The company finally has software to track projects. We didn't have that before that. So now we're able to measure and track our projects at a portfolio level. It has substantially improved our ability to meet deadlines.

One project that we are working on is developing an enterprise application for a client. It is a very big application that will have millions of users. We needed training in capacity management to handle that type of user load so there are many internal tasks, as well as external tasks, that we have to manage. We check in with the client on a day-to-day basis to finalize their requirements and we can see if there are any gaps when working with our product development team on the requirements.

For this particular project, we plan using agile- and Kanban-based systems and the Kanban dashboard is very useful within PPM Pro. Each task is given to our team members and we have a sprint meeting every morning and feed that information into the solution. It has enabled us to track all these sprints, including what we have discussed in our staff meetings and with our clients. It also helps us with time management, such as the four to five sprints we need to complete in a week. The solution helps us track these things, analyze progress, and deliver projects on time. Overall it is a very good experience.

Another benefit is that because we can see the roles and responsibilities involved in tasks, that helps encourage people to always follow their orders. That is one way that the solution helps to reduce project delays. In addition, because PPM Pro sends notifications if a project timeline is approaching or has been breached, it helps us plan accordingly and also avoid delays. Things come up in every company, such as a developer going on leave or a project manager not being available. Still, a client's expectations are very high, so these kinds of notifications are very useful. PPM Pro has helped us reduce project delays by 30 to 35 percent.

We are now able to track all project management activities across teams. Before implementing PPM Pro, we couldn't do so because every team is diverse and spread out across different geographic locations, so collaboration was quite a challenge for us. 

Also, it's much easier to report on and analyze data. Other things like portfolio analysis reporting and budget analysis have proven useful. It's an all-in-one solution for project management.

Previously, we had no project management solution, so everything was done manually in Microsoft Excel and other tools that didn't allow the same level of collaboration among the team members. It was frustrating to send an attachment with the Excel spreadsheet to every team member each day, and then they had to update the spreadsheet and send it back to us. It was a mess. 

PPM Pro has reduced project delays by about 65 percent because it provides us with all the necessary information to keep projects on track. Avoiding delays is the primary purpose of any project management solution. If you don't have a solution, it creates inefficiency because you have no idea which team resources are unavailable for a given day. 

For every project, we have to establish timelines, set deadlines, and estimate the completion date of a particular task. PPM Pro notifies us if we are approaching the deadlines, and we can customize this to give notice two or three days in advance. It also gives us a better understanding of how long each process takes. For example, if we create five tasks, we will set the timelines for each task and get proper notifications.

PPM Pro is forcing us to put everything in one place because everything was SharePoint, Excel, Microsoft project. We have a Projectplace and we have LeanKit, so we're trying to set boundaries around what goes into LeanKit versus what goes into Planview. Projectplace was bought by our marketing department. I don't even know what they're doing with it, but at some point, it's going to force us to assess how they're using it. I don't want three tools. I either want an Agile tool or I want the full PPM Pro. It's forcing us to grow up.

We're getting to the point where it provides managers with the insight that they need to empower decision making. We have portfolios set up and we're recording our first executive report soon.

It has helped to reduce project delays because we had some issues at one of our rollouts and had to back out. I was able to because of the way I had my tasks set up and predecessors, I was able to easily move out the dates without having to do a lot of changes. It's been reduced project delays by at least 25%.

We're new, so the goal is for standardization. We want Planview to help us be more consistent across the different themes. We've got several different project management teams embedded within certain parts of the business. By building out Planview, we've been able to standardize within the portfolio world, it's made my life a whole lot easier. I'm not backing everything on spreadsheets and running reports and things. It has reduced a lot of the administrative overhead for us because we do have these external contractors and by granting them access to Planview, they can now go in and do all the stuff themselves instead of having to rely on us. It's saving us a ton of money on licenses too. It's been good so far and I think it's going to get better.

