Planview Portfolios Reviews

It's primarily for project and portfolio management, which includes resource assignments onto projects as well as financial management of our projects.

When we implemented it, we were able to intentionally assign resources to the projects that they've been approved for. Previously, we didn't have a way of restricting resources from charging time against any active projects that we have. By utilizing Enterprise One, we were able to reflect and show the resources when they went to enter their time sheets for only active projects and projects that they were approved to work on. This meant that they were charging hours against work that their project manager was expecting them to work on.

We are still going through a lot of transformation as an organization on the whole. Planview is a good partner because one of the ways that we have tried to change our strategies is to move to a product-based approach. I think Planview will help us with that.

It has helped to transform our organization’s delivery. It is enabled us to see actual planned start and end times of projects, then we can look back when the projects actually closed out. This gives us an opportunity to look back, and say, "Why did it take us so long to finish a project, especially if it went above the proposed plan?" It also manages our costs to say, "Based on how we're trending on our costs, how are we going to finish within budget? Are we likely to go over budget?" This also affects schedule.

Planview has helped connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution because we utilize the strategic module within Enterprise One to help with that work.

The biggest impact has been resource assignment and management. It has helped us consolidate those and be very intentional as far as the tasks that resources are assigned to track. It has a big impact on our financial planning as well.

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.

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.

We've been using it for 14 months.

It's very stable. I am very happy with the stability.

It is very scalable. I think it's helping us grow, as far as we are a changing organization. Planview has been able to grow with us in that respect.

We've used that technical support. We have faced some challenges with some of the enhancement requests that we might want information on and the process it takes to get some of those changes put in. The process has improved from when we first implemented it. We have noticed a difference. 

I am leaning towards rating the technical support a seven and a half to eight out of 10. I would expect that next year, I'll probably be able to rate them a 10.

We're using Innotas at the time, which is now Planview PPM Pro. Ironically, we didn't realize that they were going to be acquired by Planview when we started using it. We switched over just for maturity and to have better financial planning and reporting application as well.

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

We partnered with Planview in terms of the initial deployment. They had an onsite consultant who helped us with the configuration and creating the test environment before we were able to cut over and move into the extra production environment. The experience with them was very good. I would rate the experience as a 10 out of 10. We had a very good cut over experience.

We don't track the ROI. I think that there is some ROI available just based on the cost of how much we've been spending on our portfolio the last year and on how Planview has helped us manage those costs.

From PPM Pro to Planview Enterprise One, we did not evaluate other vendors. We already had the relationship with Planview from using PPM Pro so that helped us. Planview came to us very receptive. Also with the costs, they were very understanding. Knowing that we were an existing customer, they were very much willing to work with us to make sure that we were able to transition to Enterprise One.

I would rate them as a solid nine out of 10.

Give Enterprise One a fair consideration. It is very scalable and flexible with the changes that we are seeing with version 17. There are a lot of integrations, so the capabilities are much broader than what you may initially perceive. I would definitely put it up there as a product that is as good, if not better, than anything that's out there in the marketplace that is similar.

We are not yet using the Lean/Agile delivery tools, but we're hoping to do so in the next couple of months.

Public Cloud

Other

We are using it to monitor all the investment planning from the business. In IT. we using it for monitoring all activities, the financial spent, and the delivery of the work.

There have been new additional features helping us quite a lot, which have helped us to get executive adoption of the tool. Now that we are moving into version 18 with automated things, we will get more value with that. It's going to help us facilitate upgrades, I am looking forward to that as well.

It's helping us to be more mature in the way we handle change and projects from the business point of view. We have some transparency in what we do and are auditable in our different steps. That's a huge basic step, but a good start from the business point of view. We are now connecting to the IT through Columbia. There is now a nice simple flow.

It is helping to have a more structured process for planning and investment in capacity management for decisions. Now, we have information that is visible and helps to have more certainty that the decisions made are the right decisions. It's helping us to be more on the right side of the decision or have more confidence in the decision that is made.

Our transparency is increasing a lot. It is helping us to get people together. There are no dark rooms anymore. In some areas or concepts, we want to add more light to every single concept. That's the big impact that the tool is having. It allows conversations between people.

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.

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.

We have been using it for nearly two years. We started in January 2018.

It is stable and reliable. Downtime is marginal. 

Planview alignment is a replacement for SAP cost center, specifically the finance, controlling, and some PPM. That was the comparison that we started with. We didn't compare Planview to other PPM tools because what we saw gave us a run for our money with what we had before. 

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

I would rate it an eight out of 10. We have angles that can still be better, but the product gives us enough growth for years.

It is mainly for project management and resource capacity management across the IT department.

It has impacted our department within IT, which is the project management office.

