Planview Portfolios Reviews

We're using it for IT project management and annual planning. We also have CTM (part of Enterprise One), which is the true application portfolio management tool. The application portfolio management tool is more about managing metadata around our applications that we support. However, we are looking to do the integration between CTM and the PM modules.

The biggest impact is the maturity around getting projects in a single place so we can do portfolio level planning and use the tool for more than just timekeeping. This has been the biggest step that we've taken so far. This year was the first year that we did all of our annual planning in the tool instead of starting it in the tool, then doing it in spreadsheets afterwards. So, we're still growing there.

It has been effective for our delivery. It's given us much better visibility into what is being delivered and when.

Our finance/accounting department has been able to get more information than what they had before.

It helps connect funding with work execution. All of our projects have budgets and expected benefits to calculate an NPV. That is part of our annual planning processes. Then, we track monthly reforecasts and progress against those plans.

The visibility across the portfolio, who is responsible for what projects, who is working them, and where we are in terms of financials.

The integrations need improvement. We have some data exports. They're not even live app integrations. They're just data exports that run with our SAP instance. They either fail, hang up, or aren't configured correctly to operate. Those are the issues that we're running into now.

Some things that we're looking forward to are alerts and monitoring notifications for active notifications. We would also like more about the history of actions which are happening within the tool, so more recordable history.

We have been using the tool since 2016.

The platform is stable. We rarely have any issues with Planview for functionality. We don't have any issues with crashes.

We do have some significant issues with our integrations that we're working through. Those are not as stable or reliable as what we would like. I think it's processed-related, but it's all on the Planview side.

We haven't run into any issues with scalability.

We have run into a few issues with performance. It just seems to be slow, depending on how many activities you have in a work breakdown structure, how many projects in a portfolio resource, etc.

We are planning to implement more features, as the organization can absorb that change. We haven't tapped all of the capabilities of it yet.

We have used the professional services for the integrations. Their support is good except when the applications don't work. 

We have had several conversation, even at Horizons. It is really a process issue.

We switched from Primavera. We had sort of outgrown it. We needed more of a project and something that would be a little bit easier to use for our projects. We weren't taking advantage of the full capabilities of Primavera.

It's very complex. Maybe it was a lack of defined processes on our side of things. We really struggled to understand how we needed to answer the questions that they were asking, so they could configure it to support our processes.

We overcame it by trial and error. We kept at it until we got to a point where we could at least deploy and start tracking time, then grew from there.

It's been several years, but we did use professional services for their initial rapid deployment.

We would have a hard time calculating ROI at this point. It has been part of our normal operations for several years. Knowing what it would be without the tool, that would be difficult to calculate.

We recently did a new bundle for all of Enterprise One. It includes some of the newer pieces, like Projectplace and LeanKit. It bundled our CTM in with it as well. I think the total came out to be about $900,000 a year. This is for unlimited licenses.

We did evaluate other vendors.

We don't use Planview's Lean/Agile delivery tools. We use VersionOne.

Start with processes first. Do that hard work before you get Planview in and start talking about the capabilities of the tool. The tool can do pretty much anything you need it to do, but you need to know first what it needs to do for your company.

The tool is very powerful. Sometimes that complexity makes it difficult to use, but it certainly has more than what we need.

The tool has a lot of potential. Our particular implementation of it has some work to be done. I would rate it a seven out of 10.

We don't use Projectplace.

Public Cloud

Other

We use it to help us manage our IT assets for our company.

We've heard many heard sound bites from other areas where, five to seven years ago, they did not have this type of visibility into the IT assets for the organization. As it is now, we work with multiple teams who ask us for these different types of information. None of which would have been possible without having an application like Enterprise One.

The biggest impact has been the visibility into our IT assets.

Some of the most important features that we find are the ability to relate assets to one another (applications to software and hardware) and associate capabilities to each of our assets, as well as to whom the users in our user base are, whether they're internal/external customers and which departments. From this, we can create reports which can help identify for a particular department the applications that they use or own. Then, from there, the capabilities they offer.

We do find the solution flexible. Having the ability to make customizations to the product offers a great deal of flexibility to buy business requirements as well as meet the needs of our clients and customers.

The product can probably improve in a couple areas: 

1. Support is still a challenge. We find it challenging more due to the responsiveness and getting a case or ticket assigned to an analyst. That's what I was just doing. I was following up on an email that we opened last week. We haven't heard anything, so following up on that. So, that's one area of opportunity.
2. I would like them to be more product-focused with the continuing evolution of the product. As companies transform the way they do IT asset management, the product should continually change with it as well.

