Planview Portfolios Reviews

My company uses the solution to do investment planning, project and program management planning, and they do some resource management using that primarily for cost forecasts.

I work on one of the support teams here. I do some configuration and I do some training as well as some design work that involves configuration within the tool.

It's helped the company due to the fact that it does a reasonably good job of tying in those resource forecasts. We're able to integrate with cost information from other systems that we have. It does a pretty good job with that. Also, the ability to tie the risks in with the work is pretty helpful. I like that. Having that being sort of a single source of truth for the risks and for the resource forecast, that's been very useful for us.

The solution has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic initiatives or objectives. We are now funding incrementally, planning for shorter periods, and doing reviews more frequently instead of doing yearly reviews.  We're able to do that using Enterprise One. That's helped us a lot.

I like to work in the resource assignment view. I like the ability to plan tasks out and sequence them. The risk management is great and I appreciate how you can tie risks to the work level items. It helps us forecast resource costs and we’re able to tie the risk to those aspects which helps us keep those items on track.

We're not using the solution for forecasting remaining effort. We use it just to forecast resource costs and other direct costs that are entered.

The solution view into resource capacity and availability helps us to manage work.

For example, we're currently moving forward with what we call capacity-based planning. The tool is integral to how we're doing that.

The solution provides a variety of types of resource assignments for assigning work to people. It does allow us to have different assignments for resources. It does have some limitations, however, it does allow us to do that for the most part.

The solution allows program managers to group work together and see the resource demands and cost at a consolidated level through reporting. The reporting is pretty basic in that it allows us to export the data. It requires project management to undertake some additional analysis outside of the tool which we're able to do at this point.

When it comes to managing project plans, the solution works fine. It works well for that. The challenge that we have is that, in our environment, we don't necessarily use it as designed, we use it a little bit differently. That's not the tool's fault. We don't advance the system time every day or every week. We do it monthly. We currently are not doing extensive dependency management within the work.

The out-of-the-box reports, as far as I can tell, are weak. We've had to build a lot of reports using Power BI, which we connected to it.

Reporting is not my focus area, however, one of the things that would be nice is if we could connect our Tableau to it. We do use Power BI, however, we have also been using Tableau. It'd be nice to be able to use that toolset as well for reporting.

One of the problems that we have is that any of the data that comes out of Enterprise One is a point in time. We can't show change over time. Therefore, if we're looking at, for example, progress on work, and we wanted to know if a schedule has gotten better or worse versus last month or last year, we're not able to do that directly on Enterprise One. We have to use a reporting database and extract the data periodically and then use that as a basis for our ability to show change over time. That's a hassle. It would be nice if Enterprise One was able to show change over time, by having the ability to report on data from prior periods.

The solution doesn’t provide end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work. It doesn't work that well in and of itself for planning Agile delivery, for example. I know that they have LeanKit, and we have LeanKit licenses, however, most of our enterprise is using Jira. We are interested in connecting to Jira. That should be coming out in the next year. That said, at this point, I would say it doesn't provide us the end-to-end work management or resource management that we would like without that Jira plugin.

If it could provide historical data or prior time period data, then we would be able to have fewer integrations. That would be an improvement for us. It would probably mean an ability to shrink our footprint on some other Hash Apps, which would probably mean cost savings for us and a simplification of our reporting. 

There could be some simplification on how we manage the users on the system. When you have a user for the system, you have to manually provide them grants. It's not like you could clone a user and provide those same grants to somebody else on their team. You have to do it all manually. That's a hassle.

The inability to paste in data, or do bulk data updates is a little bit difficult as there is no bulk update for work and resource working assignments. You have to manually enter all that information. That seems unnecessary.

If somebody's allocated at a certain rate for a certain time period, you should be able to copy that across and say, this is flat for the rest of the year and then modify it with any exceptions. It's not easy to do that sometimes.

We are not able to drill down into the details and align the consolidated information with this tool. We’d like to have that capability. Every time a project manager or a program manager has to export information and then do pivots and do whatever else in Excel, it means that there are copies of data floating around that we'd rather have stay in the tool. We’d like them to be able to do their analysis and reporting directly out of the tool. We're not there yet with that.

I would not say that the solution has increased our on-time completion rate.

I'd like to see some of the configurations simplified. There's a lot of weird duplication of fields when you're looking at the alternate structures. There's inconsistency around field naming conventions.

I've been working with the solution since 2018.

The stability is pretty good. It's a little bit slow. In particular, we have some projects that are pretty sizable, and then there's substantial performance issues. For some projects where we have hundreds of tasks with hundreds of resources to open, it might take on the order of five minutes to load up, which, to open a screen, is not a reasonable amount of time. That's not normally acceptable.

We've had to artificially break things down into smaller projects, even though that's not the way the work is being managed. That's been a challenge in terms of when we've had to execute workarounds.

There's a scalability problem around very large projects. If you get a large project with a lot of resources and you want to project out for several years, we've had to change that forecast due to the fact that it wouldn't scale. Opening it now takes five minutes, however, in the past, it would take 15 minutes to open and then change things. It was really slow to refresh. We've had to break large projects down to something smaller to make it still somewhat unmanageable, but better.

We have 500 or 600 staff that use the product. We have some people that really just manage risks. We have some people that do resource forecasts. We have other people that really are focused on reporting. We also have other people that do project management and others that manage programs. On top of that, we have some people where their extensive usage really has to do with certain life cycle approvals.

Usage may increase slightly. At one point we had almost 800 users. We were able to cut that down a little bit. We may go back up above 600 in the near future, I don't know for certain. If we have any growth, it would probably be 10% in the next year. That is my expectation.

Technical support has been pretty good. We had some challenges as we were not on the latest platform, on the latest release, however, we just did an upgrade. We're on the July release now. We're two months behind. We are not yet accepting the monthly releases.

Overall, technical support is usually pretty responsive.

We used Microsoft Project Server for some things, and for other things we used EPPM, which is from HP.

We switched from EPPM to Enterprise One. It had a good review and we wanted to give something new a try. I wasn't at the company at that time, so I don't know if it's the best alternative to EPPM. For the scheduling stuff and detail planning at the task level, we switched from Project Server based on cost. We knew that Enterprise One had the functionality, so there was no reason to support two tools any longer. By focusing on Enterprise One, we were able to simplify the assets we had running our software platforms.

I have not used SAP or Oracle products for project management in the past.

I wasn't a part of the initial setup. I can't speak to whether it was straightforward or complex.

The deployment took about nine or ten months. We wanted to do a phased roll-out due to the different organizations that were involved and also due to the fact that we wanted to work with the different parts of our organization to get the sets of requirements configured.

In terms of maintenance, we have a team of about 30 people that does testing as well as configuration and deployment. There are some people that focus on the configuration of strategy information, and life cycles. Others work on configurations related to the work and any of the work-related attributes such as risks and issues and status. Other folks just work on developing Power BI and other external reports. We have other people that work on training and communications as well.

We worked with Planview directly.

We didn't implement this product to expect some specific financial return. We were just trying to enable certain functions that we have not monetized. We don't have a payback period or anything like that.

I do not have information about the pricing. I know that we have on the order of 600 people on the license, however, I don't know the costs around it.

The company may have evaluated a few other options. Project Server was one of them.

It's my understanding that Project Server has better integration with SharePoint, which is in some ways similar to Projectplace. Project Server is easier as it requires a desktop client, or, at least it did previously in order to maintain the schedules, which was very convenient for a lot of users. That said, in a lot of ways Project Server and Enterprise One are similar, however, honestly, I like Project Server better.

We're just a customer and an end-user.

We're using the July release currently.

The solution meets our needs at this time. It has some limitations with respect to some functionality we're not using yet related to team-based assignments. Maybe it's an area that is not fully applicable since we're not using it yet. It's a feature that was rolled out a year or so ago, or maybe a little bit more, and we have not yet adopted it.

One of the things that I did hear, although I wasn't part of the decision, was that the Gartner Magic Quadrant was a big factor in swaying management's decision. Enterprise One was in the Magic Quadrant. It was well-reviewed by Gartner. I would advise others to give this less weighting and to really look at how configurable the tool is. Project Server is easier to maintain in terms of configuration and operations than this product. 

If I had a colleague at another company and they asked me, "Hey, do you like it?" I would say we do like it, however, it's not perfect. Nothing's perfect. However, users need to really think about how easy it is to find resources that can configure it or how easy it is to actually do those configurations.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We use E1 to track scope, schedule and financials for R&D projects. Some R&D teams even use E1 for RCCP. 

E1 used to be used to track Transformation projects.

E1 have a very useful tool to bring accountability back into projects, make it very easy for us to assign teams and resources to activities in project and track the progress effectively.

It has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives, the leadership has been using E1 for Strategic alignment of Projects.

It helps us keep track of the salary/ hours spent on R&D projects using the time tracking feature, which enables project managers keep track of salary charges as we have hourly labor rates associated with BU's.

