Planview PPM Pro Valuable Features

Prateek Agarwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager at Indian Institute of Management Visakhapatnam

Scenario planning is the most important feature. You can easily align strategic management and the portfolios within your organization. It helps you visualize all your strategic plans and the KPIs. It provides that information on a unified dashboard, in which you can track all your resources and the portfolios. It helps senior stakeholders and executives with clear reporting about project intake and demands, in real time.

It also has some built-in, reusable templates and you can modify them according to your requirements. You can also create templates and workflows from scratch, so that you can plan things accordingly.

The team collaboration is nice compared to other tools. You just add your team members, provide them access and, according to the user's level, they are able to use the application. For example, when we create a new project, we create work streams, timelines, and the sub-tasks. Then we have to think about how many team members are required—the skills of the developers, testers, QA teams, consultants, and marketing. We add those team members to that project and provide them access to their tasks so that we can track their progress in the real time. That really helps us. We might have 35 to 40 team members in different locations using this product simultaneously.

In addition, the task management features are useful when you have timelines for project completion and for progress. It shows you any gaps or timelines that you have breached. Task management is very useful, and that would be true in any project management tool.

Another helpful feature, because we define timelines in the grant chart for each project, is the time tracking. It is very crucial for us to complete a project on time and meet the deadlines for our clients. The way PPM Pro tackles these is great. It provides a notification to us when a timeline or a sub-task within it is approaching the deadline.

Integration with PPM Pro is fine. It provides APIs and the integration mechanism for third-party tools and applications, like Microsoft Office and Microsoft Project. We have only integrated it with Microsoft Excel because we generally capture the requirements and the timelines offline. Because the solution doesn't work offline, in situations where the internet is not available, or we are on-the-go with a client, we capture the requirements in Excel. The integration means we get the data from Excel into PPM Pro.

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GM
VP of PMO at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Daptiv is a project management tool, so it's pretty straightforward. The ability to manage projects and programs has been beneficial for us.

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JA
IT Project Manager at Orange España

PPM Pro is based on ITIL methodologies, so it is useful in our day-to-day work for developing timelines for our project management activities. It gives a clear picture of the progress and status reporting for our senior stakeholders at any point in time. 

It has a nice dashboard view, so you can analyze the progress of a project from a single place. It provides a nice graphical representation of all the project management with visualizations of Gantt charts and customized reports. You can easily track all your progress on project tasks and flag any issues. 

PPM Pro comes with various project templates, and you can create your own templates based on your requirements, so you can use them for all your project management activities. If you're using readymade templates, it is quite easy to create new project management activities. But if you have special needs and the template doesn't fit your requirements, you can create your own templates and share them with the team members and stakeholders. It's a straightforward process.

The team collaboration features are perfect. Building a team for a project is also smooth because we have sets of credentials for every team member, so they can easily log into the application and start using it because we have assigned project and sub-project tasks to various team members, like development, engineering, product, data analytics, sales, marketing, and consulting. They can use the solution anywhere at any time and plan their work accordingly. The level of visibility PPM Pro provides comes in handy in our day-to-day work because everything is moving to the cloud. More people are working remotely or doing hybrid work in the office. It gives them the flexibility to use the product from anywhere.

It is used by developers, junior developers, testers, marketing staff, etc., and we have a repository of all the contact details for each resource. We can easily track or easily reach team members when any requirements change. So it is quite efficient and quite easy.

The time-tracking capabilities are also excellent. We haven't experienced a single issue while developing timelines and the Gantt chart for each project. It has a nice notification system that informs us when we are approaching the deadline for a project or task, so we can update the senior stakeholders.

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Buyer's Guide
Planview PPM Pro
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Planview PPM Pro. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
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SL
Global Applications Functional Lead at Carlisle Companies Incorporated

The reporting and dashboards are the most valuable features. For most of what we're using it for almost all of it is pretty valuable to us.

One of our M&A projects are acquisitions.

I don't want to say that they do enable us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle because some of our IT PMOs that are using it, I don't know if they're creating templates and stuff yet to go that far. I am planning to utilize it in the future. 

The time it takes to create a new project in PPM Pro depends on how many tasks are within the project. Currently, I have one group that has 191 tasks. That took them a while to put in. The biggest downfall right now for us is loading all the tasks in there. Some of them are not using Projectplace so they can't import from it.