We do have some interruptions in service for one reason or another, but a majority of the time, it seems very stable.

We don't scale. We don't have a lot of users, just in the hundreds, even though our organization is in the thousands. 

It seems fairly scalable, particularly as our organization is in the cloud.

We interact with technical support quite often, whether it's deployments, bugs, or errors that we run into. We work with them on a fairly regular basis, whether it's just typical deployments or if it's actual issues that we run into. Most of the time, it's on the Planview side, whether it is an outage or some performance issues. Occasionally, it's something that we introduced.

I was not involved with the initial setup.

Our ROI is the visibility and relationships between our applications and software with one another along with the ability to tie capabilities and assign owners to identify individuals who are related to the assets. In a lot of cases, different areas of the organization have different needs. They come to us for information regarding different IT assets, and we're fortunate enough to be able to provide that information from what we've captured and placed into the Enterprise One application.

I would rate the product a seven out of 10.

Public Cloud

The primary use cases are project management and resource management. We use both of those modules of the tool today.

The transparency piece has improved our organization. We're big into financials. We set targets annually. We are able see real-time based upon our reporting structure, and we do this on a monthly basis. We use some of the reporting features that they have in the tool to show this information to key leaders in our organization to be able to keep the wheels turning down the road.

We are in a very transparent company. I like that the data that we store is available for everybody. We're not trying to hide anything. Being an administrator, I know a lot about the tool. It is very easy to show somebody how to use the tool and get used to it. Hopefully that user doesn't come back and ask the same question twice is really what it is about. It's a very intuitive product as well. For what we use the tool for today, it's easy to learn and pick up.

I am looking forward to the upcoming features. Previously, we have had continuous upgrades, so not having to put in so many tickets to get in a queue to get the migration up and running. we'll leverage that. Based on issues that we've run into, such as, having to open up a ticket, then going through development and that whole process, it lengthens out to find out that, "Oh, we can't fix it. It's going to be in the next release." Then, we have to wait for that release to come out. From an admin perspective, I think the upcoming features are great. 

Some of the other administrative screens, like the configured screens, they are modernizing those, which is exciting. This will help me out.

About six and a half years.

We started in version 10. We have gone through the migration path of upgrading and the pains that they've talked about today of having to go through the process of upgrading to a new version. I'm very excited to see the features which are coming.

For the most part, it is stable, but we've had our struggles as well. From a reliability and performance perspective, we don't have a lot of users. We have about 350 users, not all online at the same time, but we've had our struggles with performance. It is good to see that Planview has seen that themselves and are doing everything they can to fix and remedy this. 

One of the reasons why we've upgraded so many times is because of performance standards. We've just run into issues where we've had performance problems. Maybe they are not upgrading, but they're adding more horsepower. Then, we do go upgrade and lose that horsepower, which is frustrating from my perspective as an admin to lose that horsepower. Hopefully, that'll change. It's been pretty stable though in the version 17.

The support is slow. I've heard that they're beefing up that side of the company. It just seems to be the same people who are slow. It's getting that first contact resolution to the customer after I submit a ticket. It's literally within two minutes that I get a response back that says, "Hey, we got that." Then, it may be a day or two after that before they will get back to me. It is just going back on their words. If you're going to say something, just do it. That's the way I was growing up: Finish it out. If it's going to be two days, just tell me it's going to be two days. But, if you're going to tell me that you're going to get back to me today or tomorrow, and you don't, that to me is a little shot in the foot.

Planview Enterprise One is way better than what we had before. We have been through spreadsheet hell. Being able to leverage Planview to get us out of that has been great. We've had some great success stories come in since we have launched PlanView.

I would rate them as a seven point two out of 10. The magic quadrant says they are at the top of the top, and I don't disagree with them, but I think there's room to grow. I have seen that every year. This is my seventh time being at Horizons. It's just great to come back every year to be able to see what is coming next. You can definitely tell that they are listening to customers and trying to do everything they can to build the best in show product in this space.

I personally integrate with SAP, Workday, and JIRA. My stance on JIRA is that LeanKit is the way to go. I believe that. I think our company is just stuck on JIRA. We're in JIRA land. Everything is JIRA. It's not for everybody. I think the flexibility with LeanKit is the answer. It's just getting that message to the right people in our company to take that leap and go that route. I integrate with Workday and ServiceNow within our tool set at our company. They're all cloud-based.

We have a number of custom fields, but not really. It's pretty generic from that standpoint. We don't have a lot of bolt on things that need integrations. Flexibility-wise, it's good for our needs right now. We are right in the thick of agile transformations. So, it'll be interesting to see how we can hopefully leverage the tools that Planview offers to help ourselves and our company transform along the way. I'm looking forward to that.