It brings visibility to work being performed as well as resource capacity.

It certainly has improved the way we showcase our work. I'm part of the project management office. The way we show our projects data is certainly way better than what we could earlier.

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.

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. 

We implemented Planview in 2014. We hope to upgrade next fiscal year.

It is pretty stable. We have hardly had any outages.

It grows with our needs. It is easy enough to scale.

We are not very happy with the customer service. This is one of our main pain points. It doesn't cover the entirety of customer service, as there are reps who are really great and we've had good experiences. 

Many times, we've had people give us attitude, delays in response, or just a lack of interest. This got to the point where if there was a problem, we would rather try to solve it ourselves than call customer support. 

We did have a call with a manager or director from customer service. He will be looking into these issues. 

Different people were using different tools and the reporting was a problem. So, the new head of IT charged the PMO in 2004 to come up with a tool. We did an RFP and Planview was one of the finalists, and our final choice.

Licensing costs are pretty high.

I would rate the solution itself as an eight (out of 10), though the overall experience at a 6. I like the solution. There are things that they can improve on. Planview is constantly working on new things for each situation that comes up.

Public Cloud

Other

The primary use case is project costing, resource forecasting, and financial reporting of projects. It is implemented only in departments that touch what we call our project portfolio. So, the people in IT who do the coding, programming, developing products for customers, and the maintenance on our systems, they're all in the solution reporting time. However, our payroll and human resources do business as usual. They run the company and business, keeping the lights on, but they are not part of our time reporting community.

As we grow, it will help us because nobody in the company speaks or understands Planview data. It allows us to take that and put it into a format where we can walk into a boardroom, and say, "This is where we are. This is where we're going. This is what we need."

The biggest impact on our company is resource forecasting.

Planview has helped connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. That is the key use that we have for it. We use it to validate the work that we're doing and the funding that we need. The difference between the previous version and current version for us would be the ICPM and the way it gives us different scenarios. We can go in and build that out.

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.

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.

On December 3rd of 2018, we upgraded from version 11 to Enterprise One version 16.4. So, we've been using it for about 11 months now.

So far, we've not had any problems with it. We did have a couple of little hiccups. Most of our stability issues have been around that it is hosted at Planview. When our network goes down, so does our connection to the outside world. Then, we lose all of our cloud-based solutions. When everything was on-prem before, we could lose that connection to the outside world and still function as a company. Now that all of our solutions have moved offsite, anytime we lose that connectivity, it's a whole office of people sitting around twiddling their thumbs because you can't get to JIRA, Confluence, etc. Most of our projects are still actively managed out of Microsoft Project and saved on their desktop. That's probably the only thing that we can still leverage when that connection goes down.

We lose Internet connectivity once every two to three months when there is a hiccup somewhere and something goes down in the matrix, then we lose connectivity. It is usually down for maybe 30 minutes to an hour, then we're up and running again.

I would rate the technical support just slightly below poor. We have found that for us to communicate with Planview technical support and open a ticket, we have to make a business case with a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation including screenshots, red circles, and arrows. We have to draw it out for them, then we make a video showing this is us and everything the way it should look. Then, we do this activity: Here's the outcome and the malfunction with the explanation. We have to remind them that we don't use allocations, that we're just using reservations. We go through this whole diatribe of putting almost a packet together. Then, two weeks later somebody calls us, and says, "Hey, we're looking into your ticket. Can you explain what's going on?"

It's like, "I just spent all that time. Did you look at the video? Did you look at the PowerPoint?"

"Well, not really."

"Well, go back and look at it." Then it's, "Well, did you understand it?"

"Well, I don't know. I can't reproduce it. Let me..."

Then, the other day, we went through that same process. They called us up. and said, "Hey, we couldn't reproduce your problem, so we just went into your production version and updated your project for you." I don't ever want anybody from outside of my organization to touch one of my projects. So, I was pretty livid about that.

In some ways, the solution is flexible. In other ways, it is not. It seems that the support that we get from Planview when we call them up over the phone is almost misleading at times.

When we talk to people at Horizons that have had some of the same challenges, they found it very flexible because they knew about a thing to make Planview work the way they needed it to and we didn't get that assistance from Planview. The biggest benefit in being at Horizons isn't the support from Planview, as it is the support from the user community having been in the software.

My wish is the company, Planview, steps up to be just as valuable as the use cases and user stories.

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

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

Glen Van Koojic and Mike Moulden were outside trainers and facilitators who helped us with the rapid deployment of Planview. They are contractors, not actual employees, of Planview. They are great guys and helped a tremendous amount.

We have seen ROI in non-tangible ways. There is still much more to be had there as we improve our business plan and operation.

We evaluated Clarity, Rally, and a Microsoft Project Enterprise solution.

