Planview Portfolios Reviews

We use it for project and program management.

The solution is flexible. Planview is always introducing new releases and functionality, which ends up being beneficial to the company. We are able to do some customizations on our own along with our IT department, and that's very helpful.

The solution’s collaborative work management has affected our operations in a positive way.

• The work and assignments
• We can track the financials.
• We can do portfolio management. We can look across the portfolio at several projects.

I find these features valuable because of their visibility.

I think our performance issues have to do with our large portfolio. We have a lot of data in there. We're a global organization with thousands of users, and that also has an impact.

The financial piece of the tool could be better. While it may have to do with the complexity of the work that we do, it seems that the tool should be able to drill down a bit deeper into the financial area.

The stability is fine. We are currently experiencing some performance issues, but as far as the stability of the system, it seems to be rather stable.

It is easy to add users and introduce new projects into the system.

There are people on my team in my organization who work with the technical team. I do not usually work with the technical team. They are happy with the support that Planview provides.

The biggest impact was to the end user because we have always had a project management tool. We had a tool prior to implementing Planview. This tool is more user-friendly, so it was more easily adopted by the organization and end user community.

The switch between tools was made for better adoption throughout the organization and to move to a web-based system. Our previous system was not web-based. 

We did the initial deployment with the help of Planview. There was good support.

They also helped with the deployment and training. They were available to help us through the whole rollout. Then, they took us further than that and provided some support after the rollout to make sure that things continued on.

We evaluated the current vendor that we had, Planview, and a third vendor.

• Understand what it is that you want the tool to deliver. 
• Have clear expectations of what you expect to get out of the system. 
• Have good user requirements.

I would rate the solution as an eight (out of 10). 

It's our primary PPM tool. All of the projects across the enterprise are being managed through Enterprise One.

We've been on version 13 for two years now. Prior to that, we were on earlier versions of Planview going back to 2009. So, we've been on Planview for 10 years. 

We have the flexibility to choose not to use things that would be really beneficial. Unfortunately, my predecessors made that choice, multiple times, so I'm trying to undo that.

One of the things that I hope to do, because we have to upgrade soon, is spend time putting together the business benefits of using some modules and pieces of the tool that we don't currently use.

We have a fairly good picture of time tracking. So, it's helping us get there.

As a user, I really liked the ease of the status reporting and the one stop shop of everything being in one location. 

There's still a lot of reluctance within the organization. We're not using all of the capabilities that we have today. We're still doing our strategic and capital investment planning on spreadsheets rather than using the capabilities that exist within Enterprise One. I definitely need to leverage the experts here at Planview to help drive a culture change. There's just a lot of reluctance on behalf of people within the company to put data into the tool.

We have some transparency in where people are spending their time, but we haven't done a good job of resource management in the sense of predicting demand. We have a lot of opportunity there to improve.

It is stable.

It is scalable. It should growth with us.

To the degree that we've needed it, the solution has been very helpful. 

Part of the struggle that we've had over the past year has been a 100 percent turnover on our team. Everyone on the Planview admin team today has been in the job for less than two years. So, we don't have the depth and breadth of knowledge and experience as an admin on the tool that other companies have. We're still learning. We don't know what we don't know.

It has been a struggle to make even simple changes because we have to go through statements of work to get the assistance that we need along with all of the legal hurdles and financial issues that those involve.

We were previously using PAC. The move away from PAC to Planview was based on our ownership by Royal Bank of Scotland at the time. They were using Planview, so we moved to Planview.

Our prior PPM tool was a little clunkier and harder to navigate. So, ease of use has been a strong suit here. But as we now look to expand and start using some of the other tools that Planview provides. the integration of the suite is going to be a strong sell point for us.

The last version upgrade that we did from 10 to 13 was complex because we were moving to a cloud platform from a locally hosted platforms. So, there were all of those issues. There was a significant amount of testing. However, we also had an organizational change, which changed the management of the group which was doing that application enhancement. Therefore, we had that complexity. Now that we're on the cloud, it should be pretty straightforward.

We have seen time saved but I can't quantify it.

I would rate the product as an eight (out of 10). This is based really on what I've learned the product can do, not on how we're using it.

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.

