OpenText Project and Portfolio Management Reviews

We generally provide PPM services for our customers, and we use PPM solely for our in-house development. Most of the time we implement and provide services and consulting on Micro Focus PPM.

The majority of the cases are Demand Management and Project Management implementation. Often the main challenges are demand consolidation, prioritization and categorization, as well as visibility on project delivery, manageability within the time and budget, transparency and end-to-end integrity on delivery. Recently value-based delivery became an upcoming trend that points to challenges with the shift from Project to Product Management (Agilization), Lean Portfolio Management and What-if Analysis.

That is not applicable to us. But in terms of customer experience, the usual value of the implementation of MF PPM can be described as follows: one of the main successes is to help the company standardize procedures across business units/geographic spread branches and set up end-to-end lifecycle processes, consolidate all demands, improve visibility, transparency, and control of portfolios of investments and projects, optimize the use of resources, and focus on the investments aligned with their strategic goals. 

There are two key areas where the features are valuable; the implementation perspective and end-user functionality. PPM really has a powerful workflow and form engine that allows us to create workflow complexities and processes. There's a good balance between flexibility and best practice and it generally allows us to implement any kind of requirements a customer might have. It's a good balance of flexibility and functionality for configuration. It's a really powerful tool. I saw the other tools bending, compared to them it's really good. 

UI is user-friendly, it is quite simple and intuitive. It ships with a balanced content of the dashboards and the reporting features. There's a good interaction between modules, that allows organizations to have a full e2e cycle starting from the idea/proposals in the demand management, transform and execute in project management and track and manage grouping into programs and portfolios with out-of-the-box roll up and roll down features and data transparency. Approach management is really very powerful. It has also integrated with Microsoft Project and supports the hybrid projects with ready-to-use out-of-box agents that integrate with the agile tools like ALM Octane, Jira, CA Rally and etc. 

I like the new release approach on the Micro Focus side that turned into a rapid quarterly basis with transparency for the end-users and the ability to impact the content of the future patches and versions.

There's also room for improvement in other areas such as configuration which is a little old from an implementation perspective. There could also be improvements in API which is rarely used but we do use them in some cases. From a user's perspective, it's becoming more necessary in that agile transformation. More of our customers are now looking to have everything in one place and I guess Micro Focus could make some improvements in that area as well as improvements in communication and corroboration functionality in the tool.

On the strategic and portfolio functionality can be a bit more balanced and improved interactions with the other modules. 

I've been using this solution for 13 years. 

The solution is very stable, it fully supports HA and has wide HW/SW platform options. Performance on a very good level.

It is also scalable and has good guidelines and recommendations for hardware sizing. 

Technical support could be improved. Support is a competitive issue in the market with this tool, at least for medium sized customers. 

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward, but it's important to keep in mind that this is an ePMO solution, so it should take some time to deploy. It is based on the maturity level, current challenges, the readiness of the organization, business requirements, professional services, etc. It can be deployed as a fully complete solution or incrementally that can be a good approach to start getting values at the early stages. Complete solution in common case deployment may take around 10+ weeks, incremental deployment can happen in 3-4+ weeks cycles. Any specific case may increase or decrease the duration of the deployment. 

In terms of cost, I think this solution is competitive with others in the market. I like that it has a transparent price without hidden extras like some other vendors.

I would suggest that in the first year of implementation try to keep it simple and keep close to best practices. One of the main mistakes companies have made in the past is to replace the industrial-based best practices with their own technics and this doesn't always work. So, they end up migrating problems and issues, that may be part of their internal culture, to the new platform. I would advise soft adoption and incrementally distributing the use of the tool across the company.

Every solution can be improved so I would rate this product an 8 out of 10. 

We use it for project and portfolio planning, and for resource management.

It helps our organization to plan our resources exactly and to support the billing process as well.

The most valuable feature is resource planning or resource management.

Micro Focus Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) has a very strong workflow engine.