The average time it takes to create a project is ten to forty minutes. Before PPM Pro it would have taken five minutes. A lot of our employees have Microsoft Project. On the PMO side, one of their concerns is that it takes them a little bit longer to input a project and tasks than it would in Microsoft Project. I have a couple of PMOs who are still on the fence, just because of the amount of time it takes them to put in projects compared to Microsoft Project. With Microsoft, you can copy and paste because Microsoft Project is basically Excel. That's about the most that I've heard their biggest complaint is that you can't just copy and paste into it and you copy task and things like that from Project. I've got one PMO who isn't hip on Planview, just because she can create a project in her task and project within five minutes and it takes a little bit longer in PPM Pro to do that.

The process for building a team within a project using PPM Pro is easy. 

I only have one division that is using timesheets right now and we're still testing out in our sandbox site, but so far everything seems to be working great for what we want to do for time tracking. I think there's one little concern, and we're testing that out next weekend, but I think we'll be fine on it.

We've tried a couple of the different settings for the time cards and what projects they can charge time to. It comes back to that they want them to only be able to see the tasks that they're assigned to, but they can see everything now. If a task is in the future, they can still add time to it and they don't want them to be able to add time to it. Just a mistake-proof type thing is the biggest thing.

PPM Pro provides managers the insight that they need to empower decision-making. So far I've gotten good feedback from our PMOs who report and things like that. I would say that's a plus, that's a good thing for us.

I'm not really running any projects and taking feedback, from what I hear so far it has helped us to reduce project delays. It has also helped to increase the number of projects within our organization.

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

I liked the dashboards because I need to report out on tasks completed in the last two weeks, tasks scheduled for the next two weeks, what the risks and health are. What I've been able to do is create reports based on that and then put those reports into a dashboard. The old reporting was clunky, but the beta reports got better. But then I couldn't add the beta reports to the dashboards so now they released the new beta dashboards and it works great. It does everything I need to do.

PPM Pro enables us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle. I manage most of the ServiceNow projects. I have a ServiceNow template. We buy a lot of companies so anytime I bring on a new company, I just put in the ServiceNow template and I know every task I need to do to accurately onboard that company.

It doesn't take terribly long in PPM Pro to create a project but if I don't know the tasks, that's the longest part. Building tasks is the longest part.

I had a little confusion with how the licensing worked for building a team within a project. I was giving everybody a full license, but our administrator gave us a sit-down and said we can't give everybody a full license, we had to give them a timesheet license.

I personally haven't used the time tracking. We're not that mature yet. Our PMO just started in March, so we've had to develop a charter, recruit the members, make sure we know what the CEO expects from us. We've been managing projects at the same time building the organization so we haven't really gotten into the time management or the resource feature yet.

Its ability for viewing projects and timelines is pretty good. I have no complaints about the Gantt view or anything.

It has helped us to increase the number of projects in my organization by 50%. We actually have an intake process in ServiceNow that if you want to request a project, you have to request it in ServiceNow. It notifies the PMO team. We review it and either approve or reject it. If it's approved, then it goes to our steering committee and every two weeks the steering committee assesses which projects we're going to take.

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SB
Global IT PMO Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 5,001-10,000 employees

The dashboards are one of the most valuable aspects of this solution, although, we've only developed a few that anyone's using. There is more maturity there and, of course, we're a month and a half into this, but getting our executive leadership to see these things is half the battle. I think dashboards are going to be critical. 

We're also very interested in finances, with linking Plan B with Hyperion. The plan is to investigate that a little more. The fact that it's scalable was critical for us in our decisions. We weren't quite sure what we would need three years from now, but Planview has so many different applications that we figured we'd have a pretty good shot with it, so that's the plan.

In terms of the time tracking abilities, my company has been about 90% outsourced for all IT resources, which in today's world is not recommended, but we have these people all over the place and all over the world, trying to track their time on projects. As we are gradually bringing our IT back in-house, we need vendors to be able to track their time. We need our local contractors to be able to bill their time. We're starting to get a better picture of what's actually being spent on what.

We took a simple route with time tracking. We have what we call homerooms, it's where one could bill all of their non-project time. So we're able to get a full picture of what our contractors are doing and we get an invoice from their company. The IT accounts payable, who also reports to me, is able to reconcile those invoices against actual time entries in Planview. It's been very helpful.