We have three different teams on Enterprise One right now. We currently have research and development, MIS, and sourcing continuous improvement. The main business cases are new product introduction, MIS projects, and also continuous improvement of productivity projects.

We are on the cloud.

We have recently had some good portfolio discussions about what types of projects and how much effort is going against each type of project, then making better decisions around how they better tied back to the strategy that we want to chase. 

It's around innovation versus continuous improvement versus maintenance-type projects:

• Do we understand how much time and effort we're putting against maintenance projects?
• Where do we want to grow more in innovation? 
• How do we better focus our resources on these types of things? 

That specifically has been how we've been doing it recently.

I don't think it's transformed our strategy yet. I think it's getting us better visibility into how we're working on the strategy. But, I wouldn't say it's changed our company's strategy.

We've brought our portfolio altogether. We have had multiple ways of reporting out what our portfolio is, whether it's in Excel, Word, or in different places. We brought all of our projects together in one place. That has worked out well for us. We've been able to manage the work on Gantt charts and our resources better. The big thing for us on research and development is around managing people's time, on which projects they are working on, and how much effort does it take to launch our projects.

I have found the solution to be flexible. It has the ability for us to have three teams working on it, plus we're going to have capital planning coming onto to Planview next year. The fact that we can all be working on it: MIS folks working on their projects at the same time that you have research and development, new products coming in, and we'll be doing capital projects. We've all been able to work on the same platforms, and it's very helpful that way.

I would rate it as an eight (out of 10). We have had some difficulties with trying to get the financial component of it to work the way that we want it to. The way that we do IRRs, we tried to do that in Planview and the financial model didn't quite get there. It depends on who you talk to, but some of our project managers would probably give it a higher score. When you start talking to some of our financial folks, they would probably give it a lower score, as they are trying to figure out how to best use it financially and have had some struggles.

The stability has been fine.

So far, scalability has been fine. It's added quite a bit to it. It's worthwhile.

The technical support has been pretty good. My technical team would be able to talk more to that than myself. Recently, we have gotten on a newer version. We're currently on version 15. Some of the things that we've been running into roadblocks on, it looks like the solutions will be coming out in versions 17 or 18. So, we have to upgrade before somethings can get completed, but I think for the most part, we've been happy with the support that we have been receiving from the help desk.

We had multiple groups on different tools. Those things were not working for us. We had one group on Access and another group doing things in Microsoft Project trying to manage a portfolio there. All of our project activators were in Excel, Word, and scattered all over the place. It was tough to find information.

It was fairly straightforward. We understood it pretty well out of the gate. We understood the format. 

The format of the tool worked well for us, but there were some things that we were not too familiar with in the tool. We probably didn't learn some things and some training in the tool before we actually got into implementation would have been better. There were some things we were agreeing to ask along the way where we didn't quite see the end picture because we were trying to implement the tool. We were trying to make decisions when we were not sure what the end game looked like. Once we started working on it, it was pretty intuitive and worked well for us.

Planview consultants helped us with it. Our experience with them was very good. It was a different approach than how we typically would have done it internally before. So, we did take a pause along the way and make sure that we were getting what we needed. For the most part, I think we did well with it.

We have not calculated a return on investment at this point. There actually wasn't necessarily an ROI project for this. It was more just trying to pull visibility and get multiple groups under one table. We didn't measure for this one on an ROI basis.

We are on the Flex licenses.

We did talk with SAP and Planview. Originally, we also considered Innotas, which was acquired as Planview PPM Pro. 

Planview Enterprise One was handled best across multiple functions. Everyone came up with different requirements. Planview was good at meeting all of those for each one of us. We did a detailed RFP and scored it all the way through. Each group scored it where they thought it worked for us. Planview scored best.

The big thing for us is that if you're having a difficult time trying to keep track of all the different projects that are going on in different areas and you need one place to be able to go for it. This has worked really well for us.

The biggest impact of using Planview in our company is visibility to everything that is being worked on.

We have not yet used Planview to help connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. I think we want to get there, but we're early on.

My primary use cases for this solution are: 

• Time reporting
• Portfolio management 
• Capacity planning

Enterprise One has improved my organization by enabling us to stop committing to work that we can't do.

The most valuable feature is capacity planning because only Planview does that. 

