Planview Portfolios Reviews

The primary use cases are soft management and work management. We are expanding at the moment to outcome management and strategy management as well as ICP planning. Next year, we will expand to CTM.

When I started in the group on the German side, we could only have aliases as resources. Now, we are able to have named resources through the agreement, and pulled from the worker's council, for example. 

We have more stability in the data. Our group has plenty of portrait data now, as we are part of the source of the tools for portrait data.

Planview has helped connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. We started to have strategic planning inside going then down to the outcomes. Out of the outcomes, we will try to wait on the projects and other teams, then growing slowly to link it.

It brings transparency to our projects.

I like the Excel interfaces that we have and use it for. 

It gives us the vast ability to churn out-of-the-box reports and have an overview about approach rates and resource utilization.

The product is flexible. E.g., the work infrastructure is easy to adjust. Some other structures are really easy to configure, adjust to our behavior, and adjust to our processes.

Overall, the UI needs improvement. The UI should have more possibilities for users who are not specialized in using Planview. At the moment, it is more of a technical UI. I would like it to be an open user UI. 

improvement is needed on several modules, like resource management and outcome management. 

The product can grow with us. We can add more users.

The customer support center is really valuable. I have had a lot of email discussions and talks with them. We have found several solutions. Sometimes, it ends in an enhancement request.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We plan to upgrade to version 18 next year.

We did an assessment of several companies.

I would rate the product as a seven out of 10. 

Mainly, we use it to manage all of our strategic and capital projects. There are about 80 to 100 projects per year that we manage with it: schedules, issues, risks, and financials. We manage everything in the tool.

Our reporting is much better. There is much more visibility on projects, schedules, tasks, and in our milestones. Now, we have a consistent way of reporting out to the committees and getting all of our schedules and milestones.

The most valuable feature is the reporting. We are able to extract monthly reports out of Planview Enterprise One. We then report out to our leadership and executive committees. It is a combined report that lists all of the issues, risks, our schedule, and milestone. It gives leadership as well as all the committee members and everyone a one page view of the progress of the project.

The tool is easy to use, and that is good.

We had some learning issues at the start, but now that the users are in the tool day after day, they are getting there.

Power BI versus getting reports within Planview could improve. Instead of having to leverage Power BI, those reports could just be generated within the Planview tool using the tiles. This would be a huge jump for the product.

For most part, it's pretty stable. The only issue that we have seen is with the reports. Sometimes within the application, when you pull a report, it takes awhile performance-wise for the reports to pull up. Otherwise, it's good for the most part.

The technical support is pretty good. We have opened up many cases with Planview which get addressed in a timely fashion. 

It's when we want to get into integrations that the time response could be a bit quicker.

It is changing the culture of project management within our company a little bit. Before, we had multiple tools, so project managers were either using Excel or some had Microsoft Project. Reporting was done in different ways. This tool just brings the project management community together. We're all on the same tool and reporting on the same structure.

The initial setup was complex because we also implemented it in a three month time frame. This was a pretty aggressive timeline for us. We got it done.

We didn't get all the integrations done, but that was sort of our phase two. We started in December with our build portion and went live in March.

We did not other vendors. 

We're part of UT. Because we already had an existing contract within the UT system, we piggybacked on that contract and utilized that to implement Planview.

It is about a seven or eight out of 10. I think for the most part that the tool itself is excellent. It meets our needs. It gets us the reports that we want. It has all of the portfolio and program management functionality. All of that is working well. I would've given it a 10 out of 10 if the integrations in some of the reporting capabilities were easier,

We use it for resource management, financial forecasting, and time reporting.

I am a user, not an administrator. I mostly do portfolio management.

It is good to have everything in a centralized place.

It has helped improve governance, mostly. People want to know where their money's going. Projects sponsors need to know what we're spending money on and what our burn rate is. Planview can give that to you straightaway.

The forecasting and time reporting functions are the most valuable features. We have about 200 people and can accurately forecast to the penny how much it's going to cost us for the year.

It is a bit of a rigid system.