PPM Pro has enabled us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle. We've created five or six of them which is helpful, not only for our PMs but also for our finance team because some tasks can be capitalized, and tracking CAPEX is very important for us. It's in the templates so then the PMs don't have to try and guess what's a CAPEX task or an OPEX task, it's already in there. That's been very important.

It takes around two minutes to create a new project. In our old system, we didn't really have projects so getting the project in the system was the biggest hurdle for us with the old system. With PPM Pro, the request goes in, and then you just copy and paste everything over to a project. It's just taking the basic request data and then turning it into a project. It is very, very easy in PPM Pro.

The process of building a team within a project makes sense to me, but I've been doing this for a long time. Some of our PMs are getting tripped up in the difference between the staffing section, the team section, and the task section and which one of those does what. We've spent a couple of weeks now trying to explain that if you add the person to the staffing section, it gives you demand, and if you add them to a task, then they can enter a timesheet. Getting the initial team set up is a little cumbersome, but once it's up, then everything just flows really smoothly.

In terms of its test management features, PPM Pro is a lot like other tools. There isn't really anything with the tasks that stands out as being spectacular. You can import tasks from MS Project, but you can also do that in other solutions as well. It's nice and some of those things are convenient but nothing really jumps out as a great feature within that section.

I liked what I saw for viewing projects and timelines from the demos. I think it's pretty great. We don't have enough data in ours yet to get any good views on things but I liked the Gantt button where you can toggle that on and off to get the view right in the system. I have a little more work to do as far as viewing timelines and things in the reports. I've got a few basic ones set up, but after watching the reports and data dashboards, I know that's going to look a lot better, especially after we get some data in our system, but it's pretty standard and straightforward.

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

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MH
Director at Parkview Health

The most valuable features is probably the request module:

  1. The work intake component is why we selected the product. 
  2. The resource management capabilities with demand management and capacity management. This is very strong. 
  3. We like the fact that now, especially with the new request module, there's a nice colorful Kanban board view that goes along with it. 

There are so many components to it. It is like almost every day that we find some other use case for it. So, it's very flexible.

We use PPM Pro with Projectplace. It is absolutely 100 percent fantastic. Now, we can give people that more collaborative, comfortable look and feel with a Kanban board view. We give them a smart app that goes along with it, essentially not having to worry about using rigid project management. They are very complementary towards each other: PPM Pro and Projectplace. What one is not so strong in, the other one has strengths in it. It is fantastic.

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VR
Project Manager with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution is valuable because it gives our executives a high level of understanding of what's going on. I like the portfolio aspect that shows all the projects and the budget and you can see the priorities and whether the project is on track or not. It has good visibility. 

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SS
Developer at Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.

The most valuable features are project management, reporting, dashboards, and time management. In terms of reporting and dashboards, we have stakeholders who are really interested in how the R&D business users are doing. They are interested in knowing which projects their resources are allocated to and what the resource allocation looks like. 

They're also interested in the financial summary, how the resources are involved in the financial aspect of the tool or in the division. I think every division has different reporting and dashboard users. There are different kinds of users who use them very differently. Reporting and dashboards are one feature that we really use a lot. We have a huge team of Power BI and PPM Pro integrates really well with Power BI.

PPM Pro absolutely enables us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle. We had a good customer session on this, where a team utilizes portfolio management and project management of the tool very intensively. We follow all of the templates but having said that, we have so many divisions and we have so many users and project managers utilizing the tools. They have a different bunch of templates. We're not just following one or two templates. We have a number of templates that the teams are using.

It doesn't even take a minute to create a project using PPM Pro. It's very quick.

The process of building a team within a project depends, it varies from different person to person or different project managers and how they want to utilize it. I think the most important thing is the staffing person. Resource workbench and staffing are the two most utilized features under project management.

There is a feature under the project where you can add team members. We have the permission profiles which give the team members permission to edit or modify the information on the project. For example, if you're adding a resource as a team member of the project, you give that permission to the team member and you can also limit that to the permission providers. If you don't want that team member to be able to edit the key information on the project, you just give them the view-only permission. 

The task management features are really good. A few of the divisions are using the time management part of PPM Pro very intensively. They use timesheets and allocate hours. 

PPM Pro for viewing projects and timelines is absolutely great because we have the task view and we have the spreadsheet editor. You can view projects, both the status of the project, what we're doing, and what the timeline target date is. We usually build out a report and then a dashboard and then view it collectively as a team, as a division, or as a group.