The resource capacity and availability have helped us to manage work by preventing us from starting work that we cannot consume.

It gives us flexibility in configuring assignments. We can do both Agile Teams and non-Agile Teams. This flexibility affects our ability to meet our company's particular needs by allowing us to work in a hybrid model, some Agile Teams, and some non-Agile Teams.

The solution out-of-the-box that we established was insufficient. We had to purchase and set up OData. I don't believe that it's a great solution out-of-the-box but eventually you can get there.

It does not provide end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. It also does not help with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives.

The portfolio creation user interface needs improvement. It's not intuitive, from a user experience perspective. If you've never used it, it doesn't click here and then the next thing opens, click here, then the next thing opens. You get all the features upon opening to create a portfolio.

The request screens, the request process, and the workflows have a poor user experience also. The workflows are definitely not intuitive. You're clicking links and going back and forth. It's way too many clicks and it doesn't make sense. It's not intuitive. On the request side, it hasn't been updated in a long time and it's the entry point for all of our work. It could provide more data value than it does today.

I have been using Planview Enterprise One for 15+ years. 

The stability is fairly high. The only problem we've had so far is that for whatever reason, Friday morning, the page load is ridiculously slow. I don't know if that's when the staff is doing updates or what, but Friday mornings are very slow.

I'm not worried about scalability. 

We have about 450 project managers, resource managers, team members, leadership viewers, and power admin users.

There are two staff members for maintenance. They both administer maintenance, consult on new capabilities, and develop reports and new functionality.

We're only one of 20 lines of business in the organization and we're the only ones currently using the solution. Within that number, there is around 20% adoption. Time reporters have to report time, but I don't know that I would consider that. They do it, but that's not a tipping point. We do have plans to increase usage. We have a proof of concept with one department outside of ours.

I'm unimpressed with technical support. When my folks call or email they say if it doesn't do whatever it's supposed to do out-of-the-box they can't answer a question and we end up back with some solution consultant.

I did not enjoy the setup process. It comes with a set way of thinking that is sometimes limiting.

We started the last deployment in June of last year and we deployed early November. Employees started using it a hundred percent in December of last year.

We used a consultant from Planview for the deployment. They went above and beyond, but their approach needs upgrading.

We are seeing the start of ROI. We have additional capability. It didn't save us money at all, but it gave us new capabilities.

I like where they're headed with the whole FLEX model. Your license gives you access to whichever tool is the one that makes sense on the Planview platform. That was a pleasant surprise. That has not been their approach over the 10 years I've had exposure to them.

We also evaluated PPM Pro and prior to that, in another organization, I evaluated CA and PPM Pro before it was owned by Planview. We have applications of Workfront, WeTeam, Trello, Azure DevOps, and various things.

Enterprise One's sweet spot is people, work, and money. They're pretty much the only one that can do that hat trick. If you want that, you have to get them, but we don't use it for any team capability. It's too cumbersome and the user interface is still lacking.

My advice would be to discuss your data upfront before you agree to an implementation. See what it looks like to have the data you need and what sort of costs would be required to do that from the very beginning. Then, see not only how will you visualize and record that data but how will you migrate data. That cost us a lot of time and delay in the user adoption because the migration of data was manual.

I would rate Enterprise One a six out of ten.

Our primary use cases are for portfolio planning, forecasting, budgeting, and obviously reporting. The project managers input for projects, input resources for proper forecasting, and for budgeting. It's the same with our resource managers to monitor their teams' capacity and then also for finance purposes for our annual budget planning.

We don't use the solution a lot for the project planning itself. As far as tasks and milestones, we don't use some of the features to see what stage a project is at. We really just use it to input the project. We actually use outside applications to manage a project in most cases. 

As far as project planning, entering specific tasks and resources assigned to the project to forecast those projects is about all we use it for. And then, of course, start and finish dates. The flexibility to use a certain finish date is nice, but we don't really go into the project details in Enterprise One.

Enterprise One improves our monthly portfolio and resource capacity planning and forecasting. It improves the visibility of the resource capacity and the team's capacity to take on new work. 