But  an issue that we are facing currently is most of the engineers have to submit their time sheets on multiple tools and since planview E1 is being used for only R&D project, the engineers opinionate that it is counter productive to enter timesheets, we are also not well versed with Lean costing to implement in the Org. 

We also track various project metrics which makes it simpler for Leadership to view the details.

Lifecycle management for projects is also commendable, where we have multiple types of projects. 

The most valuable features are the W&A screen. It provides a very useful view as well as the option to capture baselines. I can always review the progress of my projects with my team. It also allows me to capture the notes with respect to the progress. It also allows me to assign members to the task and ensure that they fill that timesheet. I know how much time they spent on certain tasks.

In terms of regular traditional project management and new product development, I would give its ability to see what stage work is at a six out of 10. Non-Project managers find the Ui and UX hard to digest. 

For Agile project management, having the feature of adding backlogs is every useful, but there are a lot of issues with Projectplace connectors as well as LeanKit connectors to Enterprise One, which hampers the Agile experience which is why it feels like a half-baked product. But I hear it has been fixed in newer updates and our Org is under process for update.

With respect to the forecast, I would say it does very basic forecasting of picking whatever we predict and just dividing it by months, quarters, and years. I would prefer to have AI technology in Planview Enterprise One to forecast and predict much better based on historical data. Since Enterprise One has been existing in Flowserve for the past 10 years, there's a lot of historic data that can be used to predict rather than forecast. There are a lot of solutions out there that would do the same.

Its ability to create project related summary reports across multiple projects is one of the best features. They have very good data warehousing.

It is easy to create dashboards using E1 data connectors or the Odata that Planview team has created for us. One of the few reasons why many in leadership likes planview E1.

Our organization is shifting towards Hybrid project management and currently, we are facing issues to re-use the E1 in a way to track projects. We might need to rethink our setup but there is room to improve the standard offering of E1 for Hybrid Pm, as well as update the UI.

Its view into RCCP and availability does not at all help us to manage resources. It is one of the worst features of Enterprise One where everybody in our company hates the tool and are sort of forced to use it for RCCP, some teams have moved to use other tools for the same and use E1 as recording tool only. 

Enterprise One does  not provide any insight to respective resources on the available work and the left out work when he or she goes to the timesheet. It is like filling an Excel sheet from 15 years ago. New solutions out there actually do a better job.

The solutions I am referring to are JIRA as well as Confluence. With that connectivity I see many of my IT teams doing Agile timesheet planning with sort of a background timer capturing the time being spent on a activity. 

Enterprise One has got a very rap in the organization due to its bad UI and complicated UX. The steep learning curve and inability of other non project resources finding it hard to use the tool makes it hard for people to recommend the tool.

The number one thing that needs improvement is the UI. It should be easy for even casual project managers. It should provide customizable screens that look modern and can be a choice for project managers to choose at a professional level, medium level, and a very easy level. I am thinking 3 separate standard Ui that you can choose as per level of users. 

Many PM;s track projects using different tools and sometimes they end up using PV as a record system.  

Enterprise One does not provide a good risk assessment functionality and does not provide a good what-if analysis functionality, it would be preferable to have this in a good UX. 

It does not provide end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. It's 50/50. It is very difficult to use Enterprise One as a tool that one would WANT to use to better the project. It is at this point, a record system that we are bring told to use as it gives nice metrics for leadership to make decisions. 

I have been using Enterprise One for the last two and a half years and my company has been using it for 10+ years. 

I would give their stability an eight out of ten. It's quite stable. Here and there, there have been issues, but other than that, it is quite stable.

It can be scaled very nicely.

We have 2,000 to 3,000 users. The major chunk of these people are in engineering, if not, it's R&D project management.

Before it was ten people managing this solution but now that's down to two. 

I also use Microsoft Project, basecamp and Project for the web.

We were using Excel sheets before and some people are just content with it but can't bring accountability there. Projectplace has been the right filling point between excels and Pm tools. 

But with PowerPlatform from MS, it is becoming easier to create our own tools for project management and we create simple UX for our teams. We are able to bring accountability as well. I think some of us are using Power Apps because we feel the UX in E1 is bad.

We can aggregate E1, Projectplace and Power Apps data to PowerBI dashboard and it is pretty great.

I was involved with the setup for my R&D projects. The setup was extremely straightforward. It was a single sign-on, so it was pretty good.

All the admin guys take care of pricing and licensing and I'm pretty sure it's expensive.

I would suggest avoiding Enterprise One for small scale or medium scale businesses and go for Projectplace or even LeanKit because they are the best parts of the Planview suite. Enterprise One is old, it's aging and they need to revamp it. Large scale companies that can afford E1 for leadership, can look into it but still its difficult to recommend. 

I realize that most R&D project managers don't know how to use the system because of its user interface. But for those who do understand how to use the system, it can be an extremely powerful tool. But a project is done with a large group of people and that group don't like it.  

On a personal level, I actually like Planview Enterprise One, because I know how to use the tool pretty well. So somebody who knows the tool quite nicely can get tremendous value out of it.I do not use other PM tools like many other PM's, I use E1 and Projectplace quite rigorously and have created PowerBI dashboards for teams, sponsors and customers. For some projects I do use PowerApps to create a front end and use that data to manually input data to E1.

It's been extremely useful for me in managing projects as well as in my career. And if people weren't so hell-bent on not liking it, I would still continue to use Planview Enterprise One for everything. It's like a love-hate relationship for me. 

I would rate Enterprise One a six out of ten. 

We use Enterprise One to capture everything in IT that we're working on from projects that require capital funding, to running the business. We are doing everything from soup to nuts, including timesheets. We've established the full implementation.

It provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. We're able to see the full scope of what people are working on. We can see all the different types of activities that they are charging time to and we can do an analysis of whether we think that's the right distribution of the workload.

Enterprise One has improved my organization in terms of everything that we're working on. We're able to see where our resources are allocated and when we have availability, which helps us to schedule the portfolio. That's really the main intent of Enterprise One.

The ability to capture timesheets is the most valuable feature. Also, the ability to see what the full organization's working on is probably the biggest bang for the buck.

Prior to implementing Enterprise One, we didn't have a tool to do any of that. We were hard-pressed to understand what our people were working on. Now, we have a full view of projects, allocations, and effort to deliver our portfolio projects.

Enterprise One's ability to forecast remaining efforts is pretty good. It's a regular schedule, so you can see your burndown rate and see what's left on the project to spend from a labor and non-labor perspective.

Its view into resource capacity and availability absolutely help us manage work. We can't plan out projects for delivery until we know if we have resources available to deliver them. That's been really critical. We look at our projects and see what availability of resources we have. That helps us to determine when we can start new work.

Project managers can group work together and see the resource demands and costs at a consolidated level. They can create portfolios. 

We are able to drill down to the underlying details via consolidated information. We can see exactly what people are working on and we can see where they're charging their time. We can see their allocations and redistribute the load if we need to based on how much is being demanded for individuals.

We hope that it will increase our on-time completion rates. That will hopefully happen when the projects are delivering. Some of them have end dates coming up in the next quarter and some not for another 6+ months. We'll probably be able to start viewing that within two to three months.

I don't initially expect the on-time completion rate to be increased, but I'm hoping over time, we get better at project intake and estimation. That will help us to deliver things more efficiently and meet our timelines.

The scheduling's kind of clunky in terms of its ability for us to see what stage work is at. They could have done better with that. It can be difficult to use.

We don't use its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects. I think it's poor.

We implemented Enterprise One three months ago. We're about to upgrade to the September release so, we'll be current as of next week.

It's mostly been stable. There have been a few times where things were delayed but it came out pretty quickly.

We will be rolling it out more broadly across the organization. I don't envision any issues with scalability. We plan on expanding it to many other areas. I'm already talking with seven other departments within my company. It's going to be rolled out enterprise-wide. The supply chain is probably the biggest organization next to ours, then there's legal, and a couple of other departments who it will make the biggest impact for. 

There are 750 users across our organization. 

Technical support is fair. Some people are very talented and very knowledgeable but others are not. They're generally responsive. There have been some times when they've not been, but they are 75% of the time.

The initial setup was very complex. If you've ever done the implementation it's not an easy implementation. It's very complex. We had a group of 20 people working on this project for 6+ months to implement the tool. The configuration alone was six weeks just to set up resources, initial lifecycles, and things like that. 

In terms of the implementation strategy, we had the project all laid out. We knew what and when we needed to deliver it. We knew what the scope of our work was. We had a massive communication exercise. The change management aspect of this going from no tool to a very sophisticated tool like this one required extensive communication and change management. I was the project lead, I lep up the whole implementation and worked with project managers. 

Maintenance requires three people. I oversee them. I have two full-time people.

We worked with Planview's implementation team for the deployment. 

