we like.

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SL
Senior Engineer at Northwestern Mutual

The product can probably improve in a couple areas: 

  1. Support is still a challenge. We find it challenging more due to the responsiveness and getting a case or ticket assigned to an analyst. That's what I was just doing. I was following up on an email that we opened last week. We haven't heard anything, so following up on that. So, that's one area of opportunity.
  2. I would like them to be more product-focused with the continuing evolution of the product. As companies transform the way they do IT asset management, the product should continually change with it as well.
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AH
Sr PPM Administrator with 5,001-10,000 employees

I would suggest for the request module that they open up the fields and columns so it's like we are doing our work in the work module. You can't do that with today. We also have to make sure that the fields can go both ways with the request and work modules. Including fields in the column sets would be helpful, because today they only use attributes.

For the multiple fields that you have, there is not a single select field, but multiple selections. You can't use those in column sets today. It excludes those fields when being reported on. So, you have to figure out another way to do that.

It would be beneficial for us if it was able to integrate with other tools and have those tools integrated into Planview, which they're working on. Examples of tools being integrated DevOps, JIRA and Projectplace. Since we're a mature PMO, and not all of our PMOs are, if they can integrate with Projectplace or the Planview PPM Pro, that's good. 

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

The solution needs to be better at accepting new ideas for upcoming releases. At times, we've requested Planview to add new features to the tool. But they have it go through an enhancement idea process, and we find it a long process. Your idea goes through only if the same idea is proposed by other organizations.

Email notifications for resource allocations/requests/requirements/reserves are something that could be added. A lot of the time, we get questions from resource managers. We would like to get an email notification when a resource request is made.

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

Enhancements are needed in:

Advanced reporting and analytics: While Planview Management provides robust reporting and analytics capabilities, further enhancements could include more advanced data visualization options, predictive analytics features, and customizable dashboards to provide deeper insights into project performance and trends. 

Enhanced collaboration tools: While Planview Management facilitates collaboration, additional features such as real-time chat, video conferencing integration, and collaborative document editing can further improve communication and teamwork among project teams and stakeholders. 

Scalability and performance: As organizations grow and their project portfolios expand, it's essential for Planview Management to ensure scalability and performance. This could involve optimizing the platform's architecture, enhancing database management, and improving response times for large-scale deployments. 

Overall, by addressing these areas for improvement and incorporating additional features in the next release, Planview Management can continue to meet the evolving needs of organizations and remain a leading solution for project and portfolio management.

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VP
Specialist Project Solutions at Flowserve Corporation

We had issues with the data rephrasing. 

The integration stuff is not going so well. I heard that there are a lot of updates to version 18. It is almost 40 to 50 percent updates on the integration part. We should feel the difference and our problem should be resolved.

I am looking forward to exploring the bots on the recording part. This will really help us out when it is added.

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MR
Manager, Project Governance at Clorox

We want to deploy the program management function. We are not there yet. It's not already part of our solution. It's a further enhancement that we want to purchase eventually.

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KW
Associate Director, PPM Governance & Operations at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

I think our performance issues have to do with our large portfolio. We have a lot of data in there. We're a global organization with thousands of users, and that also has an impact.

The financial piece of the tool could be better. While it may have to do with the complexity of the work that we do, it seems that the tool should be able to drill down a bit deeper into the financial area.

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

I would like to see more documentation pieces. Right now, they do have the content repository. I would like to see more out-of-the-box features with document repository capabilities.

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TS
Manager of IT at Regions bank
  • Integration
  • The cost of other pieces and integrating them in.
  • The response to certain issues that pop up.
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AS
IT Architect at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

In terms of improvement, I know one of the things they're moving to is a single Planview account ID. Right now, if you have multiple Planview products, you have to log on multiple times. But that's a general statement. It's not specific to Enterprise One.

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MF
Enterprise Portfolio Analyst at Wellmark

I would like to be able to copy and paste from Excel into work and assignments along with roles and hours, as opposed to having to type it out one by one.

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KK
Project Administrator at Texas Mutual Insurance Company

I've personally been using Planview for going on 17 years now, and I think they have made some great improvements in it. I've used it both as a Resource Manager and Project Manager, and now I've been using it from an admin perspective for quite a while. I think some of the administrative aspects of it could be a little easier, especially when it comes to designing reports. The reporting coming out of it could be a little bit better.