It has helped with the prioritization of projects through alignment with strategic objectives. We have not used the strategy feature much in Enterprise One, but it does help to prioritize projects based on the need and the capacity of the resources to take on the work. It ultimately helps manage the project to have the bank customer in mind. So as we're taking on new projects, we can all work for the same goal with the customer in mind.

The assignments are in a project that's assigned to a resource. The capability is there.

The resource capacity planning is the most valuable feature because you can evaluate your team's capacity by team and what projects they're working on and you can forecast easily by team.

The resource capacity and availability help us to manage our work. During portfolio planning each month with new projects that are presented, we're able to use Enterprise One to measure the capacity of each team that's being requested to be on the project. And obviously, the resource managers and project managers are still getting used to using the tool. But I think that as time goes, it's a good tool to measure, to see the capacity and overloaded resources, as far as projects go and taking on new projects.

Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. It does do end-to-end project management. It's a good thing that we can do end-to-end project management as far as monitoring the project resources, capacity, and timeline, and the schedule of the project. But that's all we use it for. They get what they need from an outside system in order to manage the project end-to-end.

I do all of the reporting for Enterprise One and it's not as user-friendly. So there's not a whole lot of flexibility of what we can do with the reports or custom reports like we could in our old system. The ability to customize reports is not there. And we actually have to pay for Planview consultants to capture reporting that we really need because of the inability to configure the current track record for Enterprise One. That's the thing that we are struggling with is the reporting capability in Enterprise One, without having to pay for extra services from Planview to get what we need. The downfall of this is because Enterprise One is a hosted application, our administrators do not have access to the data table to all of the data tables, to all of the data, and all of the data sets that are running in the background.

The feature to create summary reports across multiple projects affects our ability to share the big picture with management. The flexibility to customize the reports in the way that management would like to see them, we cannot do. We have to engage Planview in order to have access to data to provide to management.

The reporting capability and access to the fields for our system administrators to have access to the data without having to pay Enterprise One to get the data that's needed to create custom reports for management to create reports need improvement. 

Another improvement would be on the request side for visibility. For the requesters to see progress for work and reporting for requesters portfolios, and for requesters to be able to monitor the working end to end.

I would also like to have the ability to report at a task level for chargeback purposes.

We just configured Enterprise One last September and we went live in December.

There is very minimal downtime. The only thing that is room for improvement is that their reporting is very slow. It's a very painful process to pull reports, it's just really slow.

It does slow down based on the number of projects and also based on the amount of data that's being pulled in a report. If we are pulling reports, from September, for example, it's pulling nine months of data into a report. Every month goes by it takes that much longer because it's pulling in that much data, especially if we're trying to get time-phased effort.

We have about 500 users and the roles are requesters, project managers, executive users, resource managers, compliance, finance users, and we have our system administrators.

We are using it about 50% of the application's capability and we have plans to increase that by bringing in cost capital. It's basically expenses.

I would rate technical support a six out of ten. Most of the time, if a ticket is open for an issue or we are not able to do something, we're just referenced to go read out into the customer success center without actually getting help from the customer support. Or by the time a solution is provided by customer support, our system administrators have figured out a solution. Our customer support representative that monitors our tickets is really good. He monitors our tickets for us. He follows up on the tickets. I think that that is a good thing to have for all clients. I think clients should have a customer support representative to collaborate on what tickets are open.

Secondly, the reason I gave it a six is because a lot of the things that we bring, that's not an actual error, but has to do with the functionality of the application, we're just told the functionality is not there. No, Enterprise One can't do that or yes, it can, but you have to pay a consultant to set that up for you. Which are things that should be able to be done by an administrator. But again, with the application on the cloud, in the cloud, we are very limited on the flexibility of what a system administrator can do within the application.

Then timeliness of resolution and tickets being routed to the correct team's queue to work on the ticket could be improved. The customer support representatives are great. I think they're as helpful as they can be. But their knowledge of the system in itself has them answer us in a way that say "Just go read about it on the Customer Success Center."

The initial setup was very complex. It was rushed and there wasn't a lot of follow up after the configuration. Our consultant was very knowledgeable, he was very good. But there's only so much he can do in so little time. The configuration was basically the consultants setting everything up with very minimal help or interaction with our administrators, and because the configuration and go-live are so far apart, there was not any followup. To improve after configuration, there should be a series of follow-ups with the system administrators and the product owners, as well as going live, make that available.

