Planview PPM Pro Reviews

We provide IT services to organizations. We manage all our customer delivery projects with the tool.

We are using the latest version of the solution.

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.

Flexibility is the most valuable feature of the solution. We're able to do a lot of integrations with ConnectWise, which is another IT services tool that we use. So, we can integrate with that, and it's pretty flexible. We just went live a couple of weeks ago, but already we're able to bring visibility into our resource utilization and project status with clients.

This system is fairly adaptable.

The biggest things are the status notes and internal notes. They have made some great improvements these past couple of weeks, but they are still lacking a bit. There are still a little kludgy. It just needs to be a bit more straightforward with notes, copying and pasting. They've made huge improvements, but it still could do some work. E.g., for some reason, the formatting is still looking a little bit weird on selecting different fonts.

It is very stable. I haven't had issues with stability at all.

It can grow if we need it to.

The technical support is excellent. They are knowledgeable and quick to resolve issues. The only issue I have is with offshore support: The time difference is a pain. Other than that, everyone knows what they're doing. They are friendly and helpful.

They support you and will be there at every turn. They have very technically competent people who understand the processes.

Matt (account manager), Daryl (integration), and Lena (customer success manager) have been a big help to us.

No one knew what was going on and projects weren't getting completed.

The system itself was straightforward. Our needs were complex. We did an integration with another tool ConnectWise. It is a pretty complex integration. Our requirements made it complex, but the system is straightforward. The consultants helped us with the integration. From start to finish, it took us about eight months.

We used the Planview consultant who was great. They were helpful.

We have gotten what we are looking to achieve on the solution, but we have not yet achieve monetary ROI.

We are looking at Projectplace.

We looked at a whole list of vendors, include Project Server.

We chose Planview because of their support. Another reason was we had the ability to add notes onto time entries. We are different than a lot of their customers with billing. Our notes are how we explained to the customer what we did, and that was key.

I would rate it a good nine out of 10.

We are still working on how the solution’s collaborative work management will affect our operations.

We are not yet using Projectplace.

Our primary use cases are for capacity management, resource management, and time tracking.

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. 

Based on our usage, capacity management and resource management are the salient features. The challenge that we have in terms of managing the portfolio is arriving at the different projects within a portfolio and ensuring that the capacity what we have meets the need. When we do the portfolio planning, the tool helps us a lot in doing so, and from the reporting perspective, it provides a good overview of where time is spent as compared to what was planned, which I feel is key for a standard project and portfolio management.

PPM Pro enables us to create usable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle. I think it works beautifully for the waterfall-based project, though Agile-based implementations have challenges in defining such templates. The level of detail is a bit different when it comes to Agile as compared to waterfall projects.

We have customized the templates for our needs, based on our definition of waterfall and Agile. If it is a waterfall template, then you're defining your activities, you're defining your time, and the schedule. So when people report back to these specific tasks or a specific area, the time gets captured according to the phase and work that they have been doing. This works out pretty well when you take a report and compare it to say, "Okay. Where are you? What was planned?" If the design was planned for 1,000 hours of work we can see how much we have spent, where we are, and how much more is needed. It is pretty well documented.

Once the task gets completed or closed, you can't expect people to go back and report any time on it, so it's locked from that particular perspective. In terms of the Agile template, it's a different thought process altogether, specifically when a project might use different teams to work on the same project. It becomes a bit challenging, because two teams might do the work at two different times, and you may still want to keep the task open for a longer duration. It's a bit of a challenge and we are learning what the optimal way of moving forward with the Agile process is.

Because most of these Agile teams work with the task breakdown or they plan with Azure DevOps, we have a whole gamut of activity that breaks down within the Azure Boards stating the Epic's features and the task level detail. With PPM Pro, we define a high-level Epic or a feature so that the team can report the hours. There's a bit of duplication of effort there because the team has to update their activities on Azure, as well as come back and do the time reporting in PPM Pro. One of the initiatives that we have engaged with Planview is to see how to integrate both the tools.

It only takes a few minutes to create a new project. It's just a copy and paste to create a template.

In terms of the task management features, based on the parameter of the project, we have the standard tasks being defined. They would have been mostly waterfall-based projects. Then we do the phase-wise tasks, the initiation, elaboration, construction, warranty, kind of a thing. But if you take a modified Agile project then the task is derived based on the higher level Epics. It has brought a positive impact to the project management process, mostly in terms of planning financial controls or budgeting process. We rely on the tool itself to let us know the overall plan, as well as the dollar amount that is forecasted and spent.