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SB
PMO Manager at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable feature is that it's highly configurable. It's a highly configurable solution. We can design and build stuff quite readily ourselves. It's also very flexible. We are also using it to help identify pinch points within the organization. As in, we can identify where people need support and additional help.

PPM Pro has reduced the time it takes to generate reports. That for us is a big thing. Instead of us spending our time doing collation and presentation activities, we're actually doing more value-add activities in terms of analyzing the data and trying to interpret what the data is telling us.

PPM Pro absolutely enables us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle. It enables us to quickly establish and build projects as and when they've moved through the governance lifecycle or parts of the early stages of the governance lifecycle. We're also able to configure the ability to print a standard type of project or program in some of the cases we've started exploring. In terms of the benefits, it's given a visualization to our senior management team of where things are at any particular time and they have the ability to drill down into the detail where necessary or keep it as high level as they need.

It's literally just the click of a button to create a project in PPM Pro. It's a very quick process. The key thing that we have is the governance processes and the approach for capturing enough information. In terms of that, the lifecycle is about two or three weeks, but actually being able to get a project into the system is exceptionally quick. You can build workflows to help support that. We don't use it at the moment, but it has the ability to build workflows.

I would say it's quite straightforward to build a team within a project. It's very easy. It comes back to data and I think it's the same with any PPM tool, the tool is only as good as the data that you've got in there. We did a lot of work initially to make sure that our resources were in place. It's just a case of project managers being able to select who they want on their teams and vice versa. If they're not sure, we also have the ability to set up resources as well and then our resource managers to select people that they want to start based on their availability.

In terms of viewing schedules, I would rate PPM Pro's ability an eight or nine out of ten. It's a very similar interface to Microsoft Project, which I'm sure a lot of project managers are very used to in terms of the details pages. It's a very nice layout in terms of navigation. You can select your ability to view different timeframes and you can view a purely word-based view of your plan. There is the Gantt chart availability as well. It's very easy and quick to switch between the two. You can also drill down into specific details at a task level summary task and you can bulk upload or update tasks. 

At the moment, we don't actually use timesheets or its ability to allocate hours. Integrating and using timesheets is on our roadmap but we don't use it at the moment. From the exposure that I've had in terms of playing around with it, it seems pretty fully functioning and it gives us the information that we want to be able to capture. And then it's how we then suck that information out to then push into our external systems or corporate systems.

We always had a very high number of projects. We have around 30 going at the moment and they're quite significantly sized projects. In terms of the number of projects, I think the biggest challenge we have is getting resources on board in order to manage them. We can certainly capture them and we can identify where the pinch points are. It's just our recruitment process is quite a slow process. In terms of being able to run projects, we can actually identify what we can run based on the constraints that we have at the moment, whether that be financial or resource-based, and we use the information from PPM Pro in order to provide that.

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RM
Director Enterprise Applications at Nassau Health Care Corporation

The most valuable feature of this solution is that my team can use one tool that's reliable, scalable, and provides the leadership team visibility to what's going on.

This is a flexible solution. We've had some bumps in the road with some of the product integrations, but overall I think the tool allows us to maximize our business process. We were able to leverage custom fields so that we could capture the data that was specific to our institution. Being in higher education, we have some unique situations that corporate Fortune 500 companies don't have. I think that the level of flexibility was integral in our choice with this tool. The reporting and the dashboarding capabilities have been really, really helpful.

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KG
Solutions Development Manager at Wake County

Just about everything about the solution is valuable. I can't pinpoint one specific thing. The tool has helped us mature as an agency, has taught us to collect better data and the benefits of having good data.

It enables us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle. We utilize many different types of templates from intake forms to review processes, to standard status reporting. There are very different use cases. It's streamlined the project management process. My group is not an official PMO. We're referred to as solutions development. We are the project managers and business analysts for the organization and so, it has helped us to understand the work where it's coming from and how to organize it. It also makes the necessary information available to our higher-ups within the organization.

It only takes a few minutes, depending on availability, to create a new project. We use a standardized template to collect the information. The project request initiator fills out a short form through automation within the system and the approvers are notified. They go through the process of determining whether the project will be added to the portfolio or not. And if it's approved through workflow automation, the requester is notified. It gets added to a series of reports which get updated on a weekly and monthly basis.

It's always been an easy process to build a team within a project. The users are familiar with the system. It's not like we have to do training every time a new project is spun up. It's pretty intuitive. There is not a lot of hand-holding necessary. The tool gives us what we need and we get what we need out of it.