There are some small things that are troublesome to me as far as assigning resources, setting people up, trying to configure resource structures, and stuff like that. But those are just small nibs. I think overall from a usability perspective, it's really good. It's huge. Planview's the Microsoft of project planning and PPM. There's a lot to it and people just need to take the time to learn it.

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DD
Team Leader at Wellmark

As more and more organizations are adopting agile as a framework of how to deliver work, they should build in some flexibility within Planview of connecting the work to the teams.

For example, right now the old waterfall methodology of planning was to say "Hey, I need an allocation of a resource." Normally with other tools I've seen, it's if I need an allocation of 18, I know Planview has that. We, unfortunately, made some modifications, we didn't go that route, we're on fast forward. That is an example where I think Planview has done that. 

When you think of planning at a PI level, roadmap planning, or release planning, I think they should make a little more headway into how agile delivery works, tying it back into the financials and the planning to Planview. I think it would be good.

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

I find it a little difficult to forecast the remaining effort but even though I've been using it for years I don't think that as a company we have been using it to its full extent. There is probably a little bit of process change that's required on our side, as well as understanding as to how Planview works with forecasting.

It's more internal for us to look at from a process point of view, to understand how the forecasting works. We're a bit unique because we're also using another tool called MIS along with this application and it's integrated with Planview Enterprise One. It gets a ton of the information from there and that's where we're actually relying on financial forecasts.

The integration was okay until Planview changed its integration software from Appian. They have Integration as a Service now and we're not using it. We're continuing to use Appian with our own licensing of the software for on-premise.

Being the IT development manager who implements the upgrades for Planview, I would love to see more thorough testing of expenditures and more thorough testing in general. When we do an upgrade, we have to do quite a bit of testing because we can affect the bottom line. We have to understand that Planview is upstream from our financial tool that derives the capitalization of applications. We have to do extensive testing and when we implement a release, we find numerous bugs and we have to have hot-fixes and patches put in on top of whatever we're testing at the time. Because it's such a huge amount of effort to upgrade the application we can't go to the next release, even if it has the next fixes on it because we're going to have to redo all the testing. We'll set the project back months, and then we find another bug. It's very difficult. If we can have better and higher quality testing coming from Planview software, then we'll have higher confidence in putting the software in and not testing the out-of-the-box functionality.

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KK
IT Project Director at UT MD Anderson

We had some learning issues at the start, but now that the users are in the tool day after day, they are getting there.

Power BI versus getting reports within Planview could improve. Instead of having to leverage Power BI, those reports could just be generated within the Planview tool using the tiles. This would be a huge jump for the product.

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

The resource area needs improvement. The improvements that have been made recently in the later versions have been good improvements, but I think there are some more improvements needed there.

I would like to see where we could add a few of our own fields and be able to track some additional information such as release information attached to the pieces of work so we can tie our accounting codes into the work and the release at the resource level.

I don't think there's been a lot of investment in the request area. That's our intake and it seems to have remained the same over many years. I feel there's a disconnect from when we enter a new request, and if we approve it and dispatch work, the request and the work are then disconnected.

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HP
Senior Project Analyst at Otpp

It is a bit of a rigid system.

We are looking to upgrade next year and the big thing for us is BI integration. The project already has that, so that is what I'm looking for, and Planview has sort of covered that base already. This will make our reporting a lot more customized. We can be more flexible. Right now, we are sort of using custom reports, which can be a bit buggy, as they're not native to Planview. This will be native integration.

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

When I started working with Planview, I didn't know anything about project or resource management. I had to learn everything: the admin side, then the user side of it. Probably, in the beginning, I would implement in the blueprint or workshops more demos. A live demo of how the system works because we would like a little deeper dive in how the application works for us to understand what we need to provide, what we are doing, what we will be doing. Because in the beginning, it was so overwhelming, and we didn't know anything about the tool. 

You know your process. You know how you work, but you don't know how you're going to put that in the tool. If we had more demos in the beginning to make us more comfortable with the tool, we could have improved the success of the configuration.