The functionality is really good with a lot of modules, and there's almost nothing missing.

The user interface is very, very old and is missing some functions, such as, for example, re-do, follow, and share functions. The UI is not good.

I would like to see different databases supported. There's only one database available at the moment, and it is very expensive. I would like better database support.

On the functional side of the product, I would like to see an enhanced and improved project management module with HR components in it.

I've been using this solution for 21 years.

It's a very stable solution with almost no downtime.

It's very easy to build up and is very straightforward.

We have 30 users in our company.

I would rate technical support services at five on a scale from one to ten.

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward.

We implemented this solution through an in-house team.

We have an annual license, and it is fairly priced in comparison to that of other solutions.

Use it out of the box in the beginning, and don't change it too much or make it too complex.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Micro Focus Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) at eight.

OpenText Project and Portfolio Management is an integrated solution of multiple modules that help organizations manage their projects, portfolios, resources and financial deliverables. 

The availability of multiple integrated modules is a vital aspect of the solution. The modules present in the solution include project, demand, and resource management. 

The user experience of the product needs to be improved. The resource management in OpenText Project and Portfolio Management also needs to be improved. 

I have been using OpenText Project and Portfolio Management since 2007. 

It's a robust tool with no signs of instability. 

OpenText Project and Portfolio Management is a highly scalable solution. Numerous customers of our organization choose the solution over others. 

There are two types of customer support that can be availed directly or indirectly for OpenText Project and Portfolio Management. One type is direct support from the vendor for the core functionalities and infrastructure; another support type is from integrators or the product implementor company that is available with a SaaS subscription.

The support quality provided by the integrators depends upon their skills and experience with OpenText Project and Portfolio Management.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. But sometimes, the setup can become time-consuming due to some configurations for unique customer requirements. The deployment of the product can take two to seven months for rollout into an entire organization. 

The deployment process covers the whole range of professional services, from installation, analysis, design, development configuration, and training.

A yearly subscription needs to be procured for the SaaS version of the product, and the on-prem version is available through perpetual licensing. There is an additional cost for product support, which includes functionality and upgrade support. But there are no hidden costs in OpenText Project and Portfolio Management. 

The solution has the same level of integration capabilities as competitor tools. OpenText Project and Portfolio Management exhibit wide capabilities for reporting. The product has an AI engine that allows an user to create reports in varying formats from a remote location.

There are also certain configuration capabilities in the product that mimic BI tools. In comparison to other tools in the market, OpenText Project and Portfolio Management is one of the most flexible and powerful tools available.

The product also has a robust dashboard and recording features. The reports in the tool can be created and exported in almost any relevant format such as Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Word and HTML. Native corporate designs, dashboards and additional customizations can be integrated in the tool as well. I would overall rate the product an eight out of ten. 

I think it's very important to have clear processes defined in the organization in order to experience a smooth product transition and there should be support from the management executive to implement tools like OpenText Project and Portfolio Management. It's common for any kind of digital transformation and tool implementation to fail without executive support.

There should be proper collaboration and agreement within the organization using OpenText Project and Portfolio Management. For instance, to implement the product in reality, there can be some kind of resistance, and this is why the right tool adoption is crucial. Regarding the implementation of OpenText Project and Portfolio Management, I would suggest others be onboard in an incremental process by focusing on the quick wins and urgent challenges and keep improving.  

I believe that, as per the market trend, every PPM tool will embed artificial intelligence. OpenText has already onboarded the trend and announced the release of a massive AI cloud. The vendor has its own AI engine embedded in OpenText Project and Portfolio Management and other tools from the vendor as well. 

The product brings multiple benefits to an organization through increased transparency, visibility on projects, tasks, and capacity, and also showcases financial spending patterns or budget savings. OpenText Project and Portfolio Management is able to increase the overall productivity of the organization and also measure it through certain benchmarks.

• Better resource planning
• Utilization

Program management was also one of the ways that we planned to use this tool, but we could not make best use of it.