PPM Pro has enabled us to track more in the system than the old system. Just by having Planview and making it so accessible to people in the organization, we're finding that more requests are being submitted and tracked versus people just doing it on their personal desktops and stuff. Previously, things weren't being tracked. 

It's taken us from being a very disparate organization around projects to all focusing in now on each other's needs. Before, we would work in silos and everyone would spend a lot of capital on these projects. What we are finding today is those people are more cognizant that the funding is not just for them, it's for the entire organization. We have to share and prioritize the work that we're trying to do. We prioritize based upon return on investment.

We help connect funding and strategic outcomes that work for the future. We will create a strategic request and that request becomes a project. We're mapping from start to finish the execution, work intake, and now we're also doing what we call post-implementation reviews to make sure we get the return on investment that we set out to accomplish.

PPM Pro is cross-functional. When I started, one of the instances was a mess because people had a different approach or different mechanism in place. For example, they were just going ahead and creating available fields for projects without anyone's permission. We did an event where we established that only the admin should be able to create the available fields. For example, if you're creating a field under one division, the nomenclature should be BID completion methods. We established that process. After that was established, it took a while when we changed the whole approach, and now we are able to utilize it more effectively. Only the admins have the access to create the available fields. We also put the description and when it was created by the field so that we have clarity on those fields as to when they were created.

After we utilized that approach, we are in a much, much better position. Earlier, it was around 4,000 available fields that I could check. It was reduced after the cleanup by 20%. We are in a much better position right now than we were before.

PPM Pro absolutely provides managers the insight they need to empower decision-making. Especially with project managers, we focus a lot on the permissions. We don't give permission to everybody to edit anything on a project. Even if you know you're a project manager, only the project manager or the admin has all kinds of necessary access to the projects. Not everybody on the team or on the staffing can edit it. Once we established that approach, it has helped the project managers a lot in executing a successful project.

PPM Pro has improved my organization through standardization. The big thing for us is that we came from a very immature state of play. Everyone had their own risk and issue management capabilities and their own different impacts for risks. We've been able to standardize that within the program delivery arena. That for us has been a major thing. We're all speaking the same language about the same things and using the same metrics in order to capture statuses.

We are exploring its ability to provide decision-makers with the insight they need to empower decision-making. The big thing for us was just to get our projects moving and delivering. We've historically been through a number of challenges and organizational changes within our area and effectively, Planview has enabled us to get a really good picture of where we currently are. The biggest challenge we had initially was that our executive leadership team didn't know how much change was going on. With Planview, we've been able to capture that and provide the metrics in order to see what they want to do and what needs to be reprioritized. 

PPM Pro has also helped to reduce project delays by 50% in terms of highlighting common issues and risks. We hold monthly project reviews where everything is captured and we go through the project managers to highlight those high-level and high scoring risks and we are then able to take corrective action. The key thing is that we're using it as a tool to help support project managers. We're not using it to beat them up because they're not delivering stuff. It's really a tool to be able to surface those issues that wouldn't necessarily get surfaced.

For resource managers, it's given them the ability to see when they have staff that is over-committed. Rather than react, we can work to mitigate that before the overcommitment actually happens, as in cases where somebody has a deliverable that's in conflict with something else.

With respect to the integrated product portfolio transforming our strategy, I think that this solution has helped us to achieve what our institutional needs are. I think that we're still working on that transformation journey. It's created a platform for centralized management of these initiatives versus disparate data and a lot of manual work to pull it together. I can have a dashboard that provides that information at a moment's notice.

With respect to the integrated product portfolio transforming our delivery, I wouldn't say that this has happened yet because we are not a centralized PMO, institutionally. We have a small portion of project management within the IT organization, but I would suspect that as people who we work with can spread the word about what we're doing, that may take foot elsewhere in the organization.

I think that we have better collaboration, but not necessarily with PPM Pro. We are integrated with another tool that gives teams the ability to work collaboratively and see the progress of work.

We have not yet implemented the Lean/Agile Delivery tools.

We are not yet at the level where this solution helps us connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution.