The solution's time-tracking abilities are one of the strong points. The only challenge is enabling it to the minute-level task. It's not at a project level but it's at an organization level. If  I want it to be at a higher level as compared to some of the other projects where I want it to go to the nth level of a task for the time reporting, I cannot control it at a project level but it's controllable at an organization level. That's the only big challenge that I have.

The leveling of time reporting is centrally controlled as compared to the control at a project level. For example, if I create a task and I create a task as a phase of initiation, elaboration, or construction and if I enable the time reporting to be at a task level, these tasks would be seen by the timesheet report by the user, to say that this project has an initiation task assigned to him and he can report the task. But if there are multiple levels of those tasks, it has a folder with three or four tasks. If the time tracking is enabled at a task level, the number of steps that you would have defined in your task shows everything to all the users.

It provides managers the insight they need to empower decision-making. When we look at our portfolio and when we want to work around either increasing or reducing that portfolio, we do use a lot of what-if analysis. That helps us in making very meaningful decisions to say whether we would be switching or investing in something else, whether that would be working on a specific system or diverting diverse posts to a different system, which would have a better return on investment. 

The integration with some of these other tools that we use, like the Azure DevOps needs improvement. I heard there are few things coming within Planview or PPM Pro itself, but I think it's still future dated. These integrations are key for us from an organizational perspective. 

We're looking forward to the new dashboards and some of the capabilities.

I have been using PPM Pro for five years. 

It is stable. It has matured a lot since the time it was called Innotas. I find the solution to be stable and robust.

We have around 200 users in my company, including portfolio managers, project managers, and two admin. 

We are at an optimum level right now so we don't anticipate more users at this point in time.

Support has been great. Last year we engaged with Planview to help us with some of the apps that we've been doing, specifically in terms of the forecasting, and how to manage the contingency. We did have one of the consultants engaged and working with us, but unfortunately, it was not of much help. In most of these cases, I think consultants revert to saying, "Okay. We are coming with the new financial tab and the functionality." So our problem didn't get resolved at that point in time last year. But we are hoping that the new features that are being rolled over right now will help us in what we are looking for.

I would rate their support a four out of five. There are gaps in some of the work they do but they are responsive and knowledgable. 

When we purchased it, it was still called Innotas. The organization hired a PMO manager who had worked in a different organization and he had experience working with Innotas.

We use MS Project and MS Teams. We never looked at any integration with PPM Pro, since we worked the process to a different aspect of work. Microsoft and PPM Pro are two different things. From the project management perspective, you can't do any time tracking in Project, and you can't do any capacity management across your portfolio. PPM Pro is focused on complex projects.

The initial setup requires some work to be done, but it was not complex. You have to setup the organization, have customized reports, and customization. It was more of a standard process, but it was not so straightforward.

From the PMO perspective, I've written off 30 to 40% of the effort from my PM constitutes to a good amount of savings at the end of the day.

We have different models, some are user-based, some are a license for all the tools underneath it. It's a different combination and capacity based on the user's needs. It is optimally priced.

You need to have a very clear understanding of what your requirements are, the use cases that you want to implement, and what is that you would like to develop in the tool. Based on that, you need to ensure to put the right configurations in place so that the right kind of data can be populated. Doing a thorough analysis of that requirement is key for putting up the right design and right configuration for the tool.

I would rate PPM Pro an eight out of ten. There are still features that the product needs to deliver. The standard project management, in terms of the capacity of the use cases related to the portfolio, capacity, refills, time-tracking, is all good. Other features that are key from a project at a portfolio perspective in terms of auto-calculation, managing contingencies at a project level and the portfolio level need improvement.

My primary use case for this solution is for research and development projects.

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.

The most valuable features are: 

• Projects 
• Portfolios
• Reports
• Dashboards

We track all of our development projects in the system so it's good to have visibility across multiple projects instead of just having Microsoft projects being used on local computers. And then the reports and dashboards allow us to have more flexibility or more consolidated views for different types of users.

It enables us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management life cycle. It has made our project management process a lot less manual.

PPM Pro is good for viewing projects and timelines. You can see a Gantt Chart, but again, there's no visual, so we have to export the project and get a visual or use an office timeline or other forms of a timeline visual. That's a really manual process.

To an extent, it provides managers the insight they need to empower decision-making. The lack of robust resource planning is not good and that's difficult to manage.

It has helped to reduce project delays by roughly one to three months.

It doesn't help us to increase the number of projects in my company but that's not a bad thing because we were doing too many before. 

It takes more time than it should to create a new project because we can't bulk edit things very easily. That is definitely an area that has room for improvement. 

I would like to have the ability to edit items in bulk and save drafts. It's one or nothing. You can't save drafts.

Another area of improvement is the system's slow for projects with more than 600 line items.

There is also no timeline visual, it's only a Gantt Chart.