As long as we can get enough participants, it will make the pricing more reasonable. We signed up for an enterprise license. That makes the per person cost much lower.

Aside for standard licensing, we had a cost for the implementation but nothing besides that. 

We evaluated nine other solutions including Planisware, Clarity, Microsoft, and ServiceNow. Enterprise One is very similar out of the other two industry leaders. Clarity, Planisware, and Planview are the three industry leaders. They're all pretty comparable. We ended up getting a reasonable price, which is why we went with them.

For the organization, people really have an appetite for the data. Being able to pull it all together really was the biggest benefit for us.

My advice would be not to underestimate the amount of effort it takes to implement. It's much more than the vendor would tell you.

I would rate Enterprise One a seven out of ten. I would give it this rating because of the amount of effort it took to implement and bring an organization this big along. It was a monumental effort. It took a lot of work to do that.

We have historically used it for resource management and project, so, work management. They're maturing different pieces of the resource management and the work management to leverage some of that. Other use cases that we've started with would be planning, strategies and outcomes. We have it initially built out from a beginning use case and continuing to mature that as we roll out some change in the organization of moving to a strategically managed portfolio, not just a tech portfolio.

The more we have access to data and being able to portray the reality of the situation, as long as people are managing the data right, we have more opportunity to make data-driven decisions as we move forward. As we look at what's happening in a project and its execution throughout the lifecycle, its understanding where they're at, what they're doing, what challenges they are having, and what their forecast looks like. Are they going to be able to meet some of those milestones, or do we think that the data says they may have some challenge? And then we can ask the anecdotal and the non-data-driven questions about what's happening. It helps us drive to ask more pointed questions and dialed-in conversations.

Enterprise One has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. That's what we're getting to implement now. We're working through the hierarchy and the alignment piece right now with our executive leadership. And what I'm excited about is we'll be able to show them the alignment in data and reports. As we move through the planning process, it's not just being tracked outside of that and it's not just conversational, it's about understanding what they're wanting to do, how it aligns, and then not only the strategy but the outcome because that's the important part.

We can determine if something is our strategy, what our desired outcome is, then how it aligns, and how it is going to add value. I'm excited about what it's going to bring into our planning as we move forward from here. This was something I've been looking forward to for quite a while, so I'm glad we're turning the corner to implement that.

A lot of of the value is around the project metrics so far but as I get more plugged into the strategic management, it's strategic planning and programs and then tying that into outcomes. I work with executive leadership and that's really what they're looking for, to say, "Okay, what outcomes do we want to achieve and how are we going to get there, plan that out, sequence that out, and then get the work to do that? And then track the work back to where we're headed with our outcomes."

A lot of seeing what stage work is at is based upon how you instruct people to build them out. As far as the tool, the tool has the capabilities, it's just getting the people to make the right choices in how they set up and then manage the data. That's always the challenge.

It does a great job with forecasting remaining effort. The dependency is on the people and the process. With whom the people are managing, what their future plan looks like so that the forecasting can be accurate. It's about the due diligence and the work between the resources, resource management, and project management to say, "Here's what our schedule is. Here's the work remaining." And as long as that's being managed, it's great.

The resource capacity helps us look at not only our future forecasting and what we need to do from a resource standpoint, but we can go back and see what we used. We can even leverage historical to understand what our future might look like and find the balance there. It helps us do both.

Its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects is great as long as you're managing the base data correctly in the roll-up. I love a lot of the out-of-the-box reporting that they have and the ability to manage the configurations within our team. To be able to say, "Okay, we want to show this or we want to slice by this." And being able to be flexible in that.

The reporting options are great because not only can you have so many out-of-the-box, but you've got the abilities to use Power BI, pull down things in Excel, and do portfolios. There are all kinds of different ways to manage data.

As we transition into using the strategies and the outcomes, I'm very excited about some of the strategic dashboards that are out there. One of the things that we've started looking at are TreeMaps. TreeMaps have taken an interest in our leadership to see the distribution of some of the information and just by showing it in different ways. The only thing I'd say is that it would be nice to see some of the TreeMaps, not just on strategy, but on other data elements too.

It provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. Historically, we've been just doing technology data, tracking, and reporting, but as we shift into the strategic management, I'm excited about the opportunities to be able to manage all work, not just tech work. We'll be able to track and understand where we're at with milestones towards our outcomes. We're looking forward to the system transition there.

It's quite flexible, depending upon how the organization chooses to use it, which I think is great. There are some different ways that we've chosen to use it that maybe down the road, we may flex and change that as we go forward. I like that there's an opportunity to use it and partner with Planview to understand what your use cases are and what's the best way to manage through that.

It can go through and group together in a strategic program on the strategy side. We've chosen to implement it so that it ties up there and then manage the initiatives. And you can see then the attachment and the roll-up, so it's an association. It sounds like there's maybe some more coming as we look at some more flexibility. We're able to drill down to details underlying the consolidated information.

It's helped us drive awareness into what's going on and then being able to manage our completion rates better.

We've been using it for a while, so it's about maturity. It's about being able to build out things in Agile groups and teams and some of that. Then really trying to drive into the direction of Lean Portfolio Management and more Agile program management, I think is where we're heading.

I have been using Enterprise One for three and a half years. 

The stability has been great. I haven't noticed any issues as far as that goes. I think anything that we've had any challenges with has been handled very quickly and it's usually in an off-hour. I haven't noticed any issues personally.

The scalability has been fine from a user standpoint. We haven't had any issues. Our biggest thing is as we switched our contracting, we looked at FLEX licensing and I think that's going to be a huge asset for us to be able to have much more flexibility in bringing people on and having roles go up and down, versus a contracted set number of roles. That'll help.

In terms of increasing our usage, we're pretty early in our expanse of the capabilities. A couple of years ago, I walked through the capabilities with our leadership team and road mapped out from a portfolio standpoint what I'd like to see us leverage across the organization for me to be successful in strategic portfolio management for the organization.

We're working down some of those implementations and those capabilities. We started by ensuring that we were reset and set up well on the handful of core capabilities. We'll continue to build that out as we go and mature. I love the roadmap of where they're headed with capabilities and what they're offering organizationally. It aligns with where we're headed in our organization too.

I don't personally use technical support but our administrator does. I know that we've been plugged into conversations that she's facilitated with them. Some of the times we have to just ask them to contact us because it's much easier to have a conversation about it versus what we think is wrong and what we're seeing in our scenario. 

I'm not sure what my current company previously used but where I had worked previously, at my other employer, we used Clarity. That was the only other tool that I had used. They're similar to a certain extent, but what I see with Planview is where they're headed and how they bring things together, more than just what I understood Clarity to be doing when I last used them. Keeping up with where things are headed.

Since they've gone to the regular releases, the initial setup is pretty straightforward. I don't know that we were doing a good job of managing regular releases when it was major releases. It became a little bit more of a struggle there as we got caught up in our releases. Now that we are managing on a regular, monthly cadence, it's so much easier to take an increment than it was, skipping major upgrades and then trying to figure it out.

Upgrades are done overnight. We get it for a week or so to play in the sandbox and validate it, then they process it overnight, and then we're able to leverage it the next day. It's a very quick turnaround.

Because it's so component-based, there has not been a huge strategy that we've had to do from an implementation standpoint, but as we look at being able to deploy or mature some of the capabilities, then that would tie into the strategies at those points.

We've only used Planview's global consulting services. We haven't used an external company to do that.

For maintenance, we have one main owner of the application with her back up, so we've got two people that support Planview overall for our organization day to day. They're application owners. 

In terms of users, we roughly have 1,000 to 1,200 technology partners using it and then a handful of business partners.

We're looking at the FLEX licensing or the partner licensing for our renewal. Where we are looking at having access to all of the products in our contracts so that as we decide to continue to build out the capabilities and make changes, we have access to their other products as well.

We've got PPM, but we're not holistically using that a ton yet. As we build out our business architecture and enterprise architecture, we've got that and we've got the ability to use it. One that interests me from a portfolio standpoint is the connectivity to Azure DevOps, potentially LeanKit, and Lean Portfolio management capabilities that way. It's on the roadmap.

A big lesson for the organization was not to so prescriptively narrow their opportunities. The way they had it configured prior to me coming on, they had shut themselves off from being able to implement feature capabilities because they had driven out so many restrictive requirements that some of the things couldn't be leveraged.

We've been understanding what the capabilities are and where we would like to be, and having a different conversation with Planview when we partnered with them and their global consulting services, to understand what that roadmap looks like, so that we could be guided a little bit better about what to implement and when, and how it might work together as we move forward.

My advice would be to be open to the possibilities and not tying yourself too closely that it has to be a certain way. Be open to understanding where you'd like to head and then how that all needs to come together, and leveraging the opportunities that way.