We are looking to upgrade next year and the big thing for us is BI integration. The project already has that, so that is what I'm looking for, and Planview has sort of covered that base already. This will make our reporting a lot more customized. We can be more flexible. Right now, we are sort of using custom reports, which can be a bit buggy, as they're not native to Planview. This will be native integration.

Stability and reliability are absolutely fine.

We use it very basically. We only have 200 people on it. Most other organizations have thousands of people on it. Our entire company is 1,500 employees.

In the time that I've used it, we've doubled up the amount of dollars on our intended projects. We have managed to double the number of people using it and doubled the amount of projects. We went from one portfolio to three. All of that was a walk in the park.

I am a user, so I don't have to contact technical support.

It was there before I came.

I would recommend Planview compared to what is on the market. I would even say that Planview is the market leader.

I have also used a customer solution in the UK and Microsoft Project.

I would rate the solution as a 10 out of 10. It does what I need it to do, so I've got no complaints. From a user perspective, it's perfect.

It is mainly for project management and resource capacity management across the IT department.

It has impacted our department within IT, which is the project management office.

It brings visibility to work being performed as well as resource capacity.

It certainly has improved the way we showcase our work. I'm part of the project management office. The way we show our projects data is certainly way better than what we could earlier.

The reporting, Power BI export are the most valuable. The dashboards & reports that we provide out of Planview are priceless when compared to any other tool. The tool itself has a variety of built-inr eports. The dashboards that we publish to our executive leadership been very well-received.

If you have a tool, you want customer support with people who you can depend on. It seems like we cannot depend on anyone. Customer service is lacking. Our sales rep did not bother to reach out to us in the past 2 years, and not even at the conference. He excluded us from a local meet-up he had organized. Our customer relationship manager keeps changing. It seems like we have nobody that we really can rely on. 

It is pretty stable. We have hardly had any outages.

It grows with our needs. It is easy enough to scale.

We are not very happy with the customer service. This is one of our main pain points. It doesn't cover the entirety of customer service, as there are reps who are really great and we've had good experiences. 

Many times, we've had people give us attitude, delays in response, or just a lack of interest. This got to the point where if there was a problem, we would rather try to solve it ourselves than call customer support. 

We did have a call with a manager or director from customer service. He will be looking into these issues. 

Different people were using different tools and the reporting was a problem. So, the new head of IT charged the PMO in 2004 to come up with a tool. We did an RFP and Planview was one of the finalists, and our final choice.

Licensing costs are pretty high.

I would rate the solution itself as an eight (out of 10), though the overall experience at a 6. I like the solution. There are things that they can improve on. Planview is constantly working on new things for each situation that comes up.

We use it a lot for managing project resources. We do a lot of research and project management with it.

I personally haven't improved that much yet using the tool, but I see how there's a lot of value in it. We even started doing proactive resource management. The way the data is presented in Planview, there are a lot of ways to take it and mold it for use within the business.

I like is how customizable it can get and how detailed some of the data you can get out of it can be. A lot of the basic reports come through it. I am a resource manager, so I slice it to see things like time sheet completion, compliance, etc. It's really useful to dig into some of the reasons why people aren't compliant.

It's mostly reliable. There are some issues with how long it takes to load the data to Planview, It just depends on what your setup is. If there was a way Planview could maybe make the loading faster, in case you do have a lot of things going on with your setup.

Whenever we have issues, there is always someone ready to help us. Their people are knowledgeable and responsive. They get to tickets quickly. Just three or four weeks ago, we were having issues with getting data into Planview. We submitted a ticket and the turnaround was probably 45 minutes to get a response.

A lot of our internal training came from Planview support. They were Planview videos from Planview.

I would recommend the product. There is a bit of a learning curve with it, as with any type of new software. Once you get a good grasp of the principles of Planview, it is a really powerful tool.

I would rate the product an eight (out of 10). It's pretty good. It gets a lot of what we need done. There are ways for it to improve, and we should always strive for that.

We use it for its intended purpose of project management. It is a typical PPM tool.

I don't think we're trying to do anything with it outside the norm that would need it to flex a whole lot. Our intent is to roll it out pretty much out-of-the-box.