The configuration was about six to eight weeks. We had our plan B consultant about that long. But after the system is configurated, we didn't go live until December, because after configuration we also have to take time for the creation of training material to train our end users because it was a completely new system. After configuration, you need a couple of months to just create the training material and provide training and adoption of the application. We were not able to go live until about December because of the time it takes to do the training and adoption of the application. By that time when you go live, you're not really using the system right after configuration until then. There are going to be things that come up that a consultant should still be available for the solution as the company goes live.

We had implementation strategies based on the user role. To start, if you think of end-to-end projects starting with the requester, all the way down to closing the project. The strategy was starting at the initiation of a project and continuously moving in the training, the order, or at the same workflow that a project goes.

The licensing and pricing are a bit high and the flexibility of the licensing is high. I think that the pricing to engage consultants is high. I don't have anything to compare it to other than other applications that I've supported. So there's just not a whole lot of flexibility in our licensing, which makes it very limited to what our requesters can do and different roles in an app.

My advice would be to be more engaged between the system administrators and the consultants during the configuration stages. Also, for Planview to be more transparent about what the system administrators can and cannot do as far as reporting. And then also make sure that there is time for a training plan and a very well-thought-out training plan based on each phase of a project and user role as they are interacting with that project.

The lessons I've learned is the need to ask more questions about how the application works as far as configuring the system and learning more of the limitations of a system administrator so those questions can be asked upfront during configuration.

I would rate Enterprise One an eight out of ten.

I have a governance role in our strategic portfolio management and I use this solution for reporting out against the strategic portfolio. I interact with the PMOs and FPNA and help to get the two on the same page.

Our ability to do strategic portfolio reporting has gotten much better. We're more accurate with how we report out. One of the biggest things is that each year, we've had a lot of shifts in how our pillars are set up and we can quickly shift to meet those needs without having it be too lengthy or too difficult.

Using this solution has helped improve how quickly we can deliver. It saves us time.

Collaborative Work Management has affected our operations because we're able to collaborate with different groups. We've got our PMO groups, and I'm able to get the information that I need from them. They go in, pull all of their information and I get the reports. We collaborate really well, from what I can tell.

My understanding is that we are using the Lean/Agile delivery tools, but I am not sure if we are using them to the full extent.

The most valuable feature for me is the ease and customizability of reporting. We can get different reports and customize them to do different things.

I also like business objects capabilities, although I haven't used them in my current role.

This is a flexible solution.

This tool is easy to use. I have used solutions such as SAP and Oracle and compared to using those products, I picked up up this tool right away. Once I had a little bit of training from our admins, I thought that it was really intuitive. It was easy for me to go in and build reports, where I didn't constantly need other people to do it for me. That is nice because I have administrative access, so I can do pretty much anything within the tool that I have the knowledge for. That is a plus for a business analyst. You can get the data you want quickly, export it to Excel, and slice and dice it the way you want to.

I would like to be able to integrate with Oracle to supplement what we're currently doing with reporting. We aren't doing it right now, although I don't know if it's a limitation with Planview or it's a limitation with us. I know that it would be helpful for me to bridge that gap because we have to deal with two different datasets.

From a stability standpoint, I think it's solid. I haven't had any major issues with it. I'm always able to get my reporting and I'm always able to do the things that I want to do.

My understanding is that we have seen ROI from this solution, but I am not aware of the specifics. I know that other Blue Shield organizations are using it, and I have heard that it has been successful for us.

Currently, we are not taking advantage of the full functionality that is offered by this solution. We really need to push to get to that next level and use everything that is being offered. I think that there is a disconnect between the people who are the administrators of it and the people who tweak it to get it to do what we want. We just need to have the conversations and that vision of what we want it to do. I know we've got some limitations within our own company, where I think we have a vision of where we want to go and things that I want to get. We're just not quite there, yet.

We've always struggled, but we have been getting better with our reporting each year.

This is a great tool. I have a stronger finance background, so I've used more ERP-type systems and this is my first project management system. From what I can tell, it's great. I haven't used Oracle's or one from another vendor, but I think that this one works well.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.