The task management features are very robust within the system and the other platforms like Projectplace, for example, offer more variety for task tracking and task responsibility and so forth. We don't really utilize the system from that perspective for tracking at the PPM Pro level. We use that more as high-level portfolio management.

It's very good for viewing projects and timelines. The reporting is getting better. It was good before but now, with all of the new improvements to reporting and dashboards, it's improved quite a bit.

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TS
Management consultant at Sloan Consulting

The status reporting is the most valuable feature as it's easy to use; it's simple for project managers to enter their information, and the reporting features are very flexible.

Planview PPM enables us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management life cycle. We were able to garner some best practices by using Planview templates, but they are also flexible enough to modify without having to customize the solution. The distinction between ''customize'' and ''configure'' is important here. 

When it comes to viewing projects and timelines, the solution is excellent. The views are easy to access and highly configurable. 

The solution provides managers with the insight they need to empower decision-making and help them manage risk, as it allows them to see when projects are over budget and behind schedule. 

Planview helped to reduce project delays because we can see when they occur and take proactive steps to remedy the situation.  

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SV
Program Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

The project entity in PPM Pro gives a lot of options for us to capture information, manage, and control it in a very detail-oriented way.

The timesheet management features give us visibility to the overall capacity planning and how much actual effort is going into the programs monthly. The risk and project status information gives a helping hand for stakeholders to understand how the programs are progressing. We have only explored a portion of it so far. The other features that we are exploring right now are the what-if features that seem to be helpful for future planning and project program management. We are aiming to get that rolled out as quickly as possible.

PPM Pro enables us to create reusable project templates that reflect our project management lifecycle. This includes many factors like fields used in a particular type of project, information captured in selected fields, tasks, attachments, dashboard links, calendars, risks, roles, team members and staffing information, etc.

When a project is running, there are several aspects of this that come into the picture. Gate structure, task structure, resources, roles, and settings etc. Also, the information we capture varies from project to project. When a project is completed, if we see that something is a potential candidate to be converted as a template, we extract the necessary information/setting from the existing project and create that as a template asset, so that in future, projects can be created based on that template. Multiple templates can be taken from one project. It takes hardly a minute and a half, maximum, to create a project in PPM Pro with the system defined mandatory fields. When it comes to a project, each customer will have a set of requirements (mandatory fields) in terms of what they need to capture for it.

Building a team is tricky. There are two ways I look at the team in a project. One is based on the staffing aspect; another one is just as a team. For building a team, if it is just a team grouping into a program, it is very simple and straight forward. You can add the members directly into the team. But if it is a staffing-based team, it is a bit complex because we deal with the role demand as well as resource planning. So, we need to plan it out first before it goes into the system at present.

In terms of PPM Pro’s task management features, we have not created any complex structures yet, but recently we have identified that it is more suitable in terms of complex structure management. And also helps to roll-up the information from tasks to project to Program to BU level. As of now, we only use around 50% of the potential from a task status. The structure we currently have is very straightforward and simple from a task point of view. It is possible to capture a lot of details in the task structure. It is really impressive that task structure can capture that kind of detail.

The time-tracking abilities like timesheets and allocation of hours are good. It is efficient and practical. PPM Pro gives a comprehensive insight into projects and empowers project/program managers to make informed decisions. We create reports and dashboards in PPM Pro that show the overall status and progress of each Business Unit with the details of projects with required KPIs. Please note that these KPIs will differ based on requirements from each BU/Customer.

Stakeholders also get a view of the timesheets at a high-level and are also able to drill down to the necessary details. This helps them to see whether the team is spending more or less time compared to the original plan and they can revise the planning, which will become more efficient for further project execution. We have set a platform for stakeholders in the system with dashboards and reports based on the KPIs needed for them to evaluate. This helps them to make decisions and also helps us to improve the system to get more out of it.

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JA
Client Support and Portfolio Management at British Columbia Lottery Corp

The resource management feature is certainly the most valuable for us. It is the supply and demand. Like most companies, one of the hardest nuts to crack is understanding where your people are and getting them to do the right thing at the right time. So, certainly, out of all the functionality, this has been the saving grace for us because it now provides us with the insight to do future planning and stop taking on more work than we are physically capable of doing as a company.