We already had Planview. We looked for a while at Workday because Workday was coming on to do our HR stuff. The idea was, "Maybe we can get some sort of work management project piece out of Workday, then have it all be integrated into one tool with one check to write." There wasn't enough meat on the bone for us to go that route. So, we went with Planview.

We decided to go with Planview because of familiarity. We didn't have to change to a whole new system. Even though the difference between versions 11 and 16 was a totally different code base. It was beneficial for us to keep similar look and feel, layout, and shorter training time.

We still use Microsoft Project as a standalone. Most of our projects are managed out of that because we use Planview as a financial reporting tool. We will hopefully replace Microsoft Project with an expanded use of Planview Enterprise One.

I am happy with Planview. I would give it an endorsement.

We're trying to move in a more lean, agile direction. Everything we use right now for that is JIRA, Excel spreadsheet, and Microsoft Project based.

We used Projectplace during the rollout. I really liked it and would like to keep using it. We don't currently use it, as we are not currently customers of it. I think it was their tool to use when they were rolling us up and because we were participating in that project with them, so we got access to it that way.

I find value in both products: Enterprise One and Projectplace. I didn't see any synchronization or data feeding between the two of them. So, I can't tell if there's any synergy between them. I believe there probably is based on what I've seen at Horizons, but I've not witnessed that synergy.

We barely use 20 percent of the features that are in the current version. I am excited about all of the products that Planview offers and how they seem to integrate together. I would like to see my company mature and develop to the point that we could bring on a second or third Planview product, then we can really start becoming lean, agile, and innovative. However, we need to get our own house in order before we can even talk about future features of Planview.

We need to do a better job of being us than we currently do. We need a little more leadership maturity. We need to refine our business processes. We have a new CEO, and he's setting a new direction for the company. We need to get his business vision a little further down the road than where we are. We're sort of in a state of flux right now.

The product is probably a seven or eight (out of 10), but I think our adoption of it and use of it right now is probably a five (out of 10). So, we need to be better at using the tool. 

Public Cloud

Other

My primary use cases for this solution are: 

• Time reporting
• Portfolio management 
• Capacity planning

Enterprise One has improved my organization by enabling us to stop committing to work that we can't do.

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.

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.

I have been using Planview Enterprise One for 15+ years. 

The stability is fairly high. The only problem we've had so far is that for whatever reason, Friday morning, the page load is ridiculously slow. I don't know if that's when the staff is doing updates or what, but Friday mornings are very slow.

I'm not worried about scalability. 

We have about 450 project managers, resource managers, team members, leadership viewers, and power admin users.

There are two staff members for maintenance. They both administer maintenance, consult on new capabilities, and develop reports and new functionality.

We're only one of 20 lines of business in the organization and we're the only ones currently using the solution. Within that number, there is around 20% adoption. Time reporters have to report time, but I don't know that I would consider that. They do it, but that's not a tipping point. We do have plans to increase usage. We have a proof of concept with one department outside of ours.

I'm unimpressed with technical support. When my folks call or email they say if it doesn't do whatever it's supposed to do out-of-the-box they can't answer a question and we end up back with some solution consultant.

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

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

We used a consultant from Planview for the deployment. They went above and beyond, but their approach needs upgrading.

We are seeing the start of ROI. We have additional capability. It didn't save us money at all, but it gave us new capabilities.

I like where they're headed with the whole FLEX model. Your license gives you access to whichever tool is the one that makes sense on the Planview platform. That was a pleasant surprise. That has not been their approach over the 10 years I've had exposure to them.

We also evaluated PPM Pro and prior to that, in another organization, I evaluated CA and PPM Pro before it was owned by Planview. We have applications of Workfront, WeTeam, Trello, Azure DevOps, and various things.

Enterprise One's sweet spot is people, work, and money. They're pretty much the only one that can do that hat trick. If you want that, you have to get them, but we don't use it for any team capability. It's too cumbersome and the user interface is still lacking.

My advice would be to discuss your data upfront before you agree to an implementation. See what it looks like to have the data you need and what sort of costs would be required to do that from the very beginning. Then, see not only how will you visualize and record that data but how will you migrate data. That cost us a lot of time and delay in the user adoption because the migration of data was manual.

I would rate Enterprise One a six out of ten.

The primary use cases are project management and resource management. We use both of those modules of the tool today.

The transparency piece has improved our organization. We're big into financials. We set targets annually. We are able see real-time based upon our reporting structure, and we do this on a monthly basis. We use some of the reporting features that they have in the tool to show this information to key leaders in our organization to be able to keep the wheels turning down the road.

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.

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.

About six and a half years.