I would rate Enterprise One a nine out of ten. We really like the tool and a lot of the possibilities that are there. We've really connected with our support, consulting, and even our sales staff. As we've worked with other partners and conversations throughout the processes, we've really had an enjoyable experience with them as we've gone through our transition. Not only that, we like using what we see every day.

We use it for contractor and associate contracting which reflects directly to project resource, "our spend". We do a calculation based on the vendor that the contractor is through, as well as each associate has a per hour rate that is applied to the project to attract the spend applied to that project from the resources. 

We also track the number of hours spent per application. Every application in our bank has the application code that we tied back to Planview so that we can track and see how much time is spent within the application, either with upgrades, maintenance or break-fix type of situation and also to report. It's primarily for tracking reporting.

Enterprise One has improved my organization with the ability to look at the hours that people track. Prior to Enterprise One we didn't have any estimation model. As we grow within Enterprise One, we're able to pull reporting to see how much time it takes for each individual person or a team to perform a task to complete a project. So with that, we're able to start building that model to estimate the approximate number of hours for each task so that when we provide that to project managers, it reduces the amount of time building the project plan because they've already had that base model to use for each of those tasks. It's created our ability to forecast how much time it would take to perform specific tasks that are very similar to each other. 

It also improved our communication. Prior to Enterprise One, there was not that much communication between project managers and resource managers. So that when a project manager went out to Microsoft Office or to Microsoft Project to schedule a resource for a task, which they actually didn't, they have to have a separate spreadsheet. They would put down a number of hours and it was just a guess. A resource manager would then come back and say, "They can't do that." It was very back and forth. It wasn't like a synergist, a single point of information where everyone looking at the same thing, it was back and forth. So with a project manager entering just random hours and just guessing to get a specific dollar amount or to fit a specific dollar amount it was a lot of work on the project managers to try to adjust it to fit in with that dollar amount.

Now, with Planview, with them being able to see as soon as the project manager submits a request for some hours, the resource manager can communicate with that project manager instantly and say, "It won't do that. It's not going to take that much time". And then when it comes back where the resource is actually entering the hours on the task, there's an exact number. So it's hard to put a number on how many hours were saved or how accurate it's going to be because we're still growing. But prior to this, the accuracy was really, really off. It was terrible, but now we're getting more and more accurate where we're in the, I would say, closer to 70% accurate on the estimations. So it's getting really close to being very accurate.

Enterprise One helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. We use what we call Roadmap, Roadmap items under the planning and capacity section. We're the best at the capacity section. With the Roadmaps, our department heads are able to categorize the project by rank. By ranking those we're able to, especially during this COVID period, we've seen so many projects get pushed down to the bottom or completely removed due to the inability to complete those or the return on investment not being there. It really helped a lot with that planning, investment, and capacity planning.

In terms of the flexibility of configuring assignment, my other administrator and I actually came up with that solution. We decided that was the best way to go primarily because at the state that we are in our company, the project managers weren't mature enough to utilize allocations and the resource managers weren't mature enough to reject or approve those allocations. And that was causing people to be over-allocated because they weren't charging time. Because it the estimation on the number of hours needed was completely off. They were just putting however numbers in there. The resource would show over-utilized 1,300%, 1,300% and it would just throw off all of our reporting.

We cracked down on it. We had people to start utilizing the utilization percentage. Making sure that they had that communication line with the resource manager since we have our estimate as growing. But with the reserve and authorization, being able to authorize an entire team to a specific task and reserve them, allowed us to easily create the schedule that works best for that agile environment. Especially with the specific number of hours used for each person that was really easy to use those types of assignments.

We have different groups that use it for different purposes. There are project managers who use it in place of Microsoft Project. So they track their project through its phases, their financials, keeping on schedule, on time, and on budget. Our resource managers use it primarily to track their resources, to see how much capacity their team has to perform different tasks or different projects, and how much time they're spending on each individual application. Technology managers actually represent the overall group who use it to roadmap, outlook,  see what's down in the pipeline, what team has what capacity to actually take on a task, see if that project is worth the money, that return on investment is worth actually doing it. Executives are just in it for the reporting to track the financials, to see how much we're spending within the technology and enterprise operations departments. Enterprise One is useful in many ways. We have a little bit under 2,000 people using it.

Another good thing is that we can create custom reports, which is great. If I created a custom report, a tile that tells me how many people have logged in today. We currently have a little under 2,000 users, and that's only users, we actually have integrations, that we created a custom form that sends hours directly to Planview. They're not using Planview directly, but they're sending their hours to Planview through an API. We have over 1,500 contractors overseas and within the United States, that submit their time to Planview, so we can track their work in their project as well. In total, I would say the amount of user input for Planview would be close to 3,000.

Inside Planview, they have what they call a "lifecycle". It's basically a workflow, it's a set of steps that each project has to go through, and with its customization, being able to match our own project process, we match it one for one. And so we can see at each stage of the project where it is either through the gate, from gate zero through gate four, and even with Agile, being able to iterate through that same gate, by using scripted dialogues, or exit scripts, we've been able to track projects exactly where they are. Each schedule can be tied back to either the hours entered, by either date, or a percentage of the effort completed on it, so it ties together pretty good.

It's being used a lot for the remaining effort. We actually create tons of reporting off of it. We've created multiple Power BI dashboards. Data feed allows us to create our custom Power BI dashboards, so that way we can track what efforts been used, what efforts are remaining in a very graphical, easy to read way. We've created this primarily for the project managers and resource managers. My manager has a breakout session that discusses our Power BI dashboards. It's really nifty for tracking that. We use it a lot. Our executive challenged us to be able to forecast and estimate hours used on each task. That's why we implemented Enterprise One initially, but we since provided what she wanted and now we're providing more. Initially, it was just the requirement and now we're exceeding that requirement to give better visibility to all resource managers and project managers.

We have a really large organization, 22,000 associates total, including the 3,000 people using Planview. Being able to group projects into portfolios based on specific filters, either the project manager or any other approver organizational hierarchy, once you set your portfolio, you can either share that with your team or whomever so that they can all be on the same page. With the Power BI dashboards, we have a very open information model where we want everyone to be able to see the same thing. There's only one section where it's confidential and we as administrators have to provision that separately, but everything else is open for everyone else to see. So if you're just a time reporter or just have a reporting, you can go in and see the same information as a manager. Being able to group projects in the portfolios, filter them, and being able to see all of that data graphically using the Power BI or the standard reporting that came with the FastTrack setup has been very helpful to our entire organization.

For all the work that we perform, Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. We have our technology projects. We have what we call non-technology projects, which are basically projects that don't necessarily have a technology component in it. It's things like branch opening and closures, even though sometimes they will have the technology, but it just depends. We also have what we call OTW, which is another planned work. This is primarily for resource managers so that they can track their applications like how much time is spent on their applications doing upgrades or break-fix. We also have programs of work, another resource manager tool that tracks Agile programs, and we also have Roadmaps. For all the project types that we, or work types that we have within our organization, it does great.

We just started doing the on time and on a budget since we are in infancy with Enterprise One, we weren't really holding the project managers to that. We were holding them to it through the governance, but not through the Enterprise One. Now that we're a little more mature, we've started tracking that grader as well as being able to use those change requests to track as scheduled, budget, or scope changes. It has allowed us to definitely increase our on-time and on-budget awareness.

The content management definitely needs to improve. We don't really use content management for projects inside Enterprise One. We have actually switched to a SharePoint site. We have a feed from Enterprise One every night of all the projects that are created. And once they're created, we run our process that goes out to create SharePoint sites for each project. Because of the inability for drag-and-drop file ingestion, the best thing about it is the versioning, but that's also done in SharePoint. We just don't use it because it's HTML and it's hard to use. It's a little bit more cumbersome than it should and then we like.

We implemented Enterprise One initially for our pilot group at the end of 2018 and we went into production last year in April.

We have the cloud solution. It's all hosted. The team that is using it, for the most part, is just the technology area, application development, information security does our technology group. We have some enterprise groups also that are using it.

We haven't had any issues with stability. In the previous versions, there were interface issues with Internet Explorer because it's just an antiquated browser. With Microsoft adopting Microsoft more of the Edge and Chrome, the stability is fine. We haven't had any issues.

Scalability is great, with the monthly improvement push, they're on a monthly cadence of updates with the new version 18, the improvements come every month. It's awesome. They have a vast library of API calls that we actually have a contractor system. We're actually onboarding that now and we're going to implement API calls to Planview that way. I have created a multiple UiPath robot that used Planview to create reporting, to add users, to do monthly maintenance, as well as the call API to UiPath. I do a lot of robotic process automation and I can do a lot of the automation with Planview. The scalability, being able to integrate with JIRA, Workday, create custom integrations if we need to, being able to use API calls through either JSON or primarily SOAP, is pretty awesome. I don't have any complaints so far on the scalability.