Public Cloud

We are using it to monitor all the investment planning from the business. In IT. we using it for monitoring all activities, the financial spent, and the delivery of the work.

There have been new additional features helping us quite a lot, which have helped us to get executive adoption of the tool. Now that we are moving into version 18 with automated things, we will get more value with that. It's going to help us facilitate upgrades, I am looking forward to that as well.

It's helping us to be more mature in the way we handle change and projects from the business point of view. We have some transparency in what we do and are auditable in our different steps. That's a huge basic step, but a good start from the business point of view. We are now connecting to the IT through Columbia. There is now a nice simple flow.

It is helping to have a more structured process for planning and investment in capacity management for decisions. Now, we have information that is visible and helps to have more certainty that the decisions made are the right decisions. It's helping us to be more on the right side of the decision or have more confidence in the decision that is made.

Our transparency is increasing a lot. It is helping us to get people together. There are no dark rooms anymore. In some areas or concepts, we want to add more light to every single concept. That's the big impact that the tool is having. It allows conversations between people.

It gives us room to grow because it's very flexible. It gives us a lot of configuration that we can do on our own, so we can set up at our own pace. 

At the moment, the company goes at a slower pace than the capabilities offered. So, we can develop a lot until we hit its limits. This is a very valuable thing for me.

You have more capabilities. You can do things more quickly. It is helping us to transform the way that we are organized, communicate with each other, and interact with one another.

It could do with a quicker response time for some reports or portfolios.

What we are exploring now: 

• What happens after a business decision is made in Planwiew? 
• How is it enabled through other processes of the company, such as purchasing? 
• How we create a straight line of action for the users? 

We want to see what it does that is possible and what could be a good use case for it. The same way when information is collected in other systems financially, how does it comes back so we can reallocate it. Can we use something similar to ITV's business management in Planview? Is anyone else experiencing that? If so, that would be a great use case for the whole Planview community.

We have been using it for nearly two years. We started in January 2018.

It is stable and reliable. Downtime is marginal. 

Planview alignment is a replacement for SAP cost center, specifically the finance, controlling, and some PPM. That was the comparison that we started with. We didn't compare Planview to other PPM tools because what we saw gave us a run for our money with what we had before. 

The initial setup was quite straightforward. We had a very special launch that took three months during its configuration cycle. This was unprecedented compared to similar implementations that we had in the past course. It was brilliant.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. We have angles that can still be better, but the product gives us enough growth for years.

We're a global company. The biggest thing for us was to find a digital solution that enabled our global company to see everything across the globe. We have a lot of different groups at this point going up on it. We have manufacturing facilities, quality, human resources, IT, etc. The whole gamut is using Enterprise One, then beneath that we have certain groups who are using Projectplace and we will be implementing LeanKit as well.

We can see all the different initiatives that folks are working on and have been able to hook groups up, to say, "Let's not redo that. We're already working on that." Instead of having all this duplicity, we have one streamlined group working on it together.

The solution’s collaborative work management has affected our operations. We were in a place of using a billion emails, Excel templates, etc., so project documentation would get lost and no one knew what was going on. From a time savings perspective, the fact that we have Projectplace specifically, with everything in one place and we are part of a workspace where we can go and see what's going on, that has had a major impact in the way that we work.

It helps make sure stuff is aligned to strategy.

The biggest impact has been getting all these global groups into one space so we can even have intelligent conversations about what are we trying to accomplish. Before, it was just different regions doing whatever. Now, we're all talking the same language, and that's good.

It gives us the visibility and ability to see exactly what is happening for our organization. Even though we're a global company, we had our Asia Pacific and EMEA groups doing whatever they did. Then, in North America, there was no visibility across the board. So, there was a lot of duplicity and duplication in different projects, initiatives, etc. So, this solution is really giving us the ability to say, "Wait a minute. You're about to initiate this. We've got another group who is already doing that. Why don't we link you guys up together to figure that out?"

This has been a huge win because of the collaboration piece. Unfortunately, our organization has two different tenants of Microsoft Office, which means we can't communicate on teams, as an example. So, we have groups utilize Projectplace in place of that. Therefore, we can all talk, understand what's happening, and communicate that way, which has been amazing.

The colloboration between Enterprise One and Projectplace has been good because we didn't have a standard place to do this type of collaboration. There are a billion emails with Excel sheets, etc., and the way that we've utilized it is from the PM up. They are in Enterprise One, and they build their plans, doing whatever provides good reporting for our executive level leadership. Then, at the team level, there is Projectplace. The fact that we can integrate our Enterprise One down into Projectplace or sync the spaces has been really helpful.