We started in version 10. We have gone through the migration path of upgrading and the pains that they've talked about today of having to go through the process of upgrading to a new version. I'm very excited to see the features which are coming.

For the most part, it is stable, but we've had our struggles as well. From a reliability and performance perspective, we don't have a lot of users. We have about 350 users, not all online at the same time, but we've had our struggles with performance. It is good to see that Planview has seen that themselves and are doing everything they can to fix and remedy this. 

One of the reasons why we've upgraded so many times is because of performance standards. We've just run into issues where we've had performance problems. Maybe they are not upgrading, but they're adding more horsepower. Then, we do go upgrade and lose that horsepower, which is frustrating from my perspective as an admin to lose that horsepower. Hopefully, that'll change. It's been pretty stable though in the version 17.

The support is slow. I've heard that they're beefing up that side of the company. It just seems to be the same people who are slow. It's getting that first contact resolution to the customer after I submit a ticket. It's literally within two minutes that I get a response back that says, "Hey, we got that." Then, it may be a day or two after that before they will get back to me. It is just going back on their words. If you're going to say something, just do it. That's the way I was growing up: Finish it out. If it's going to be two days, just tell me it's going to be two days. But, if you're going to tell me that you're going to get back to me today or tomorrow, and you don't, that to me is a little shot in the foot.

Planview Enterprise One is way better than what we had before. We have been through spreadsheet hell. Being able to leverage Planview to get us out of that has been great. We've had some great success stories come in since we have launched PlanView.

I would rate them as a seven point two out of 10. The magic quadrant says they are at the top of the top, and I don't disagree with them, but I think there's room to grow. I have seen that every year. This is my seventh time being at Horizons. It's just great to come back every year to be able to see what is coming next. You can definitely tell that they are listening to customers and trying to do everything they can to build the best in show product in this space.

I personally integrate with SAP, Workday, and JIRA. My stance on JIRA is that LeanKit is the way to go. I believe that. I think our company is just stuck on JIRA. We're in JIRA land. Everything is JIRA. It's not for everybody. I think the flexibility with LeanKit is the answer. It's just getting that message to the right people in our company to take that leap and go that route. I integrate with Workday and ServiceNow within our tool set at our company. They're all cloud-based.

We have a number of custom fields, but not really. It's pretty generic from that standpoint. We don't have a lot of bolt on things that need integrations. Flexibility-wise, it's good for our needs right now. We are right in the thick of agile transformations. So, it'll be interesting to see how we can hopefully leverage the tools that Planview offers to help ourselves and our company transform along the way. I'm looking forward to that.

Public Cloud

We use it a lot for managing project resources. We do a lot of research and project management with it.

I personally haven't improved that much yet using the tool, but I see how there's a lot of value in it. We even started doing proactive resource management. The way the data is presented in Planview, there are a lot of ways to take it and mold it for use within the business.

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.

I have been using the product for three months.

It's mostly reliable. There are some issues with how long it takes to load the data to Planview, It just depends on what your setup is. If there was a way Planview could maybe make the loading faster, in case you do have a lot of things going on with your setup.

Whenever we have issues, there is always someone ready to help us. Their people are knowledgeable and responsive. They get to tickets quickly. Just three or four weeks ago, we were having issues with getting data into Planview. We submitted a ticket and the turnaround was probably 45 minutes to get a response.

A lot of our internal training came from Planview support. They were Planview videos from Planview.

I would recommend the product. There is a bit of a learning curve with it, as with any type of new software. Once you get a good grasp of the principles of Planview, it is a really powerful tool.

I would rate the product an eight (out of 10). It's pretty good. It gets a lot of what we need done. There are ways for it to improve, and we should always strive for that.

We use it for its intended purpose of project management. It is a typical PPM tool.

I don't think we're trying to do anything with it outside the norm that would need it to flex a whole lot. Our intent is to roll it out pretty much out-of-the-box.

This is a platform shift. If it works as advertised, it will potentially make us a bit more efficient.

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.

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.

We are really not that far into testing yet. We're not going live until the beginning of the year.

It doesn't look buggy based on what I have seen so far.

We're not live yet, so I can't speak to post go-live technical support.

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

The implementation team has been good and responsive. They have been onsite quite a bit.

I don't think we have necessarily purchased everything that I would have liked to have seen.

We looked at other products, but I wasn't involved in the process of choosing Planview.

Compared to other tools, Enterprise One is definitely cleaner and easier to use. At least, that is the way it looks so far. It's a little more intuitive. It looks like the financial data entry piece is a little cleaner.

Because we didn't buy everything that I would have liked to have seen us buy. Just based on what we have, it's probably in the seven to eight range (out of 10). Some of the agile functionality and features would definitely bump that up a bit. However, we didn't buy everything.