We're looking to integrate JIRA into our Enterprise One with LeanKit. We're still working out the financials on that to try to figure out a way to integrate that either through a flexible license or through individual licensing. Initially, we started off with technology because that was the executive who decides to start tracking the projects since that's where the project management organization lives, under technology. But more and more enterprise business unit groups are starting to want to track time and see what their resources are spending their time on as well. We're growing slowly throughout the rest of the organization. With the amount of data that the Planview provides and that type of reporting, it's kind of giving other departments and other groups visuals into what they could have by using Enterprise One. We're growing through them. 

Technical support is great. It's just like technical support at any other institution where sometimes you'll get someone who is very adept in the system, and then the others are a little less. But, generally with the way that Planview is set up, if we have any issues, we have a representative we can talk to and bail and get the right people to work on it. We've had no issues.

We were previously using a homegrown SharePoint site that we worked with our SharePoint team to build. It didn't have a nearly as robust workflow, reporting approval ability, and tracking as Planview.

In terms of the setup, I actually got hired on in the middle of implementation, but we had a Planview representative on-site performing the configuration. She basically did training while we were there so I was able to pick it up really quickly and become adjusted to building or configuring the system through configuring screens, scripted dialogues, and the lifecycle. It was really easy. It seems like a low-code solution, so it was really easy to pick up.

I would estimate the setup took from July to December. That is when we did the primary build-out of all of the integrations. We had a previous system that was homegrown through SharePoint that we had a lot of projects and data in. We had to do a lot of data manipulation in order to put it in a format that's ingestible by Planview. That took a little while too. I wrote a robot that would automatically convert all of the data over to the new data format, and we were able to send that to Plan B to have them import it.

The big parts of the strategy were just integrations with our financial system. We have a general ledger financial system that we had to integrate with and that we had to send a file over to Plan B to enter that information. We also have a Workday integration for resource management. That is a pretty nifty one where whenever the Workday feed comes over, it either removes resources, adds resources, and creates users based on if they're in a specific hierarchy of the bank. That was really nice.

From our end, it was primarily just me and my teammates working on the deployment. We were the primaries. We actually had one other resource through application development that was helping us. That was primarily for the deal integration. The Workday was just a file feed, and that was all in Planview. My colleague is also a Planview administrator. He doesn't do the robotic automation, but he does a lot of the architecting of the system.

For management, at this point, it's just me and my teammate. We have one other person who is specialized in the reporting. They do a lot of the SQL queries, SSRS, and Power BI setups, but they don't do really much of the administering of the system. 

We only worked through Planview. We didn't work with any other third parties.

The area with the most ROI is our ICCMO, being able to track that on time and on budget, all of the resource managers. Those are going to be the department heads for each of our technology departments. They would be the ones that would see the most return on investment. As well as tracking their contractors and the hours they're spending on the applications.

The pricing and licensing are fine, but with the model we currently have, we don't have the FLEX license just yet. We actually have the tiered based on the access side from just a team member to project, we call it portfolio manager to admin. The pricing is fine. That was one of the solid points for switching to Planview. There are additional costs for integrations.

We actually did an RFP. So we looked at the Gartner quadrants and we had other people provide proposals. But with all the requirements, Planview was the only one that was able to provide all of the items that we needed which is why we went with them.

The biggest lesson learned would be regarding making sure to have Planview do the training. When we did our training for our organization, we did a train the trainer where Planview came in and trained just a few people in our organization and then they went out and trained their people.

But it's like a game where you tell one thing to a person that you pass it down the line and it gets changed by the time it reaches the very end. If you have the budget for it, have Planview perform the training because I think that would increase adoption a lot easier. We had a lot of people who came from different areas that had different methods of tracking projects from Visio Excel and Microsoft Project. Getting everybody on the same page to Planview we had a lot of contention and a lot of people who didn't like the product initially. And that came down to me to training. With the trainer themselves not being very familiar with the system, being unsure about what they're trying to train the other people on didn't give the other associates much confidence in the system initially.

The adoption was a lot slower than we wanted. I think that if Planview had worked to perform the training, it would have made people a lot more of a point of contact to reach out to. And having a lot more acceptance and what they were being taught. So that would be the lesson learned.

Especially if you're an administrator, go through the advanced training if you're doing FastTrack and if you're doing the configuration so that you'll be more familiar with what the consultant is doing. Our consultant was great. She did a lot for us, but we also saw afterward, once we became more familiar with it, we saw a few errors that needed to be corrected but they were easy and we were able to fix them ourselves. If you don't go through advanced training, you wouldn't recognize it. 

I would rate Planview Enterprise One a nine and a half out of ten because nothing is perfect.

We not only use Planview for resource allocation but also for tracking financials towards the projects that we have set up. We also have financials and resource allocation and we also use the project planning piece of it.

We use Planview quite a bit to articulate and tell the story around where we're at, whether a project's at risk, whether it is on track, whether or not we need to either extend the timeline or add additional resources.

I just took it over about four or five months ago, as part of my responsibilities. But from what I can tell it's pretty robust in terms of flexibility.

It maps back to our SDLC process pretty well. I'm able to see the stage of where things are at. We also use Azure DevOps for all of our requirements and our coding. 

The work is in Azure DevOps but the planning aspect of that work, the financials, and the resource allocation are done through Planview. I'm trying to figure out how to connect the dots. Meaning, if I have a project where I've burned through 50% of my financials, and I've done all my resource allocation inside of Azure DevOps, I'm able to visualize and see the data that says, "Hey, I'm 50% through the development work of the project. I have this work that I currently have in flight, and I have this much planned for the remaining amount of time, which represents the remaining 50%." And then I want to see how that then maps to Planview. Because Planview could say, "Hey, you know what, we burned through 80% of our money." How do I then use the data coming out of Azure DevOps to then either go ask for more money and more funding or to do something to make decisions?

Resource capacity helps me to ensure that I have the individuals needed to complete the work. We basically go in at a high level. We know we have a project and we know we might need around 500 hours of a cloud engineer. And so we'll go out, we'll make the request, and the allocation is done for it. Then you have a person that's allocated for those 500 hours. The only thing I don't have is when they've burned through those 500 hours, I understand that they're burning it against the project, but I don't know how to tick and tie that to the features that they burning it against. 

It provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of the types of work. From a project view, I'm able to see where things are at by the financials, the allocation of resources, as well as the lifecycle of the project.

It also provides a variety of types of resources assignments for assigning work to people. It's pretty flexible. We could set up a variety of different rules within Planview across organizations. Each team sometimes has different roles that they need to pull in for the project or for the team. And so having the flexibility of adding roles is good.

Another thing that it has helped us with is our burn rate of dollars, more than anything else. We're able to look at things and say, "If we're coming towards the end of this year, we know our burn rates higher than it should be." And we can look at certain projects and say, "Let's remove certain work streams that we don't want to work on."

As more and more organizations are adopting agile as a framework of how to deliver work, they should build in some flexibility within Planview of connecting the work to the teams.

For example, right now the old waterfall methodology of planning was to say "Hey, I need an allocation of a resource." Normally with other tools I've seen, it's if I need an allocation of 18, I know Planview has that. We, unfortunately, made some modifications, we didn't go that route, we're on fast forward. That is an example where I think Planview has done that. 

When you think of planning at a PI level, roadmap planning, or release planning, I think they should make a little more headway into how agile delivery works, tying it back into the financials and the planning to Planview. I think it would be good.

We have been using Enterprise One for four to five years. 

The stability is good. I have not seen a lag time and we haven't been down when I've had to use it.

The scalability is good. We have 20 to 25 project managers that use Planview, a couple of team leaders, and then we do our time cards in Planview, so really the entire organization uses it, at least in IT, so it's probably around 400 to 600 people.

I would like to see us use it more. When we use Planview I would like to use it at senior level leadership planning where we can see forecasted spend, my allocation for the budget, my resources, and all of those things. I want to be able to tie that to detail work that's in Azure DevOps.

The initial setup went smoothly. It was straightforward. I don't think we had a whole lot of tickets.

We do a lot of upgrades. It's usually overnight and it doesn't take long. We had a major reconfiguration about two months ago and it went pretty smoothly.

From our side, I think we had about four or five analysts involved.

For the management, we have two people that help support and manage Planview.

We only worked with Planview, not third-party integrators. 

It's pretty easy to use. It's not that difficult.

I would rate Enterprise One a seven out of ten. 

Enterprise One supports our portfolio planning and approval process. People who are interested in having a project done would enter it in Planview and we would use Planview to facilitate the approval process. If it's disapproved, then we would cancel the entry and nothing would happen. If it's approved, then we use the tool to facilitate the execution of that project from a cost estimation and management resource as well as tracking the project progress and current status.

We also use it for risk management and to facilitate change management.

One example of how it has improved my organization is the introduction of Microsoft Power BI reporting. It greatly improved the visibility and the flexibility in those management reports. Prior to that, oftentimes there was data taken out of Planview and Excel created visuals for management. But with Power BI, definitely, the visualization capabilities are very strong.

