Planview ProjectPlace Valuable Features

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

Almost all the features are valuable. You can track a project's progress: milestones, timelines, and flag any issues. You can access the solution anywhere from any part of the world. It is a real-time project monitoring software as well. So, it is very good for project planning and reporting.

The overall user interface is fantastic. It has been very easy to learn and use. Any non-technical person with some initial training can work on it from day one, which is very good. The learning material is very good and easy to learn. There is no need to spend additional money on the training.

During the pandemic, team members were deployed in very different geographic locations. This was a great choice for this situation since we just needed to provide credentials for them to start working. We could track their progress and monitor from any part of the world. This is a very good functionality that they provide.

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JA
IT Project Manager at Orange España

All the features are perfectly fine, but the main feature is that Projectplace has the functionality of Kanban board/Scrum board. So, you can monitor all your progress in a single place. You can monitor the activities given to the agile team, the agile processes that are followed, the activities in the backlog, and the activities that need to be done on priority. You can set the priorities, and, accordingly, you can monitor and track them. It is beneficial for day-to-day work.

Another important feature is that its graphical user interface is fantastic. Its GUI is very good, and it is very easy to learn and work with. It does require some formal training, but after a few initial weeks, you get a hang of the solution.

It is a customizable solution. You can provide your requirements to them, and their technical consultants can help you according to your requirements. Its customization is very easy. Overall, it provides a great return on the investment.

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NipunSri - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant Cybersecurity at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable feature is the collaboration with other teams. It allows me to see an overview of the entire project, helping to estimate how much time and effort I have to dedicate to specific sections.

The risk management feature is one that I find very good.

Right from the initial steps, we found this product easy to use.

The logging features are good.

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Buyer's Guide
Planview ProjectPlace
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Planview ProjectPlace. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Eduardo Maya - PeerSpot reviewer
PMO at Hoteles City Express

It is a complete solution. It is very useful for the management of our internal processes.

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

The command feature on the cards is very, very helpful. We can update the cards. It is very useful.

We already have a set process in our company for tracking work details and the completion of milestones. We run an integration with Enterprise One. The template is already available in Projectplace as well as Enterprise One. So we follow that template as the corporate suggested, but under each and every line outcome we have a task which we create in Projectplace and assign cards and connect the cards to the tasks. So in terms of how helpful it is for tracking milestones, it is very good.

Projectplace absolutely supports collaboration in real-time. It's probably one of the best tools out there for collaboration. It affects the project's progress quite a bit. I started two very similar projects in two separate business units, on very similar teams. I did one with Projectplace and one in Enterprise One just to see how the mileage would vary. The one with Projectplace had a very short cycle time so we were able to finish the project earlier. The one with Enterprise One was less engaging and it took a little more time. Because we were tracking the tasks inside the schedule it was not on the cards. We don't have cards on Enterprise One. We had to create many lines and it was very hard for people to navigate. In that sense, I would say Projectplace is extremely good for collaboration and it really helps to finish projects very quickly.

It allows our teams to view the project status. The project status is much more visible with Projectplace. It's way better for the project team. For leadership, Planview Enterprise One is better in terms of status because there is an overview screen on Planview Enterprise One. 

We also Projectplace to connect Gantt chart activity and Kanban boards. It positively affects the stakeholder's ability to view progress because when they come to the project plan, they can easily see whatever is required. I also have created a dashboard which actually shows them the progress as well. I created the dashboard on Power BI and it's very easy to create a Power BI dashboard using Projectplace data.

We use Enterprise One for time tracking and reporting features for work done by project team members but there is integration between Enterprise One and Projectplace. There is a tab inside Projectplace where if you click on it, it takes you to Planview Enterprise One. We track our time through that.

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HP
Manufacturing Manager, Capital COE at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Projectplace has excellent collaboration features, including some nice kanban boards. We use DocuSign, and Planview just integrated it into Projectplace, so that was helpful. And I like the fact that it links to Enterprise One, the other Planview tool that we use to manage our capital portfolio.

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MM
Site Reliability Engineer at a wholesaler/distributor with 10,001+ employees

The workspace ease, navigation, and portfolios are the most valuable aspects of this solution. I just got access to the portfolios from my upper management, so I'm able to look at our specific SRE portfolio to see what's a priority, look at how many hours we've tracked, and things like that. I'm not so much included in the budgeting but it's important to see what projects are higher priority and so forth.