I don't find the solution flexible. We have almost like a third-party group who has to do a lot of our configurations. It's a bit painful for us anytime we want to make a change. The other issue is that we have different groups all in the same instance. So, if one group wants to make a change, it impacts everyone. Then, we all have to come together, to say, "Yes, we approve this change, or no, we do not." Thus, it has not been as flexible for us. However, I don't know how much of this is a result of the way that we set up the configuration versus the true flexibility within the tool.

As an organization, we implemented it four years ago. Recently, they created another group, which I just joined. Hence, why I've only been using it for about two months. We're in the process right now of taking out what was put in because they didn't put it in well. We're redesigning our whole Enterprise One configuration.

I've only been in it for a couple months, so I haven't really noticed any stability type issues. 

Some of it's a bit slow. We are starting to get some Power BI dashboards built into it. Sometimes, we have to stay updated or refresh them, which I have noticed that in comparison to other BI solutions I've used, there seems to be a bit of a lag. However, I don't know how much of this is because the way it's hosted or if it's a true issue.

Because we're in this process, I know that our organization right now doesn't have a very positive view of Planview's scalability because of the way it was implemented initially. So, we're in this whole process of ripping the whole thing out, reconfiguring it, and putting it back. 

So far, the support has been really good. We have a third-party through whom we submit most of our ticket issues. 

We got to sit down with the technical support face to face to sort of crafting what our solution would look like. I thought that part went really well. They seemed to have a really good understanding of what we are trying to accomplish and what our prior challenges were. So, I feel really confident that the solution they're proposing is going to meet the basic needs of where we need to go. 

The initial part of the problem was when they implemented the original Enterprise One, they implemented the most complex version of it. Our maturity level is that we can't get people to follow basic Projectplace. So, we definitely see the roadmap for it to do transform our company's strategy, but we're just not there.

We're going to be doing a fast track deployment with Planview. We have our first meeting to talk timeline on Monday following the Horizons conference.

We went to a roadmap meeting with this very specific thought in mind that if we couldn't figure out how to do this in the way we needed to, then we were prepared to walk away from it. But, we did not have another vendor selected because we recognize and can see the power of the tool. It's just figuring out how do we best use it for our offices.

I would rate the product an eight (out of 10). I've seen enough use cases from other organizations who have really transformed the way that they work. It's just clear that my organization is just not there. I have a lot of hope that this product will be what we need it to be once we get this initial configurations figured out.

The biggest advice is to make sure you've done a maturity assessment on your organization. Whatever you initially implement, you're implementing at the lowest common denominator. For us, they tried to go immediately after things like capacity planning and resource management, but our maturity isn't fast. As a result, our users ended up being very frustrated. The other piece would be, when you implement it, think about the users who are doing the work. We implemented based on what we thought our executives would want to see, and that is backwards. Those are the two biggest things. The tool is so big and powerful that it is very easy to say, "I want to do all these amazing things." But, if your business maturity isn't there, you're going to fall and that will hurt.

Public Cloud

The primary use case is project management (PPM) for the IT and PMO departments.

We can easily see which functions are overcapacity. Before, we did not have visibility into that.

Planview has helped us connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. Now we understand that if we reprioritize projects in the pipeline, it will impact downstream capacity.

It hasn't transformed our delivery yet. We are still new at it. We're learning all the functionality, so this is something that we're working towards.

Once we get more comfortable with the tool and the data accuracy, strategy will be a great step forward for us.

It's an end-to-end integrated tool. We can look at resources, finances, tasks, etc. 

It is very flexible. It's almost too flexible and lets us do stuff we shouldn't do.

We want to deploy the program management function. We are not there yet. It's not already part of our solution. It's a further enhancement that we want to purchase eventually.

We have been using it since April 2019.

I would rate Planview technical support as a seven out of 10. When we first deployed, there were some issues. We never got to the root cause of why they happened. Since we didn't have any history with it, we weren't quite sure if this was a standard operating procedure or it truly was a glitch.

Before, we did not have an integrated tool. Now, we can load all the resource and project requirements into a portfolio to see where we have gaps in resources, capacity, etc.

It was straightforward. However, I don't think at the time we understood exactly how all the processes were integrated. So, it was the learning experience for us.

We deployed it with the help of Planview consultants. Our experience with them was good. They came onsite, gave us a training, and were always available by phone.

We evaluated other vendors before going with Planview. We chose Planview because of the end-to-end integration.