The biggest impact that using Planview has had is that it has created a centralized platform that allows us to better position resource allocation and alignment, rather than relying on people to tell us that they can meet a deadline.

We use PPM Pro with Projectplace, which has been a game-changer for us. Now that real-time integration is in place, it allows our team members to communicate their progress much more in real-time. It's been a change management process where project managers have been soliciting people for where things are at. As people are getting used to working with the tool and finding its ease of use, they're in there everyday updating where their tasks are. So, we're seeing that people are using the tool as it really was intended.

Wake County government recently received a second place in the Center for Digital Government award. A lot of the information that was provided during the application process was an easy export from our system. We were able to provide lots of very valuable and invaluable data with a couple of clicks.

PPM Pro provides our managers with the insights they need to empower decision-making. I don't think it's utilized enough. We make the information available and give access to those that need it. They've seen the benefit of the system. But I don't think it's utilized to its capabilities.

It has also helped us to reduce project delays by 50%. A little over a year ago, we implemented a new process for us whereby we no longer change dates within the system. We put in more processes in place for baseline tracking and held project managers and teams accountable. We've seen more accurate estimating and projects when they do miss their deadlines, we have substantiated reasoning behind that.

We're staying at an even rate with the number of projects. The projects that we do are based on the board of commissioners, elected officials, and revenues within the County. When revenues are down, the number of projects are down. So, we can't really put the two together like a private industry would.

Planview integrated well into our Agile framework and methodology by adding an Agile process and features. 

Project Management requirements evolve based on how the project data is getting utilized. PPM Pro is getting updated continuously for such requirements. Through such changes, PPM Pro has evolved in my organization over a period of time.

Our stakeholders evaluate project information from PPM Pro periodically. Stakeholder's need for capturing additional data or information processing is also continuously evolving. When it is observed that additional project information would be useful for decision making, it will get added to PPM Pro. Or sometimes, the processed data will be useful to get a summarized view, we achieve this through calculated fields.

It is slowly evolving that way. The way the system is able to capture all this information is really impressive.

On the resource management side, prior to Daptiv implementation, most of our projects were running late causing a issues with the delivery of our products due to the limited number of resources we had available at any given time.

It provides us the means to optimize our resources by role and match them to the appropriate piece of work at the right time, without the overcapacity for that individual.

The scenario planning option provides us with the means to be able to evaluate our work in a variety of different situations. 

The dashboard and analytics function helps our executives and our directors in understanding what's going on across the company from a portfolio management point of view.

The product is providing more visibility by providing real-time dashboards so that you're not seeing incorrect information. It's all live within the system and their ability to drill down and view real-time events on a project is great. The visibility really makes a difference.

It provides managers the insight they need to empower decision-making.

It has improved our organization because the one thing that we never had before was a single picture of all our IT projects going on. Each group within IT, like operations and knowledge management systems, all had their own list of projects. Now, for the first time, we can deliver to our organization a consolidated list of what we're working on. The portfolio management has been outstanding for us.

I feel like the pace of project delivery hasn't changed much, but being able to explain where we are and the status of our projects has definitely improved since the IT department is delivering projects for a number of other business units within the firm. Primarily, this has been only used within IT at this point. We want to prove the platform, then see where we can push it into the organization further.

We're still finalizing our implementation, but our hope is that it can prove our prioritization process and strategic decision-making.

We are expecting it to connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. For example, we are looking at planned cost versus actual cost holistically for our portfolio projects. That is the objective. We're at a place where we can finally start seeing that, and it's a good thing.

While we are still in the implementation process, the biggest impact has definitely been the visibility into time tracking, demand, and capacity planning.

Our request process for how our users request enhancements from IT has been the driver for us. We have a lot of people coming in to request enhancements who are using Planview and we customize those fields as we see fit. For example, if you're in a pandemic, you need to track different things on those requests. It's easy to add those fields to build a report on those fields which has been a nice feature for us.