It has definitely helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with the strategic objective in terms of strategy, outcomes, and capabilities. It lets us tie projects to strategies, rank them, and prioritize them based on a number of attributes.

Enterprise One also allows program managers to group work together and see the resource demands and the costs at a consolidated level. That's basically the core of what Planview Enterprise One does. It gives you the ability to see across a portfolio the cost and resource demands. It doesn't affect project management ability specifically, but it helps us in the portfolio management to make sure that we're working on the right things and have the right amount of resources and it gives us visibility into future demand to help us plan for resourcing.

It drills down into the details underlying the consolidated information to a number of different levels, all the way to tell individual tasks and assignments. This lets us see what the resources are working on to help us prioritize. If we have constraints in a certain skill, we can see the detail and then make intelligent decisions on what work may need to be put off versus what work needs to get done now.

I'm not sure it has increased our on-time completion rate specifically itself, but it certainly gives us visibility into what is on time versus what is finished not on time.

The financial planning capabilities are very useful. We have integration for an SAP system, and so we load financial data from SAP into Planview for prior months. And then we use the forecasting capabilities to get a complete picture of the cost of a specific project. The financial management is very useful.

The resource management is also useful to show us resources utilization, as well as capacity and it gives us a picture across our employees as to what capacity we have, which helps us plan what work we can take on. It helps us with scheduling when certain things might begin or not begin. It also gives us visibility into if we need to consider going external for contracting or consulting resources to perform certain tasks.

Enterprise One does a very nice job of telling us what stage a project's at. We also use it from a portfolio management standpoint to gauge the health of an overall portfolio of projects. And from a planning perspective, knowing when projects are going to be ending helps us in planning future work.

It also does a nice job of letting us forecast effort either by an individual person or by skillset. If I have an individual person assigned, I can plan out their work into the future. If I have a need for a certain skill set, but I don't have anyone assigned yet, I can still plan the work being done.

It does a very good job of providing summary reports across multiple projects if there are different options of reporting available within the tool itself. It also connects with Microsoft's Power BI. That's integrated as well to provide some dashboarding KPIs.

Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. We use it for different types of work. We use it for project work. We use it for production support monitoring and production support work. We also use it for managing smaller work requests that don't require a formal project driven by a project manager.

In terms of improvement, I know one of the things they're moving to is a single Planview account ID. Right now, if you have multiple Planview products, you have to log on multiple times. But that's a general statement. It's not specific to Enterprise One.

I've been using Planview for 14 years. Enterprise One is their current version, their core PPM application.

It's very stable. In the four years I've used it at my current employer, I think only once I've had an actual issue where there was something that they needed to fix. It's a very stable platform.

I know in our case specifically, we've had over 1,000 active projects at any one time with over 1,000 users using it all over the world, and it performs fine. I know other companies only manage several dozen projects at a time but Enterprise One definitely seems scalable.

When I joined, we had about 1,200 users. We've spun off a couple of parts of our business that used to use it. Presently, we're smaller, but when I first joined, we had about 1,200 users.

We use it within our IT organization and within IT the adoption rate is 100%. There were other business areas that were using it that we sold off. We're having discussions with other business areas on using the functionality.

In terms of the types of users using Enterprise One, project management obviously is very active in it every day. We have people that work in portfolio management. They're in it quite often. We have a team that we call our relationship managers. They're folks that work with a business on project prioritization and project ideas. And management uses it, again, for visualization reporting. Resource managers are also in it to view what their people are working on and view assignments to projects and approve assignments.

I manage the solution. I'm an IT manager, but in this capacity, I'm the Planview architect so I do all the configuration of it.

The technical support seems strong. I know they've started doing some more off-shore support, and that space still needs some growth. But the US-based technical support is fine. Their off-shore support is something new that they're laying out and the team just needed some development in terms of skill and experience. 

I was not involved in the initial deployment here. I've used this product at two different companies and I actually wasn't involved in the initial deployment in either one.

In hard dollars, I have not seen ROI. In productivity and the ability to help support achieving our strategic objectives, I have. But I couldn't put a dollar figure next to it.

I'm not involved really in the pricing or licensing aspects of it. One of the things that Planview as a company has done is introduce something they call FLEX licensing, where if you have Enterprise One licenses that you're not using, you can exchange them for licenses for other Planview products. So as a company, the licensing seems flexible. But that's not an Enterprise One statement specifically.

One of the big lessons, and this applies to any solution, is not to customize it and use it as it's designed to be used. Adopt your processes to leverage the capabilities of the tool. I've seen many instances where people take applications and customize them to fit their processes. And it just ends up being problematic later on. That's one of the things we did in the latest implementation of Planview four years ago. We had an on-premise version that was heavily customized. We moved to a SaaS model that was not customized at all, and we've been able to keep it current. Upgrades are easy. So one of the lessons I would recommend is: Don't customize.

I would rate Enterprise One an eight out of ten. It does an outstanding job of supporting our needs in this space, and the company has done a great job of continuing to enhance and improve it.

We have a smaller organization than some of the other organizations. We have 10 project managers. We manage it for the customer experience division for electronic arts. Therefore, we do only projects wrapped around how to improve our customer experience. Anybody who plays our games, we want to manage those projects to make life better for our customers.

We are able to organize work. Prior to Enterprise One, the organization had no visibility in the projects that we were doing. We had people doing random projects, and we didn't know if they were benefiting the business or harming the business. The fact that we have visibility into the work that we're doing along with the status of the work that we're doing has been incredibly impactful.

The solution’s integrated product portfolio has transformed our organization’s strategy as we continue to roll out different products. We started with Enterprise One. We now have Projectplace and are looking to use Spigit. We are also looking at all the different integrations with JIRA and Workday. It really has transformed the way that we do panel work and approach our work and company.

We use Enterprise One for the formal things in our organization that have been gated. So, we go through our fiscal year roadmap and we have X amount of things approved. All of those things are required to go through Enterprise One. There were some required to do phase-gate exits and all of those principles. Then, we have the Projectplace that is more task-oriented, and we have a ton of users on that. That is more task, activities, and people looking at doing agile work or combined work. We found a way to use these tools together. Hooking them together, we will do some great reporting. There are some cool things that we're trying to do with those two that will really change the way that we will work.

These are two different teams. The people who are on Projectplace were never Enterprise One candidates. The fact that we were able to get them to use one of our Planview tools and see that there is potential in it, maybe in the future they will be the ones who are running these projects and programs. Or, at least they'll have an idea of what the Planview tools can do. So, we feel like we're in a better starting place with them.

The most valuable to us is that we have a standardized schedule. We're able to put in our phase-gates and everything that we need to make sure that we're operating and running our projects effectively. 

We now use WRK14 reports and are moving to other more complex reports in order to manage our business. 

The solution’s integrated product portfolio has transformed our organization’s delivery because people are a lot more accountable. When you have no accountability, then people don't always deliver the way that you want them to. Once you get accountability, they know that somebody is watching and the way that they manage their work changes quite a bit.

It is flexible. We started off where we had a workflow that had about 150 steps in it with gates, because we didn't know any different. We went back and talked to Planview about it, and said, "We are in a really bad way. We need somebody to help us." They came back and helped us change everything. They helped us undo all the mess that we had created. They moved us to about a 15 to 20 step process. The flexibility of being able to create something, then redo it if it's wrong as you continue to evolve and partner with Planview is really important to us.

When you get a tool, you have to know your business before you get a tool. We didn't know our business. We put the tool in and tried to wrap the business around the tool. That doesn't really work. So, we need to continue to work with them to figure out:

• What do we need? 
• What is the best solution? 
• How do we work with this tool when we just trying to figure out our business?

We're finally at a good place. Now, how do we restart with it the way that the tool thinks about work. Sometimes, it's just not the same way that we do. Therefore, how do we manage that within the business? How do we manage our internal customers? That's what we really have to work through.

The first step was to have Planview come in and retrain our organization. That was really helpful, at least to make people not so mad, because they hated the tool. They were really nasty about it. When we rolled it out to the organization, we rolled it out in a way where we didn't ask for their help. So, there was a small group of people at the leadership level who went in and said, "Okay, this is the tool we're going to use." But, we didn't really ask the people who are going to use the product. When you do that, they get angry.

They don't love that knowledge. Then, we had to go back, and say, "Okay, we're going to start over. Tell us what your grievances are." We had to identify whether the grievance was with having a tool or as a grievance with Planview. They are two very different things. Once we identified what their grievances were, Planview was able to come in, help retrain, and get some of the sentiment better just about the tool and using a product in general.

Primarily, we were only focused on the project side of it. This year, we are trying to roll it out to more operational people, which is different from project side. On the project side, these are people who are sort of career project managers, product managers, and program managers. They're willing to work with us a little bit. When you move over to the operations people, this is not their business. They don't know about tools. All they want to do is help the customers. They don't want to have to deal with tools. 