• Project management
• Resource management
• Program management

The workflow and project planning features are good. 

Highly customizable workflow is the best one of them.

Able to manage multimillion projects and resources more effectively.

Though the staffing profile is difficult to manage and update, the enforcement made us create resource plans and do demand-allocation gap analysis much better.

• Better user interface. 
• Usability in terms of better UX.

Resource managers often request the Excel like features for allocation. Though not equal, but almost close features are expected. Buying add-ons for that is not worth it.

Yes, with multi-resource allocation.

Yes, when it comes to resource management and time management, it is very slow.

Average.

No.

In-house

Not applicable.

I have seen PPM evolve a lot over the period of time i.e. since v7.5 days.

PPM has come a long way, since 9.X on-wards it has shown massive improvements both at user end as well as functional end. We are currently on 9.40 and are soon going to upgrade to 9.41 as well.

Most valuable features of PPM are:-

- The data provided by PPM is trusted and is available almost immediately; without trusted data there is very less scope of any tool to be successful.

- It provides real-time visibility into all the projects, programs and portfolios; it provides critical information at the right time and helps in taking the right decision at right time; decisions such as finances, resources etc can be taken on the go.

- The what-if analysis (Portfolio management) gives the organisations a futuristic view of how well the organisations are going to fare in achieving their business objectives.

- 9.40 has a massive improvements in the Program Management module, gives more comprehensive view of the programs running in the organisation. The timeline feature of the program show real-time status of all the projects.

- Seamless integrations into the Jira, Agile manager, MSP makes it more powerful - 9.41 on-wards it has been more easier than ever.

- Dynamic out of the box portlets and reports are other excellent features. e.g. the ability to view the capacity, demand of resources across the organisation via Analyze Assignment load portlet makes it more substantial.

- Compare to work plan feature is another excellent one that can be harnessed for decision making.

- The ability to track down every single dollar spent in the organisation makes it more powerful i.e. you can track down which project spent how much on which resources doing exactly what. The costs can be further classified either capex (capital) or Opex (Operating).

- Web Services, integrations to other third party tool like SVN (subversion) makes it more skillful. This helps in automating a lot of things if needed.

Certainly we have had good impact in our organisation.

We have explored all the features of the tool.. we mainly use it for managing programs, resources, projects and time. We do explore some features of portfolio management.

Our organisation has been able to do effective forecasting, project delivery, resource management and time tracking with the help of PPM.

- The financial forecasts comes out from PPM.

- The projects are managed in the PPM

- Resources are managed via PPM.

- Actual time tracking is done via PPM.

- We have developed many reports and integrations that has helped the organisation to save time and money, thereby automating a lot of things.

There is quite a few areas of improvement

- Reporting; need to be able to provide fancy reporting out of PPM, way it is done in OBIEE etc..

- A lot of pain points in resource management area, that needs to be addressed. Currently we have to follow standard set of instructions to make sure the end results are effective.

- Time capturing should be more dynamic, ie. changing the approvers based on different use-cases.. We have over-ride rules, but that feature is again very limited.

- There are issues with some of the background services running; if stressed, it takes too much time to finish.

Over 5 years.

Nothing major as such ... When it was first installed it was on the Unix platform and there was lack of technical expertise to manage the tool.. we had to then move it over to windows system and since then it looks perfectly fine.

Yes, when it was hosted on a Unix platform; but since it has been moved to Windows it looks all good. Not sure what was the issue with the unix platform.. could be the internal environment.

Nope, absolutely none, we have the right infrastructure.

Pretty responsive and good

Good.

Nope, all PPM.

It was pretty straightforward; no major complications as such.

Vendor team, excellent

At the top of my mind, I can't really tell, but functionality wise and time and effort wise it has done miracles here.

NA

None, PPM as always.

Nope, all covered.

The number of different things which it is able to do. There are so many different pieces of functionality, and we use almost every single piece from deployment to demand, project, resource, and time management.