PPM Pro provides managers the insight they need to empower decision-making. The data is always in the tool. It's just making sure people are using it correctly. We track the requests as they come in. We track our demand by each of our teams within IT and then estimate that effort so that we can see if we are getting a lot of requests to certain teams. We check the demand versus capacity as those items come in. Then as we plan out the coming year, we're doing a lot of that demand versus capacity and also looking back at historical data. We check how many hours it took us the last time we did something similar. That's where the tool has been helpful for us.

It has also helped us to reduce project delays. I wasn't here before the tool. When I came on, the tool had already been in place, but I think our utilization of the tool has changed a bit. I think it will be changing again based on the enhancements that are coming out as well. Overall, we've seen some improvement and I think we'll see more.

It has helped us make good decisions in terms of what projects to take or how to prioritize projects when we have multiple directors from the business or product. It has definitely helped us prioritize and work on our critical things.

The biggest impact from Planview has been prioritization, planning, and taking on the right things.

It gave us a clarity of purpose. Everybody knows what they are doing and that they are all aligned:

• Managers know what employees are doing. 
• Employees know what they are doing and the managers think they should be doing. 

That is the clarity which really helps in efficiency. 

When you look at your organization, and what everybody is working on, you now know what capacity you have to take more things on.

The biggest impact was making sure that people were aligned on what they're supposed to do. This has really helped us because we're all going in the same direction and we know it.

In my current company, it provides a quicker ramp up to understand what it can do for people by taking away all their barriers to entry: time, managing resources, and linking projects. It's made it so easy that people no longer say, "I don't want to do this because..." Other than "because", there is nothing else for them to say.

It is slowly maturing the company in the project management space by:

• Understanding the value of the project management as a function.
• The data that comes in and the structure that it provides.
• The predictability that it's providing. 
• The transparency in terms of the analytics.

It is adding to the maturity journey that the company is going through.

From an IT perspective, it has transformed the IT strategy. From an overall business strategy, we are not yet connected there. That's influence we are trying to get. We want to get those things connected.

We are planning start using the lean/agile process, especially on the business side, because they're into waterfall. We are trying to get into agile. We have done a lot of iterative development or fast track development. The issue is not from the IT space. We are trying to more to the business processes.

We're still using it in a sandbox area.

PPM Pro provides us an organized view of the work that is ongoing and resources that are working on those particular projects. It gives us that view.

It hasn't directly helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives directly out of the tool. It's allowed us to gather the information and then take it on the side and supplementing it with additional tools. It could be an Excel worksheet or SharePoint site. That's what we're trying to get to for 2021, to try to use ICP for alignment more and prioritization of work, based on budget planning. It helps us facilitate that, but it doesn't provide the end-to-end solution.

We have created some reusable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle, though we haven't used that functionality a lot. It has definitely improved our relationship with our business partners. They now have insight into what we are working on and are able to help set priorities across divisions or groups within the company. We are not having to fight to say, "HR is doing this, finance is doing that, and they only have a view into what they want and don't realize that there is a greater picture." When they get that greater picture, they're able to say, "Okay, this is less important than what is going on in finance right now so we can prioritize properly and align resources better to get their projects done faster, benefitting the company better overall."

It takes us minutes to create a new project using this solution.

The process for building a team within a project is relatively simple. I don't use that functionality a lot. I think we're just starting to get into it a bit more with some of the work that we are starting to do with some of our project intake processes in some of our project management disciplines that we're starting to implement. While I haven't used it a lot, it's pretty simple to add a person and build that team out within PPM Pro.

PPM Pro provides managers the insight that they need to empower decision-making. From an IT manager standpoint, we have been able to see the impact of a large 2:1 system conversion that we had coming in. We had two systems converging into one while we had this major project going on. This tool allowed us to see the resources, even though we had a project that was supposedly shutting IT down for a six and a half month period from all other business projects We were able to use the tool to see the resource levels and fit in a lot of other smaller project work within that major initiative and continue to move the business forward without stopping work. Previously, we would have said, "We have no capacity. We can't do anything else about this." However, in reality, we can see that there were other things that we could have gotten in and moved through the pipeline to get the work into production.