I've worked at many different companies in the past, and the customer service and the support from Daptiv are unlike anything I've encountered before and far excel any other company I've worked with. I always say to people that Daptiv is like another department in your own company as you do not realize they're a vendor.

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SD
Business Analyst II at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

I like that it's so customizable and it's so easy to customize. It's not overly complicated. We can get pretty much whatever we need out of the system. If it's not there, we can add it.

For example, the whole request process was built from scratch. We customized all of the fields that we wanted to capture as part of our initial submission and then the fields that we wanted to add on through the gating process to gather more information before final approval is submitted.

The solution enables users to create reusable project templates that reflect their own project management life cycle. We have only a few templates set up right now, however, that's something that we'll develop further as we go.

It makes our project management process more consistent across the board. We have probably 13 different project managers, from an FTE perspective, and we have a lot of consultants. Therefore, having the template already built-in keeps everybody on the same page.

It does not take long to create a new project using the solution. It's fast due to the fact that they all come through as a request and it's just a matter of adding it to the project and everything is pretty much there. You're just talking about turning a request into a project which takes less than five minutes. Previously, we were on spreadsheets and Word Docs, et cetera. As far as having the template with the tasks already in it, that obviously saves a lot of time for the project managers.

Task management features are so customizable that they're working for us based on exactly what we need. We also can always build as we grow as an organization. I like that tasks can be assigned to specific individuals so they can work on things themselves and update them in the system, as opposed to the project manager having to go in and manually do everything themselves.

With this solution, in terms of time savings, we're averaging a savings of three days per month, if not more.

The solution's time tracking abilities and allows for timesheets allocating hours. Before, we used a spreadsheet where we had to find the project in a list of 100 other projects that were going on at the same time. Being able to pull up a timesheet and only feed those projects that I'm assigned helps me as far as tracking my time. 

The solution is great for viewing projects and timelines. Their reporting feature is so robust and they keep adding to it all the time and the ability to set up your individual portfolios - however you need to - and being able to report on those, is a huge advantage.

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AW
Senior Project Manager at Husch Blackwell

It is flexible, because so far we haven't been able to figure out anything that it cannot do. It's highly configurable. We've added custom field design screens to fit our needs, develop reports, and dashboards that give us the ability to deliver much better information, especially to senior IT management.

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JS
Director, Project Management at TradeStation
  • Time tracking
  • Portfolio management reporting
  • What-if analysis

These features create visibility into project planning, resource capacity, and demand planning.

The solution is reasonably flexible. We can do all sorts of customization. We can tailor it to TradeStation.

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Mike  - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Project Manager at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees

I really enjoy how easy it is to get to data in the system like when doing searches with custom filters. EasyBuild reports are one of the best features, it gets what people want to look for.

We have several templates that we use in the system depending on the type of projects that we have. That really quickens the pace of getting tasks set up for a project.

It only takes minutes to set up a project in PPM Pro. We use the templates and then just put in the details for it, so it doesn't take too long to set it up.

The process for building teams within a project goes pretty smoothly. I find it pretty easy to use. You can build your team at different levels, either at the overall project level or by building it up through the task level. It has good flexibility.

This flexibility really does help our project management process because every project is unique and we have different kinds of project processes or techniques that we use and the way we structure the project may be different. It's nice to have that flexibility in the tool to be able to handle that.

Overall, its time-tracking abilities are good. One of the things we've looked at is potentially Projectplace to help out our users with their timesheets. It would be nice to be able to track more while we're in the work rather than having to go to a separate timesheet. From a timesheet perspective, it works fine.

PPM Pro is good for viewing projects and timelines. Some of the items that they're working on will make that even better and I know those are hopefully coming out in the near future. The whole timeline view and the ability to select and show what you want to have on a timeline will be a really nice visual component for showing a project.

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KM
Director PMO at Sephora USA

I like the resource demand capacity planning module. I don't think we are using it to the fullest potential yet. There is a lot more benefit that we can get if we use it right. I have seen the dial features, which are quick. There are capabilities within the tool that give it a quick read on how the teams are loaded, and we still haven't used them to that extent.

Day-to-day, once we understand what to do, it's very easy to use it.

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VC
Sr R&D Manager at Thermo Fisher Scientific

It makes clear what people are working on. It is not just for managers but it is also for the people themselves. They are able to see and say, "I am on this project, and it's official. My manager knows it. Everybody knows it." That helps them with their motivation.