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JM
Associate at BlackRock, Inc.

I would like easier ways to manage reporting titles in Planview. A lot of our users like to see things on dashboards, etc. I know there are integrations with Power BI and other applications. But, I would like a little more of an intuitive way for us to manage that.

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

It would be great to see Planview incorporate agile interfacing/methods in it. Like CA Clarity and other leading PPM tools – Planview should enhance or develop the interfaces to ingrate with other market leading Agile tools (like TFS, JIRA, RALLY, etc..) and collaboration tools to support the seamless Organizational investment data flow from and to these tools, it could prove as a great eco-system aligned with today’s emerging frameworks, methodologies………

I would like to see them publish their guides, FAQs, tips, and Knowledge Management Database (KMDB) for free in their community, as other market leading PPM tools do. Planview has not published, shared / made available it’s tool related guides, QRGs, release notes in public domain. Only the authorized customers can access their repository – I hope they should think about this and create the open / free / openly accessible community blog, sites where users can found the threads / discussions and can download the user / feature / admin / functional / module guides etc…

Scope of customization – it’s a great tool built with set of best practices from project management perspective, but they should provision the scope of customizations. I have grown up working with Planview versions 5 / 7.4.1 (10 years back, almost) and have never seen them provided the ability to create any custom object / module, if required. What Planview suggests is to use their existing modules as they suffice the PM and Strategic requirements. But like the other tools, they should provision for the scope of customizations so that users can create a custom module / object / entity – which will work individually (as the work, strategy entities do) having the object specific supporting attributes / lifecycles / Scripted dialogs etc… it would then certainly revolutionize the whole PPM space…

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

We're looking forward to version 18, upgrading there, and seeing what we can find there.

It would be nice if Planview were a little more flexible.

One thing that we'd absolutely really like to see is an improvement in the administration capabilities. With the Planview administrator, the interface is very time consuming, and that is not fun. We could be doing other things.

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

I would like to be able to integrate with Oracle to supplement what we're currently doing with reporting. We aren't doing it right now, although I don't know if it's a limitation with Planview or it's a limitation with us. I know that it would be helpful for me to bridge that gap because we have to deal with two different datasets.

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CM
PPM Services Manager at Roche Diabetes Care

Overall, the UI needs improvement. The UI should have more possibilities for users who are not specialized in using Planview. At the moment, it is more of a technical UI. I would like it to be an open user UI. 

improvement is needed on several modules, like resource management and outcome management. 

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

Some of the out-of-the-box reporting is not immediately useful and although it can be configured or customized, there are still improvements that can be made.

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

I would like a bit more flexibility, as far as the configuration, and have additional capabilities to configure, making it more flexible for our use.

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JC
Director of Operations at UK Santander Technology

It could do with a quicker response time for some reports or portfolios.

What we are exploring now: 

  • What happens after a business decision is made in Planwiew? 
  • How is it enabled through other processes of the company, such as purchasing? 
  • How we create a straight line of action for the users? 

We want to see what it does that is possible and what could be a good use case for it. The same way when information is collected in other systems financially, how does it comes back so we can reallocate it. Can we use something similar to ITV's business management in Planview? Is anyone else experiencing that? If so, that would be a great use case for the whole Planview community.

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

If you have a tool, you want customer support with people who you can depend on. It seems like we cannot depend on anyone. Customer service is lacking. Our sales rep did not bother to reach out to us in the past 2 years, and not even at the conference. He excluded us from a local meet-up he had organized. Our customer relationship manager keeps changing. It seems like we have nobody that we really can rely on. 

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

We have required more time from our resource managers to spend time in the tool. The adoption has been slower than we would have hoped. So, I would think from a rollout perspective, if Planview could help us with material which gets non-Planview users or previously light Planview users to become more heavy users of the system, then this would help us with the rollout. Our biggest improvement that we've seen has been in the annual planning process each year that we go through to map out what projects we're doing and what are we handling next. It has become noticeably easier the better that we have gotten in Planview.

It's still a project management tool. It's that slow adoption thing. It hasn't come full circle in the other parts of the company. Therefore, it hasn't transformed our company's delivery.

The technical support piece needs improvement. 