With the portfolio view, I knew everything when we expanded out, showing the authority and statuses. Then inside the actual workspaces, looking at the analysis itself and linking those milestones in the analysis workspace is great because a lot of PMs need that for the plan. It's easy to navigate and easy to move. I loved JIRA as well but it doesn't give you that robust visual. I think it's a little confusing sometimes when you first start up with JIRA. But Projectplace was a snap for me.

It was great to get in there and really see how things move along and so forth. One of the integrations that we are using from JIRA, is the email piece of it. It's great that they can send it to an email board and create the card. That's awesome. Unfortunately, it's not bidirectional. You can respond to that email, but it's not usually that user's email that it's going back to because we're on the cloud over in JIRA as well. We're looking into some other options for integration.

We've created templates mainly for plan-build-run. We tried to make it as simple as possible. I personally want to build that out a little bit more, from an Agile perspective. Our company is still adapting Agile as well. We have Waterfall and Agile right now. From an Agile perspective, we want to build out templates with milestones for pre-inceptions, inceptions, iterations, and then left shifts for turnover, once it gets released, and so forth. We want to see what the cases are and what we want to accomplish then break that down. I love that you can import a work breakdown structure as well. I don't know if this company does it, but that's something I've done in the past. Being able to import is great.

Then we would just plug away and try to create cards in the workspace, forecasts that need to be done, and so forth. That's where that integration may come in from and ask with our research and development teams, being able to reach out to our team, engaging us from whatever they may need, finding out SLOs, and things like that. Then, of course, the repository, the documentation repository is great, it works fine. So far its ability to work with detailed implementation plans for projects has been great.

We use the Kanban boards to collaborate and that's been a great visual inside the workspaces. I think showing your meetings has been a win-win. At first, people had a hard time looking at those boards because they're creating a card. They're trying to create a board and we tell them not to. It's easy to hit the plus sign, add a card, move cards from "Plan" to "Working on" to "Done." If you're looking at milestones as Sprints, you would want to have a separate board, so to speak, that's a backlog board that could be used, and try to visualize that and do Agile methods like Grooming and so forth. It's been good.

From a scale of one to 10, the overall visibility into project status provided by Projectplace is definitely a 10. I think it covers a lot. You can adjust by breaking it down visually and they have all the different methods, looking at it from weeks, months, quarters or whatever it may be. You can easily add milestones and look at it that way. The portfolio's important. I just got access to that, so I'm still learning that piece of it, but I think looking at the overall time and so forth, and I think some of my upper management love to export it and look at it from how much work is being done. They can email that or there's a shared link that they email upstream to see how much we're adapting and so forth.

I know they are tracking resources across multiple projects. I know that my management has talked about how many hours are spent on a specific project and so forth, but I'm sure the members themselves are tracking it. 

This dynamically updates schedules as progress is made. Without real-time updates, once somebody puts in an estimate or tracking their time if that wasn't real-time, that would be tough to dynamically look at that overall project and see how much progress. If they don't move their cards, and it keeps track of where those go, that would be a problem.

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NS
Senior Tech Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most useful features of Planview are its integration with resource management and the ability to commit and reserve various resources. Oddly enough, I liked how they did the time updates. Every two weeks, it would update all timelines to the current date, and you would then be sort of locked into what you had completed. That was confusing to a lot of people, and if you weren't familiar with it, that's a Planview feature that I haven't seen in Jira, Microsoft Project, or other products. That was very thoughtful. I liked how they handled current time management. It enforced best practices.

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GS
IT Business Analyst at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees

Planview Projectplace is a really good solution for document sharing and keeping track of the history of changes in the document. I also like that you can have everything you need for a project in one place, for example, for documentation, planning, and even resource planning. You can go back to the basics, similar to using an Excel file, and you'll have everything there in Planview Projectplace. You can share documents internally and externally and this is one of the best benefits of the solution. You can also create visibility in your projects in different workplaces, and this function makes the solution okay.

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JR
Strategist at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

I love the collaborative nature just from my role to help. I'm a strategist. I help manage those large strategic projects. Implementation is one significant piece of my role, but I love the collaboration that can exist within the tool. We're still trying to work through that but the ownership and trying to get people to really gauge and use the tool when you have 13,000 to 14,000 people across the organization isn't easy. It could be challenging because not everyone jumps right in the feet and feels comfortable with the technology, but the ability to drive ownership and visibility into what's going on is just wonderful from my perspective as trying to empower the teams that I manage. That's been very, very helpful.