Before, we didn't have any visibility into the actual task. Now, we have fact tasks and time-on-task, which are very specific to the engineers. We can now look at a task, see what they have done, and what notes are around that task.

We had a strategy, and it just helped us meet it.

With our delivery, our clients can have visibility into what they are doing. It keeps the client updated on where we are at. Before, we would just hold status meetings and do notes. Now, in the status meetings, we bring up exactly what's been done and the client can see it right upfront.

The biggest impact has been the visibility that goes with getting into our task or work.

Previously, a lot of activities were done using Microsoft Excel and they had to be recreated. There were a lot of formulas and stuff like that, with a lot of manual work that resulted in a lot of errors. With PPM Pro, we don't get any errors in terms of the calculations. We get the right picture in terms of the dollar amount being spent on each and every project.

It helps from a historical perspective. In 2020, we sometimes go back and refer to 2017 for some of the projects or some of the work that was done. 

PPM Pro is really great at the portfolio level like seeing what projects are in flight versus complete, or maybe not started. The portfolio level view is good for stage-gate management specifically.

This solution is valuable because it saves us a lot of time from having to consolidate. Before PPM Pro, we didn't have a good way to consolidate our actual costs from an IT department. This has made it possible to capture all of those, plus mix in outside costs just by putting them in manually and then have that be able to be displayed in a dashboard.

We have projects that we work on, but we also have smaller work in there that is related to our own business. We use reporting for all of our prioritization with the business and the order of when stuff will be released. It's saved us a lot of time and it has been a huge boost for communication between IT and the business side.

From my perspective, our strategy has changed in that we have become more transparent, and Planview was part of the solution for that. Aside from transparency, I don't think that the integrated product portfolio has been part of transforming our strategy.

With respect to transforming our delivery, I would say that this solution has definitely helped with that. We have an on-premises version for all of our change requests, but that was always just on the IT side. With us being able to have it where both IT and the business can easily go into one place is helpful. The way that we have it set up is that it gets prioritized by our business relationship managers. From a delivery perspective, we can actually have them have more of an input and more transparency on costs, hours, what's coming next, and what the timelines are.

This solution is flexible in some ways but not others. There is a decent amount of configuration that we've been able to do to control the different categories of projects. On that side, I would say yes, we can have multiple different requests or project types that have their own fields. Then, on the other side, it's kind of limited. You can configure it, but then you can't take it to really make it into a task management system. It's very hard to expand past just what the basic tasks are. That would be one place that I'd like to see a little bit more. It looks like they are trying to do that by introducing the backlog and putting more Agile context into PPM Pro. It looks like that's on the roadmap for Planview.

Collaborative Work Management has helped a lot by having everybody on the same page and allowing us, within IT, to be able to manage our work resources. It has helped a lot.

This solution has helped us connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. A lot of our dashboards are built around the financials. We're looking at buckets for how much each department has and we roll all of that up into dashboards that allow us to keep track of where everybody is, the actual expenditure for the year, and who has what left. We definitely use all of that capability.

The biggest impact that Planview has had on our organization is related to resource management. It was really helpful, because before we were so siloed into project teams that it was hard to get an idea of who is available from other teams if I need a resource. This has made it possible for us to actually get capacities and see what the schedules are going forward. This has been a huge benefit.

• Project data is used to make business decisions. It is used for objective analysis of project delivery, in terms of the project being on time and within the budget.
• Prior to implementing this solution, there was no centralized system for project data, either collection or reporting, in the organization.
• As the organization previously had no centralized PPM tool or a method of reporting on projects, having this data available via reporting assists in business analysis and decision making.
• This solution has provided a tool for consistent reporting and for the information from which decisions are made.

It has helped to improve our resource forecast functionality and identify resource availability.

It has brought our organization to using one tool for requests, project management, and time-tracking.

It allows the leadership to pull out the project status whenever they want to.