We're using all of it, and we integrate it with other systems. We migrate code for PeopleSoft, creating purchase orders, etc. So we're using the application for all kinds of crazy things.

We don't really use some of the things that they are improving, because we're still very much waterfall vs agile. A lot of the new functionality that they are adding for agile doesn't pertain to us. However, we constantly put in requests for some of the things we need. One of those is being able to export just our standard request type to PDF. Because they have that ability with projects, and after talking with them a couple years ago, it sounded like it would be somewhat easy to put it that same functionality request since the same types of forms are used. We're still kind of waiting on that one.

About 17 years.

It's gotten better. It has been better than other applications. The latest upgrade was extremely painful. I don't think they took into account customers that had been on it for 17 years when they wrote the upgrade script. I ran into a lot of issues with files left behind that they didn't clean up. Then when asking for help, they weren't even familiar with our directory structure, they were looking for a different directory structure. So, the latest upgrade was very painful. Prior to that, it had always gone very smoothly.

Initially, we purchased the product for 80 users, and now we have almost 2300 to 2400 users. So, it's been very scalable; very easy to scale.

I'm not thrilled. I feel like I get the runaround and I have to explain the issue five different times. First to the engineer, then the next one comes and they want to start over, so then I have to explain it again, and then they want to pass it on, then I have to explain it again. Having to do that, it's time consuming and frustrating, and I end up closing the ticket because I don't have the time for it, then my issue ends up not getting resolved.

It's very good as far as not needing to be restarted on a regular basis, not having mod files fill up, the number of issues, the number of tickets I have received from users with complaints, and its ease of use. Where I see improvement is more my experience with support and with the Micro Focus company in general, because we ran into licensing issues that took almost eight months to resolve. We had a divestiture, and we acted as a third party via TSA, and it took probably two months to try and get an answer that we really needed in 20 to 30 days. So, these kind of things where we ended up having to talk to one of their lawyers and in that five minute conversation, they're like, "Oh yeah, we can do that." They wrote up a letter, sign, sign, and done. Why it took 60 days, when talking directly to the lawyer it took five minutes? It was very frustrating.

Demand, project and time management parts of the tool are the most valuable. We can manage our demands very easily with the PPM flexible infrastructure. The staffing profile and work plan structures are very useful for capacity management, and they are also user-friendly.

We have some roles at the PMO. One of them is as a program manager. We manage a lot of programs within the year and follow the steps in Excel files. Program management can be more functional in order to better program management, which is what the tool does.

• Budget management could be provided.
• Reports could be enriched.

We have been using PPM for nine years.

No.

No.

Optiim, our vendor, supports us for technical solutions. Thus, our customer satisfaction is extremely high. Our rating is a nine out of 10.

We used to use Excel before. We needed a structural tool to manage our projects.

It is straightforward.

Not applicable.

It should have been evaluated. We don’t know before.

It has a parametric infrastructure. This provides efficiency while managing the projects and demands. At the same time, PPM customization is very easy to use, so saving time is ensured.

Project management, time and resource management, demand management, and workflow automation.

These are the most critical and important modules that can make the PPM usage successful.

These are connected to each other. If want to do PPM, you can not say 'I will not manage demands', nor can you say 'I will not do resource management, etc.'

These modules are the base for a successful PPM usage. If you use these modules properly (with industry best practices), you will get the most out of it.

We gained analytics about where the bottlenecks are, increased accurate decision making, and it provides us with several "versus" visibility.

Portfolio management, hybrid project management, top-down budget and resource planning, application portfolio management.

Eight years.

Sometimes, yes. Especially in a Windows environment.

Sometimes, yes. That might depend on the Windows environment.

They can take to the result which is expected from them.

No.

Straightforward, because we decided to align with best practices.

Power license must be divided. Administration and project management shouldn't be in the same package.

CA Clarity, IBM, and Microsoft. Did not evaluate Planview that time.

Keep it simple, of course. Apply phased or sprint based approach. Not Big Bang.