I like Projectplace for working with detailed implementation plans for projects. Early, when I first started using it, it was just trying to get over a mental hurdle of how not to lose the details. There are so many different ways in which you can set up a workspace, the activities, the cards, and using a checklist on the cards. There are so many different ways in which you can set it up. It's fun to think through how to best transition those detailed work plans into the Projectplace environment. Its work. It's almost like there's so much ability to set it up to meet the team's needs or a specific project is good and bad in terms of having the options available to you. It's challenging at times because there are so many options but it's very flexible.

I think it's a very flexible tool for detailed work plans because we have a new hospital tower that we're opening now. I used to have a 350 to 400 row Excel file. We were considering rather large files that we got narrowed down into some more concise workspaces in Projectplace. Flexible is a keyword I would use.

Projectplace tracks work details and completion milestones. I normally try to set up as many milestones as possible. One of the challenges is the data that's from it if you try to mix people. People want to see more operational metrics or KPI finances, things like that. Things that aren't really project or task-related. I would say they're concerned about how other things are going related to a significant project and those things aren't always available but we can, obviously based on the activities and things, report cards, progress, milestone completion, and some other things. I know it's just a challenge. I know our leader that manages the tool and collaborates with Planview is really focused on metrics, reporting, and how we keep making that more robust. Finding a way to take it another layer down into a more detailed look at metrics and things outside of project metrics is a challenge. It's a challenge getting that fine layer of detail.

It definitely supports collaboration in real-time. The only challenge there is, is trying to manage the change of the way people do work. It definitely supports collaboration in real-time, and there are many people that have jumped in and use all the time. But then for my seat, I also need to know that an individual is not quite there yet. I may need to follow up with a separate note. I may need to follow up with a phone call or something to check-in. It does work. It's getting people to buy in and actually use it and get over the mental hurdle of understanding that it's not additional work, it's just a different way to do work. 

We also use Microsoft Teams as an organization so people need to understand how the different tools work and how they relate to one another and that sort of thing. Yes, it works, it's just getting over that hurdle as an organization of getting people to buy into, to using it in that fashion.

The overall visibility in the project status provided by Projectplace is okay. It should be a little more robust. I know we have some of it set up. I don't know all the details for certain types of projects. We can put in a specific project status, but for many projects, we don't have that functionality turned on and it's very vague. I don't know the behind the scenes of what someone is doing, but there are certain projects where the only status that people could see is very vague in terms of task and tasks completed. It doesn't talk about the details of the three potential barriers. Some people want to know a little more detail. We do use some functionality that is turned on for certain projects that we use that people can submit a project status and that's helpful. But we don't use it across the board. I don't know the details of what someone's turning off or on and why that's the case. I'm seeing that across different projects and different workspaces.

This ability to allow other teams to see into our project status affects my organization. One of the huge benefits, even just with the integration with PPM Pro, since we use that as well and Projectplace, we've had a huge leap forward in terms of visibility across the organization of just what's out there. What's available in terms of projects, what's currently going on and we organize that, based on the hospital service line. We organize those things that people could easily drill down and say, "Hey, what's being worked on"? We slice and dice that in numerous different ways. The visibility has been great. It's just so we can have a huge initial step and our internal team's done a great job to work with Planview to help build some of those dashboards and things and actually do that in PPM Pro. I think there's some room to make it even more robust down the road. But there is great visibility early on. There are things that never existed before.

It has helped to track resources allocated across multiple projects. Within PPM Pro we have some of that visibility. I don't know that we see that within Projectplace, they've been splitting hairs, but I don't know that Projectplace allows us to see that. For example, with the projects I'm leading, I'm aware of who's on all of them and the usual suspects right across our organization. But I don't know if it's organization-wide, if we're there yet, by using Projectplace.

Projectplace definitely dynamically updates schedules as progress is made. It's great. The real-time nature of it all is a great piece to have real-time changes. People are able to see those activities and how they may have changed. That visibility is great. Then I use the conversation piece and really communicate with the team there as well. That real-time change is really helpful from my perspective.

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SK
Program Manager at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees

Clarizen's slide publisher is one of my favorite features. That is something I frequently use, and that is also highly valued within our company.

What I also like about the system is that it is custom-made. As a result, you won't have a lot of features that you won't use. You can also tailor it to the users' needs in order to provide them with the access they require, which is fantastic, in my opinion.

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Buyer's Guide
Planview ProjectPlace
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Planview ProjectPlace. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.