When we rolled it out, we rolled it out out-of-the-box, which didn't allow for hardly any customization. We found out that we probably should have slowed down and customized it. Giving advice to anybody, I would tell them don't do the out-of-the-box solution. It's worth it to sit down, customize it, and make it work your way.

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

The solution out-of-the-box that we established was insufficient. We had to purchase and set up OData. I don't believe that it's a great solution out-of-the-box but eventually you can get there.

It does not provide end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. It also does not help with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives.

The portfolio creation user interface needs improvement. It's not intuitive, from a user experience perspective. If you've never used it, it doesn't click here and then the next thing opens, click here, then the next thing opens. You get all the features upon opening to create a portfolio.

The request screens, the request process, and the workflows have a poor user experience also. The workflows are definitely not intuitive. You're clicking links and going back and forth. It's way too many clicks and it doesn't make sense. It's not intuitive. On the request side, it hasn't been updated in a long time and it's the entry point for all of our work. It could provide more data value than it does today.

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AJ
PVA at Prime Therapeutics

I am looking forward to the upcoming features. Previously, we have had continuous upgrades, so not having to put in so many tickets to get in a queue to get the migration up and running. we'll leverage that. Based on issues that we've run into, such as, having to open up a ticket, then going through development and that whole process, it lengthens out to find out that, "Oh, we can't fix it. It's going to be in the next release." Then, we have to wait for that release to come out. From an admin perspective, I think the upcoming features are great. 

Some of the other administrative screens, like the configured screens, they are modernizing those, which is exciting. This will help me out.

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

Our version is definitely set up a bit more waterfall world. It would be better if some of the agile features were more in the standard product.

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BH
R&D Project Management Coach at Johnsonville Sausage

I would rate it as an eight (out of 10). We have had some difficulties with trying to get the financial component of it to work the way that we want it to. The way that we do IRRs, we tried to do that in Planview and the financial model didn't quite get there. It depends on who you talk to, but some of our project managers would probably give it a higher score. When you start talking to some of our financial folks, they would probably give it a lower score, as they are trying to figure out how to best use it financially and have had some struggles.

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GT
Planview Administrator at AXA XL

When it comes to reporting there are some challenges with integration.

Also, some of the functionality with Microsoft is restricted.

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

I do all of the reporting for Enterprise One and it's not as user-friendly. So there's not a whole lot of flexibility of what we can do with the reports or custom reports like we could in our old system. The ability to customize reports is not there. And we actually have to pay for Planview consultants to capture reporting that we really need because of the inability to configure the current track record for Enterprise One. That's the thing that we are struggling with is the reporting capability in Enterprise One, without having to pay for extra services from Planview to get what we need. The downfall of this is because Enterprise One is a hosted application, our administrators do not have access to the data table to all of the data tables, to all of the data, and all of the data sets that are running in the background.

The feature to create summary reports across multiple projects affects our ability to share the big picture with management. The flexibility to customize the reports in the way that management would like to see them, we cannot do. We have to engage Planview in order to have access to data to provide to management.

The reporting capability and access to the fields for our system administrators to have access to the data without having to pay Enterprise One to get the data that's needed to create custom reports for management to create reports need improvement. 

Another improvement would be on the request side for visibility. For the requesters to see progress for work and reporting for requesters portfolios, and for requesters to be able to monitor the working end to end.

I would also like to have the ability to report at a task level for chargeback purposes.

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

I think that the user interface needs some getting used to. It's not immediately intuitive. That's potentially room for improvement. I think also that an organization needs to have good support from some senior management to get something like Planview established. If that's missing, then it's not so easy to get support for it in the organization. If I was to talk about a feature or something for improvement, I think it would be the user interface and, in particular, the link between strategy and work.

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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

Project planning: The work plan is a bit kludgy and difficult to use. It does not work like MS Project which irritates a lot of PMs. The learning curve is pretty steep - this is a robust application with a LOT of moving parts - and most users do not have the time, or inclination, to dig in and learn it while in the middle of managing a project.

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

Allowing users to have a link that opens a specific sub-tab or folder is a challenge. You can deep link to objects but it won't show the object in the context of the frame.

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

Visualization and reporting areas could use improvements by having canned reports.

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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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