Resource management and planning are difficult at the headcount level. In the next release, I would like to have better scenario planning for resources and portfolios.

The process for building a team within a project is manual and difficult. The system doesn't provide recommendations. Creating a new project can take a week. 

I also find their task management features to be poor because we don't have the ability to bulk edit or scenario plan. You can't save drafts. The spreadsheet editor doesn't allow you to edit all of the fields, only a subset of fields. And the spreadsheet editor is the recommended workaround solution, but it's not robust.

I have been using Planview PPM Pro for about two and a half years. 

Stability is not great. We often find a lot of issues and the timeframe for issue resolution is longer than is ideal or to be expected.

I am neutral about the scalability. That's not something we really have spent too much time diving into.

I would rate their technical support a six out of ten. It's slow. Oftentimes it would be faster to just speak with somebody in the technical team, not an account manager. I would give their technical team an eight out of ten. 

The initial setup was straightforward. We had a really good implementation team but unfortunately, our account manager who started with us is no longer with Planview.

It was really fast, it took around a month. We had a full project plan for it that we worked with Planview on creating.

Three hundred people in our company work on PPM Pro. You could call them the development team, project managers, portfolio managers, executive leadership managers, and cross-functional teams. It's just myself and a partner who work on the maintenance. 

In terms of the number of projects that we use PPM Pro for, it's adapted 70% and we do have plans to increase usage. 

I have seen ROI but I don't know the amount.

We also looked at CA Technologies and Daptiv. 

The fully integrated solution that PPM Pro said they had between PPM Pro and Projectplace was not a true statement after implementation. So we've been working with them on making that happen. Other platforms were very stale and out of date. The visuals that we were shown for PPM Pro were actually, Enterprise One, not PPM Pro, so that was a bit misleading.

We also use Microsoft solutions for project management. They are doing far better than Planview is doing right now.

For individual projects, I would give a nine out of 10 for Microsoft versus Planview being a six or seven out of 10. And then for portfolio analysis, it doesn't really provide much of an option there. Planview has got that, PPM Pro is better in that regard.

My advice would be to know your business case and make sure you test that in the sandbox environment.

The biggest lesson I have learned is that the current editing capabilities and the task list are really difficult and arduous and that it's much easier to build out a project plan in Microsoft Project first and then upload it once it's completely finalized. So it's not really somewhere to build a project.

I would rate Planview PPM Pro a six out of ten. 

We mostly use this solution for high-level project planning and resource management. We're looking to expand that using the integrations, such as LeanKit or Projectplace.

We do not have LeanKit, yet, but we are looking to move towards Agile, so in my opinion, LeanKit fits well for our use cases.

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.

The most valuable feature of this solution is reporting. It is one of the biggest things for PPM Pro because we do all of our resource management within it, including the timesheet tracking and financial tracking, and a lot of that all rolls up. We have lots of dashboards built out, and we definitely use the reporting capabilities a lot. From IT to the business side, we use the actual projects to report statuses and do all of that kind of management as well.

Managing a project at the executable level is very difficult using PPM Pro alone, so it is necessary to use one of the integrations such as LeanKit of Projectplace.

This solution does not work well as a task management system because it is very difficult to expand beyond just the basic tasks, and this would be a worthwhile area for improvement.

The dashboards are very blocky. You can get all of the information but they just don't look great.

One of the issues that we have is related to capacity, where it is very limited in how you can input the capacity for people in future items. One of the things that we would like to see is the ability to have more control over scheduling. For example, you can switch into a scheduling mode but then it just takes whatever the time period of the task is and it spreads the entire workload for that resource over that entire time period. It doesn't take into account if they are off work, and I can't put them in twice. So if they have a gap, I'm still going to show that they have all of this free time, but really they only have the two chunks before and after their time off that they're available. More control in this aspect is a big thing for us right now.

Performance and stability have been fine. We have not had any issues with that.

In terms of scalability, I think for what it's built for it scales well. It's just whenever we get into the integrations it's something I need to see more because we get to a point where it's hard to track everything within just Planview. I think the integrations that they're doing improve that scalability, hopefully.

LeanKit and Projetplace both have the cards and the actual task-level definitions that can just build into what's in PPM Pro.

The technical support for this solution is good. We haven't had a lot of tickets, but anytime we have had a problem or needed something fixed, it's been great. We have had no problems.

There are changes in the product roadmap that I am excited about, including improvements to the reporting and enhancing the dashboards. I think it will help a lot.