Our challenge will be this tool is complex. It is not necessarily easy to start and learn from the beginning. How do you get people who are not professionals to adopt it, use it, and not be mean about it? That's what we're trying to work with.

We are on year four of using Enterprise One.

We haven't experienced any issues with the stability of it. So, I feel confident in the Planview tool. I feel confident in the employees. This is our third year of attending Horizons. Every time I meet more of the employees, I feel better about everything. I just get an overall good vibe. 

There is so much that we can do. They have Spigit, LeanKit, and all of these things which are really exciting to us. I just have to go find the money, but it's pretty exciting. It's really great. In regards to Enterprise One, they have resource management, and we haven't even touched that. We are just now getting into resource management. There is a lot that we haven't even scratched the surface with using the tools that we have.

We have a super small organization using Enterprise One. Right now, we are at 20 to 30 users. We have primarily only focused on the project side of it. Now, this year, we are trying to roll it out to the operational people.

With Projectplace, about a year ago, we had one user. Now, we have 108 users on it. For us, that is a huge win when we had to fight for every user on Enterprise One. We're not having to do that for Projectplace. Projectplace is now going out and selling itself into the business. So, we have parts of the businesses which are using it that are telling other person's business.

A specific example is the customer experience support: It is all about making it easier to get back in the game and play our games. We have a group that takes our customer escalations and they're able to take those and look at them in Projectplace. They can get cards and match everything up. We're solving their problems faster. We know what their problems are. We're able to group all of their problems together. These are big wins for us in terms of things that we couldn't do before because we were having to do it much more manually before we had Projectplace. So, it really changed the way that we do business.

I would rate technical support as a 10 out of 10. We have the benefit of being right down the street from Planview. That helps us quite a bit. We have had no shortage of people willing to help. It's been no secret that we did not start off in a good place, but they helped us. Together, we admitted our flaws and they admitted their flaws, then they helped us get back on track.

We were about to quit because we were so frustrated. They came in and helped us. They did things for free that they probably weren't supposed to do. But, they came in and really tried to save us as a customer to understand what the problems were, what we were dealing with, and help us solve the issue, probably to their detriment financially. This was to make sure that we didn't leave and to help us tell the story. I think that signifies a pretty good company.

Prior to Enterprise One, we did not have a solution in the business. So, people could use Excel or anything that they wanted.

We also had no reporting. Or, any reporting that we had, it wasn't manual. It was whatever somebody thought it was.

I was hired. We had had six tools come into the environment prior to me coming onboard. So, the company knew that they needed something to organize the work, but they didn't know what. They didn't know why they needed it other than they heard that they needed it. 

It was, "Well, we have to have this, and we need it right now."

"Why do we need it right now?" 

"Because we do."

Now, we are able to be more structured. We had no structure nor accountability. With the manual reporting, we had no idea if we were on track, behind, or how much we were spending. We couldn't track the way that we did our business. To be able to understand our business and make progress towards our goals, this has been incredibly important. The tool allows us to do that.

The initial setup was super complex. We were being asked questions that we didn't understand. It was pretty clear that we didn't understand. It just wasn't a great experience. We weren't ready for it. It was more complex than what we could take in the environment. We were answering questions on behalf of the entire organization when we didn't know what the organization's needs were. It was complex and compounded by the fact that we didn't know anything, making it incredibly challenging. Some of that was on us and some of that was on them.

If they could walk you through step by step:

• What is it that you're doing? 
• What is it that we're doing of this stuff? 
• You are making decisions. 

We didn't understand the downstream impact. Nobody told us this is a critically important decision, and if you make this wrong, we're going to set up the whole tool wrong. It felt like there were a handful of those. If someone would've said that to us, maybe we would've been like, "Oh yeah, hold on a sec." We probably would've at least paused, which we didn't do.

We did the initial deployment with the help of Planview. We went in and gave them the parameters, and they implemented the parameters that we asked them to do. 

We have seen ROI with just being able to trace everything, do the reporting, understand the status, the accountability, etc. We have already renewed our contract once. Spending the money on this is a really big investment for us, where with other companies it might not be as much. However, it's a big percentage of our budget. The fact that we've been able to renew is a pretty good indication that the leadership team is seeing value in it.

I think all in we are at $33,000 a year and that includes Projectplace and Planview. We used to have the integration to JIRA, but we don't pay for that anymore. 

We did an RFP where we selected Planview. It was an RFP for probably 10 vendors on the list. Workday was on there, for sure. However, we did not look at Microsoft Project because we are an Apple shop. That wasn't anything that we ever wanted to do.

The main reason that we went with Planview was something we haven't even used, which is ironic is we wanted it for the prioritization. With the prioritization, we can move things up and down within the tool. We could show our leadership team because prioritization was taking us like a month and a half. We felt with the tool, it could take us just a few hours. We still use it, but we just don't show it to the leadership team. But, it has helped us.

The tool is a nine out of 10. Mostly, because I don't give anything a ten. There is always areas of improvement. We have had a lot of pushback when people started up in Planview. I think we're past the cultural part of it. I don't know what makes it difficult. I think it's more difficult than other tools that people have used. I hear over and over that it's not intuitive. Some of it is counterintuitive to the other tools that they've used. Once they get going on it, they're better. The word within our user community is that features are great, but the user interface seems to be very difficult for our team to use.

The problem is a lot of them came from Microsoft Project, which is really easy to use, but you also don't get any of the reporting. There are just some things with the parent-child relationships and how you link them. Also, there's something with start and end dates and the rolling of them, which really angers them. They just don't fundamentally understand it.

We were not ready for the tool when they bought the tool in. I would encourage people to know their business, have their processes in place, and understand what they're trying to achieve before they go out and buy the tool. Then, they will be better suited for it. It doesn't matter how amazing the tool is, if they don't have the processes and things in place that they need to do, then it's never going to be successful.

We have the business side who uses the project management stuff for managing their plan and stuff. We have our IT side who uses the project management as well as time management to keep track of all their projects and the hours being spent on projects by all their resources. This way they are time compliant, e.g., they run this every week to see how many of hours are being spent as people enter their hours.

With the IT side of it, the tool gave them visibility on all their projects from a program and enterprise perspective. The tool helps the enterprise with more capabilities in terms of decision-making, making better decisions on efforts, and the money that they spend.

The solution’s integrated product portfolio has transformed our organization’s strategy because previously we didn't have a specific tool which was being used for project management. People were using different sets of tools for managing their projects, and there was no centralized tool where the organization knew what people were working on. This tool gives them that visibility on all projects.

The solution’s integrated product portfolio has transformed our organization’s delivery. It gives them their capability to govern and set some governance models around what they want to see in terms of projects progressing and how they can make them better.

The portfolio management gives you a view of all the projects as well as all the information about the total amount of effort, time, and cost being spent on the projects. It gives the organization how much money and effort should be spent towards projects so they can budget and do better capacity planning in the next fiscal year. It gives them visibility into their resources and if they have capacity.

I have found this solution to be flexible. I have found it flexible enough in terms of tweaking different configurations for helping the customers doing VMs.

I can access the system anywhere. I can manage my project wherever I am. Since it's web-based, it's flexible enough for making any changes. I can go in at anytime. I can just login from my cell phone.

I would like to see more documentation pieces. Right now, they do have the content repository. I would like to see more out-of-the-box features with document repository capabilities.

We are currently on Version 16.9. We started with Planview 13 and have been on it for more than three and a half years. We have using Planview for our medical center and plan to move to Planview 18.

With Enterprise One, because it's cloud-based, we have never experienced type of crash. It's always available 24 hours. I've never seen any critical issues where the system is down more than an hour or so.

Since the IT side is already using the tool, we are promoting it to the entire business side as well. There are a lot of groups coming in trying to use the system now. We have an onboarding process that we follow for each group where we explain to them how the tool can help them. In terms of your project and portfolio management, we sort of customize or tweak the tool to satisfy their wants and needs. That is when they begin to agree to onboard the system.

We do one BU after another. We do workshop, training, and demo sessions where we understand their needs, then we do a customization of their requirements. We do custom configurations, which we show them, and they become happy.

We have used the technical support for a number of things, like reporting. 

We use our customer success team for any questions where don't know the answers or if we have a query. We do put in a ticket for that and they are pretty good with their response.

I would rate them as a nine (out of 10) because they are pretty fast in their response. I would have rated them as 10, but we use the capability and technology management. That's where it's gone a little down in terms of the support. As far as Enterprise One and the PRM side goes, they are very good.

The initial setup was straightforward. In terms of the lifecycle, it was pretty straightforward and we wanted to start small and see how it went. We wanted to see how people would react to it. We were pretty small with the initial configurations.

Our initial implementation was with Planview consultants. They were very good. We love them.

We have portfolio managers, resource managers, project managers, and time reporting licenses. These are the licenses that we have.