I would recommend coming to the the Horizons conference first. Ask a lot of questions. Talk to other companies who have gone through a similar experience.

We use the waterfall delivery tools.

I would rate the solution as an eight out of 10, because I don't know all the functionality. 

Public Cloud

Other

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.

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The primary use is project and resource management. Right now, it's just used for technical infrastructure, which is IT. But, we are also configuring it for business.

We are not live yet. It will make us more "agile" in things whenever we deliver. It will bring better visibility for projects, in terms of: resources, whether we are lacking resources or not, If we are in alignment with the global strategy of the company before a project has been delivered, financials, etc. 

The flexibility is whenever we implement for technical infrastructure, we have our business transformation process with targets, etc. Now that we are in the process of configuring for the business, there is a totally different solution. We have all the lifecycles, capability, and capacity to create screens based on workflow, shifts, etc. This is giving us huge flexibility to accommodate the company's needs. If we didn't have this flexibility, there would be one global solution for different processes of project management in the organization.

We are using the Lean/Agile delivery tools. The new solution for waterfall will be extremely helpful in making delivery faster because of visibility that the application brings to us, such as the schedule, resources, and what is happening in the background. Before, we had projects, but we didn't know if we'd have enough resources. We didn't know a lot of things. Now, with this tool, we have the full visibility of what's happening: 

• Do we need to hire resources? 
• Do we need more project managers? 
• What is our capacity? 
• What are our investments? 

Now, we can see fully into the portfolios and that everything is integrated. For the project financials, we can roll up and spread down. It's pretty good.

The most valuable features are the control and visibility that you have for portfolio management in terms of projects and capacity planning for resources along with strategies and outcomes, etc. It's so easy to access information for sharing analytics and reporting.

When I started working with Planview, I didn't know anything about project or resource management. I had to learn everything: the admin side, then the user side of it. Probably, in the beginning, I would implement in the blueprint or workshops more demos. A live demo of how the system works because we would like a little deeper dive in how the application works for us to understand what we need to provide, what we are doing, what we will be doing. Because in the beginning, it was so overwhelming, and we didn't know anything about the tool. 

You know your process. You know how you work, but you don't know how you're going to put that in the tool. If we had more demos in the beginning to make us more comfortable with the tool, we could have improved the success of the configuration.

We finished our configuration in June. We have been proving the solution here and there by running test and everything else. It does work the way that we want it.

So far, the stability is good. We haven't had any issues.

The scalability is good. The only thing that is hard with scalability, and may have a little hiccup, are the structure levels that we need to define in the beginning of the configuration. It makes for a lack of ability to be flexible whenever we are scaling, and we are growing as an organization. We are stuck with the levels that we set up in the beginning.

Whenever we define these levels, we state the amount of levels in a way that will allow us to scale in the future. That is our workaround.

It's just moving with technology. We cannot be living in Excel files. The company needs to be able to grow. Yet, we were still using Excel or other applications from Microsoft. So, we needed something more robust to support the growth of the organization. I think Planview came at the right time.

The initial setup was complex. We didn't know the tool in the beginning. So, it was harder to understand what is being done and what information we need to gather. Planview helped us gather all the information and deliver it. However, in the beginning, it was so blurry. We didn't know what was happening. We just went with the flow, then suddenly, "Ah!" Things started clicking. We started seeing things as they became live. Then, we were like, "Okay, now I'm getting it."

Configuration-wise, we took six weeks. Then, we had some issues after the configuration. It took us four more weeks to get it back into shape. Overall, it took us about 10 weeks.

We are planning to go with this project now that we finished the configuration. We are planning to go live on the second week of January 2020.

We used a Planview consultant for the deployment. Our experience with them was challenging. The initial consultant lacked some knowledge to help us. He didn't know the user interface, plus had very superficial administrative knowledge. 

Once we escalated the issue, we were taken care of immediately. Now, we have a way better consultant. We are extremely happy with our current solution architect (consultant).

Planview just jumped on this issue. They have been great and extremely supportive. They have been making sure that we are on the right path. 

The company evaluated other vendors.

The company chose Enterprise One because of the potential of the platform. It links to Spigit, PPM Pro, and a lot of other things that will support the scalability and growth of the organization on one single platform. This make it easier to manage licenses, administrate contracts, and everything else. It's one vendor with many solutions.

I would rate the product a 10 out of 10.

We are not using outcomes yet. But on the course I took on Monday, we saw the value of having outcomes. It was also brought to our attention the gap that exists between strategy programs and how you connect everything together: strategy outcomes and programs. How we can connect all this, it seems to be the way to go.

We are a big company, which has almost 30,000 employees.

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