My advice for anybody who is researching this type of solution is that Planview is definitely a good option. Whenever you're setting things up though, try to think of things at the big picture because once you start creating your solution, you're kind of in that solution. It's really hard to backtrack. So, just make sure you're thinking it through. Don't just give everybody access and tell them to give it a try, and then try to work backward whenever you figure out which one you want. Use sandbox environments. The tool works very well, but because it does have the ability to be extended and configured pretty well to what you want to do, you can make a mess of it as well.

This is obviously a leader in the market and there's a reason for it. It does what it's built to do very well. There are a few places where it can be improved, but overall, it definitely seems like it's in a good spot and it's going in a good direction.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

• Project data
• Reporting: My job involves data analysis, so the reporting feature is the most valuable feature for me.

• 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.

• Resource management
• Planning: My organization has to plan manually using multiple reports from Innotas. This means that planning is neither “real time” nor efficient.
• Visibility: The tool allows visibility to what resources are working on. However, there is no meaningful method for “What If” planning if the organization has more than a handful of projects and resources.

Their PPA (Predictive Portfolio Analysis) module is extremely cumbersome and does not readily offer a method to move projects in/out/delay to see the impact on role availability. There is also limited reporting on which roles are causing staffing issues. The What If Dashboard in Innotas is also EXTREMELY limited, and does not permit all projects to be included in an analysis. When we attempted to include all active projects and all upcoming projects, an error was received that our data set was too large. When we limited it to only our active projects (those currently being worked), the “too large” error was again received. If “What If” planning cannot accommodate all projects, and if Predictive Portfolio Analysis cannot offer a method to adjust schedules and see the impact, the tool is not useful for resource management.

We have had to develop our own methods for resource/portfolio planning, using information from multiple reports from Innotas joined in an external workbook. Since we have to work outside of the system (Innotas) to get all of the data we need in one place, the data must be refreshed manually, thus it is never real-time. This also means that users cannot refresh this information on their own, but must rely on specific employees to pull, compile, and analyze the data.

I have used this solution of over three years.

There were stability issues. There are monthly releases for this product. Following most releases, the system is either not available, or has major issues.

The new features in the release occasionally cause other functionality to break, making one wonder how extensively the new features were tested prior to release.

There were some scalability issues. Our organization is too large/complex to use the planning tools (Predictive Portfolio Analysis and What If workbench) with this solution.

Other than that, there were no issues with scalability on day-to-day project management and reporting.

I would give technical support a rating of 4/10.

Technical support is requested via case submission, and Innotas rarely contacts you to discuss the issue.

The first response to a case is often “standard” and indicates that they did not read the description provided, or did not understand the case.

The first response is often “clear your cache”, which any user with experience with this product always does first before submitting a case.

Cases can take months to resolve, and occasionally remain unresolved. Sometimes Innotas cannot determine the cause of an issue or provide a meaningful solution.

This is the first PPM solution used by my organization.

My organization purchases a block of 500 licenses. We have flexibility to add and remove users easily. I am not aware if there are other licensing models available with this tool.

I was not part of the decision to implement this tool, but it is my understanding that there was no evaluation of other products.

We are currently evaluating other options, as the organization has matured and we need a tool that provides resource management and planning capabilities beyond what Innotas can provide.

If you are relatively immature in your project management journey, this is a pretty good tool to start with. Your in-house administrators can do much of the customization that you want. Reporting is quite easy and straightforward with this tool.

If you are a small organization with only a few project resources and projects, this tool could likely provide you with what you need in a PPM solution.

The product feels like a toy. The tool needs to improve its roadmap. It needs to improve things on a project management level which includes communication as well. 

I am working with the product for two to three years. 

The product is not scalable. We have around 15-20 users for the product. 

My experience with the support is not good. 

The product's deployment is straightforward. However, the solution is very difficult to customize as per customer requirements. 

I would rate the solution a four out of ten. 

I particularly appreciate the Timesheet and Resource Management.

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

Financial management and workflow process setup could be improved.

I have used it for two years.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

I would give them 9 out of 10.

Initial setup was straightforward.

We previously evaluated Epic Clarity.

It’s a very intuitive product and easy to use. If you are a young and developing/maturing organization, it is a good first product to implement for a PPM solution.

I appreciate the project and timesheet tracking for our staff.

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

Innotas is revamping their UI. They need to focus on their request management area. I believe it is scheduled for 2017.

We would also like to utilize their budgeting process, but they need to match how we do budgeting.

We have used it for two years.

We only encountered the usual web application anomalies and slowness at times. But this could be due to different behavior when using different web browsers, such as IE or Chrome.

We did not encounter any stability issues, as we are a fairly small shop.

I would rate technical support as very good!

We previously used various tools that didn’t map to our processes very well.

I think it is worth the price

We evaluated ServiceNow.

Do it in phases if you can.