We did on a comparison of different tools, such as, Planview and some other tools available. We did our evaluation of those tools and came up with Planview as the tool that we want to use.

Initially, the university and medical center were one company. Then, we split because the university was using Planview. Then, we also took the same tool but after evaluations we came across Clarity and Planview as the bigger, better tools. We went with Planview because it was already being used in the organization and everyone was familiar with it.

The tool has transformed. I have seen it grow. I have more than 12 years of experience working in Planview and have seen the tool from the start. I've seen all the versions, and it's grown to a more flexible tool.

Right now, we are mostly focused on the waterfall method, but we are also promoting the lean and agile method. E.g., we are promoting tools like Projectplace and LeanKit. We're trying to get our customers and project managers to use those systems. Our developers are mostly more comfortable using JIRA because they've been using it for so many years. However, we are promoting these types of tools as well, where we can see if we can add value for them.

We don't use the financial management piece because we don't have clear visibility on the cost aspect of projects.

I would rate this product a 10 out of 10.

Our company has a PMO, which they use to intake their projects. They use the request module and do a process for the steering committee before its turned into a project. Once they turn it into a project, the project managers take it over and work the WBS all the way through to the end of the project.

The product is deployed on the Planview cloud.

With the lifecycles, it helps us step through our processes easier. We'll take a process and create it in Visio, then we'll go and implemented in Planview. Anytime that we have to do a new process, this is what we use. We just step it through the lifecycles and the configure screens are very easy to use. The fields that you need are easy to use.

With the prioritization that the company is getting into, it's easier to do that using this solution, including a ROM. Normally, the ROM is done in the work, but we put it in the request module. You don't have to have an in-depth ROM. You don't have to create a project, we just do it in a request module today, which has been very helpful.

For the delivery, we can tell when a project will be late, so the PM can find out why. The PM would have to tell management why it's going to be late, but they can see that right off because they do weekly status reports. So, they don't have to wait to get a status report. They can just go in there and look. Also, with the reporting capability, where they can do the subscriptions, they get it every Friday.

Resource managers can see their resources. They try to do things on their own, so that is good. Today, we don't have high-level resource management, but we are going to start doing that. We will start having demand or resource meetings to see where resources are available. However, we are still developing that. 

We don't have that today, but I worked at other companies who used Planview and saw where resources were available, scheduled, and short. It was very useful. We would meet every two weeks to view resource management. We would just sit in a room and say, "These are our projects. These are the projects that are incoming. Where are our resources today? What are they working on?" So, it was very good.

The biggest impact has been the ability to see your resources and what they're working on. Most importantly is having your projects in one place. We don't have that specifically here at GM today, but we're working towards that. That's our new initiative: Get everything in one place and have one place to go for intake. So, if you have a new request, they go straight to plan B. Once we post a project, they can do that today. We get on reporting for Power BI and the ease of use of Power BI is very big.

It's easy to use compared to other platforms that I've worked on, e.g., Microsoft Project. Innotas was one of our contenders, but they ended up buying them, so it's good to see that those features are coming out across Enterprise One. 

• I love the requested intake.
• I love how you can do calculations of fields. 
• We put in the lifecycles, which I love. 
• Love that you can get notifications within Outlook. 
• The reporting: How you can do subscriptions of the reporting. So, you don't have to sit there and send reports manually. That's very helpful.

These features save me time. Anything that you can automate is always helpful. When somebody doesn't have to come and ask me, "Hey, can you do this for me?" They can do it themselves, then it's easy to use. You can show them one time, and they go through it the next time by themselves.

It's flexible and very easy to use. Just having all of our projects centralized and all our programs in one place so we can see what the PMs are working on. Now that we've gone global, we can bring in the other PMs and PMOs easily because we've already configured stuff. Although, they may have things that they're reporting on, we can easily integrate those into our current system. 

I would suggest for the request module that they open up the fields and columns so it's like we are doing our work in the work module. You can't do that with today. We also have to make sure that the fields can go both ways with the request and work modules. Including fields in the column sets would be helpful, because today they only use attributes.

For the multiple fields that you have, there is not a single select field, but multiple selections. You can't use those in column sets today. It excludes those fields when being reported on. So, you have to figure out another way to do that.

It would be beneficial for us if it was able to integrate with other tools and have those tools integrated into Planview, which they're working on. Examples of tools being integrated DevOps, JIRA and Projectplace. Since we're a mature PMO, and not all of our PMOs are, if they can integrate with Projectplace or the Planview PPM Pro, that's good. 

I have never had an issue with the stability of Planview. That's one thing that they can tout very well. Performance issues have not been an issue. When running a report, all I have to do is let them know, and they will expand my timeout limits. So, I've never had an issue with performance with them, not in the cloud.

It's very scalable. We're on Enterprise One, so you normally have to be pretty mature. Where I came from, we were immature. We adapted to Planview and became very mature. I know that other companies can do that too. They start out with Projectplace or PPM Pro, then they'll go to Enterprise One. So, it's very scalable. It's a great solution for scalability.

The technical support is very good. I've never had an issue with them. They answer their tickets right away and always come back with a solution very quickly.

We moved from another tool to Planview. I don't know what tool this current company was on. I worked for them for 10 months, then I left and I came back. I've been with them since June again. Another company that I worked with, we went from MS Project Pro (the PPM tool) to Planview.

It was more complex because I came from MS Project Pro. Planview has so much more to offer, so you had to consider a lot more. You had to figure out what its capability were, what your portfolio and programs were going to be, what your teams were, how they were structured, and what type of resources you had in what roles. So, there were things that we had to consider, but Planview asks the right questions. They bring that out of you.

We did a test for three months, then we did a soft launch. So, only our PMs were on it, and they brought all their projects over and managed their projects there. We had another tool, where we had to do double-duel entry for time sheets. So, when they ended their time sheet over there, then they started doing it in Planview. That was just to get them used to it, and saying, "We're going to do our time sheets." We were a company that already did time sheets. That seems to be a big thing for other companies. How do you get your people to do time sheets? But if you're doing financials, they're going to do time sheets.

We used consultants, and I would recommend that for everyone. They're very easy to use. They listen to your needs and requirements. They gather them. They've been in the business so long that they understand what people are saying. Some people may want a lot of details, and they'll talk them down from that by saying, "Do you really need that? Let's start with this, and then we'll see. Does that give you what you need?" So, they're really good about listening to the requirements and providing what you need from the beginning.

When you talk to a consultant, make sure you know where you are, how many users you're going to have, what number of projects you have today, where you think you're going to go with it, and what are your pain points. 

Know your pain points, and definitely tell Planview what your pain points are, because they'll have a solution for them, whether it's reporting, which is real big, or just the ease of use. Everybody is so used to using Microsoft Project, but it's really not that different from Microsoft Project. You just have to use the tool, like Word or Excel, and the more you use it, the better you get at it. It's a very good PPM tool.

The learning curve is not steep. They have very good training and a lot of people. My recommendation is when you take on Planview, get the training. Have trainers come onsite and make sure you budget for that. Make sure you budget for consultants to come onsite and train your people. Don't try to do it yourself, let them do it.

I think our company has seen ROI. If you can see where all your projects are, what type of projects you have, what resources that they're working on, and finally, where your budget is. That's a win-win, all the way. 

We have unlimited licenses for all of our functionalities. Since we went global, we went with that model.

We evaluated MS Project, because we thought we going to stay with them. We evaluated Planview and Innotas. There was another minor one too and we want to be more mature than that. Those were the main ones that we evaluated.

We chose Planview probably for the centralization of all the projects, ease of use, views, and the configured screens were very easy to use. Ours was more about resources, knowing where your resources are, for example:

"What projects are you working on?" 

"I'm over here working on these five projects." 

"But they're not on my list!" 

This solution is just about able to see what your resources are working on and having all your projects in one place, even team schedules.

We do not use the solution’s Lean/Agile delivery tools yet. That's one reason why we were looking at this heavily at the conference. They seem to be really focused on that, which is good. A lot of companies that I talked to seemed to be struggling with it, so it's good to see that Planview is trying to move into that direction, taking everything with it.

Today, Planview does not help connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution because we only have one PMO which is using finances. I don't think that they're doing a capital budget yet, to say, "These are the projects that we're going to work on." But, as we've gone global, we will start doing that. So, it'd be very beneficial. The other company that I worked for, it was very highly used. We forecasted constantly to see where our budgets were, what our capital budget was for that year, and what projects we were going to work on at the beginning of the year. That was good.

There are so many different functionalities within it that you don't have to take in all in one day. You can just grow with it. So, that's what I like about it.

I'm always a person who will never give anything a 10. I would probably give it, compared to other tools, a nine (out of 10). I would've given it an eight (out of 10), but they've made improvements this year. So many good things are coming out, and they really listen to the customers. I'll give them a nine for that.