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MS
Project Manager at New Orleans Convention Center

The flexibility is amazing. It is UI driven.

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EG
AVP at LPL Financial Holdings Inc.

The feature that gives us the most value is the project management with the Warm screen, the work and resource management screen. The strategy financial plan roll-ups also give us a lot of value.

The Warm screen, even though we're not going to the deep levels and deep details of all the projects and trying to assign resources at the lowest level, it gives us a quick visual of what resources are being worked on, what projects, and on what activities they're working on. At least at a very high level, because we're not using all the assignment components to the fullest detail, but at least with what Planview gives us as a tool and how we're leveraging it, it gives us that quick view of who's working on what project and who's booking time to what project at any given time or any given a week.

Then, on the strategy side, it allows us to group our projects based on the strategy hurricane that we've configured in-house. It gives us a nice little look at how those public forecast stacks up and then also how the actuals stack up over time.

We are able to get all the features that we need out of it and it gives us the ability to see what we need to see, understanding also how the tool works and how the tool reacts to certain actions.

It does provide a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people. Although we're only using authorizations and reservations.

The flexibility of configuring these assignments is straightforward once you understand the assignment types. They're very straightforward and easy to use. The flexibility does not limit us. It helps us move the process that we had in place based on how we want and how the tool operates. It just gives us a little bit more control.

PPM Pro is good for forecasting remaining effort. It's accurate. 

It helps us to manage work but I think it also helps us manage our resource's time, and know what they're working on and how we could spread them. I think it's a mix of both. It helps us in both roles. From a project management or a work management perspective, it gives us the ability to know who's available to work on what projects. Planview gives us the ability to have different attributes so that we can group or be able to do a quick lookup whether it's a skill, whether it's a role, whether it's a team and allows us to do that roll up so that we can quickly identify who's the AR of a particular project and if that person is available to work on the project.

It also allows program managers to group work together and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level because it gives us that consolidated view at the strategic level but not at the project level. It doesn't affect project management because here the role of a project manager is just to focus on their project, not to focus on the entire spectrum of the projects that are going on along with them. That's more than the responsibility of the program manager. I don't think it affects them in the long run.

PPM Pro has increased our on-time completion rate. It's above 8 over 10, so 80%. 

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GW
Director of IT Application Development at a construction company with 1,001-5,000 employees

PPM Pro has enabled us to set up and run a project priority committee (PPC) within the organization. Without the PPM Pro tool, we wouldn't be able to have the project information, updates, and project listings in the pipeline to be able to run the meeting efficiently, give information prior to the meeting, and also run the meeting when we meet on either monthly or on a bi-monthly basis.

The flexibility of the product meets our needs to manage project details of what we are tracking, including the level of detail which we may be tracking. 

It is a good communication tool for our end users. The flexibility of being able to meet the different scenarios for our different customers has been very good. We have come across a few different scenarios in regards to how we work with our customers.

The solution’s task management features definitely have helped to set some of deadlines expectations in a project and have them visible and trackable to know where we are headed, what the deadlines are, and the different portions of a project. These are areas in small projects that we task very lightly, which is good. This is another aspect that is flexible for us. On larger projects, which may span six to nine months, we need to get a lot more detail done on the tasking. However, the product is able to handle both scenarios equally as well.

The solution for viewing projects and timelines is good. There are plenty of reporting and Gantt views within the application.

The solution has helped us to reduce project delays by 25 to 30 percent. Visibility is a big piece of what it is. We are able to see what's going on and react earlier to issues that have come up.

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DG
Director of Project Management at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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.

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NS
Director IT Strategic Initiatives and PMO at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

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. 

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TH
Program Manager at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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. 

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GS
Sr Systems Analyst at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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it_user568227 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Project Office Analyst at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Project data
  • Reporting: My job involves data analysis, so the reporting feature is the most valuable feature for me.
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it_user570480 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Analyst - Business Systems at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I particularly appreciate the Timesheet and Resource Management.

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it_user572589 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I appreciate the project and timesheet tracking for our staff.

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it_user475320 - PeerSpot reviewer
PMO Supervisor / Senior IT Project Manager at a government with 51-200 employees

This solution is cloud-based and that is most beneficial.

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it_user1833 - PeerSpot reviewer
CIO at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Portfolio tools are strong; what if planning and understanding demand is good. View full review »
Buyer's Guide
Planview PPM Pro
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Planview PPM Pro. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
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