This is a platform shift. If it works as advertised, it will potentially make us a bit more efficient.

The reporting looks pretty good. Although, we're not into it yet, so I can't say for sure how well that will work.

The look and feel of it is pretty clean, so that's good.

Our version is definitely set up a bit more waterfall world. It would be better if some of the agile features were more in the standard product.

It doesn't look buggy based on what I have seen so far.

We're not live yet, so I can't speak to post go-live technical support.

The initial setup has been pretty straightforward. The deployment process has taken us four to five months so far. We are hoping to wrap up by year-end.

The implementation team has been good and responsive. They have been onsite quite a bit.

I don't think we have necessarily purchased everything that I would have liked to have seen.

We looked at other products, but I wasn't involved in the process of choosing Planview.

Compared to other tools, Enterprise One is definitely cleaner and easier to use. At least, that is the way it looks so far. It's a little more intuitive. It looks like the financial data entry piece is a little cleaner.

Because we didn't buy everything that I would have liked to have seen us buy. Just based on what we have, it's probably in the seven to eight range (out of 10). Some of the agile functionality and features would definitely bump that up a bit. However, we didn't buy everything.

The primary use case is resource management. Enterprise One is built for this. We have a specific function that we use it for.

We are going to be leveraging the planning tool within Enterprise One. We had a demo of it. It will be a really good tool for us. It will help us visualize all the projects that we have lined up for the next year, where we can shift things around, and see the impact of different resources being staffed to individual projects.

People are happy using the tool. It has had a good impact on the business. Some people may not like the tracker time sheets, but it is just part of the role.

We are able to see where everyone in the team is in terms of hours, where there is capacity, and where we can actually add them, e.g., other projects that they're not currently staffed to.

It is relatively easy to manage the workflow.

I would like easier ways to manage reporting titles in Planview. A lot of our users like to see things on dashboards, etc. I know there are integrations with Power BI and other applications. But, I would like a little more of an intuitive way for us to manage that.

There are some concerns that I've had on my side from the administrative side and controlling certain things. From talking to some people at this conference, there are certain tricks around these things. It sounds like tomorrow that there will be some sessions on improving that functionality specifically.

The administrative tabs are very confusing, especially in terms of configuring screens and users. It's not very intuitive versus many other applications that I have worked in the past. I have to go to separate sections than I think I have to in order to get to the place that I need to adjust something.

I have used the technical support more on the consulting side of things. There have been no issues there. Everything has been pretty straightforward.

Previously, we were just managing resources in Excel.

While I wasn't part of the integration, it's obviously a lot easier when you have a tool which can manage your resources. It's a lot easier to visualize.

if you need a resource management tool, the tool definitely does that.

We're working on an older version right now, so it is interesting to see how we can upgrade. For example, I am interested in learning more about the cloud.

I would rate it maybe a seven (out of 10). Obviously, there is room for improvement and ways that the tool could be more intuitive for our users. But, we're a very niche use case. What might work better for us, probably wouldn't work better for others.

We use it for a little bit of everything: R&D, product development, project management, resource management, and program management.

It has given us much greater visibility to resource management and financials.

I like that it's an enterprise environment. I can look across everything that's going on and have a sense of what is going on within the organization.

We're looking forward to version 18, upgrading there, and seeing what we can find there.

It would be nice if Planview were a little more flexible.

One thing that we'd absolutely really like to see is an improvement in the administration capabilities. With the Planview administrator, the interface is very time consuming, and that is not fun. We could be doing other things.

It is very stable.

It's pretty scalable.

Overall, the technical support has good people who are knowledgeable. They are a little overworked. At least, they have been in the past year. We need them to focus on somethings from time to time. You can tell that they're really focusing on many things. It has gotten better, but I think they could still use some relief.

Karen Anderson has been a big help to us.

Historically, our company switched project management environments every three years globally and organizationally. When it was time to do a review, we looked at an entire enterprise portfolio management environment. Planview met the criteria that we had. It was a global organization. It was very solid from a financial perspective. It was able to do multiple currencies, etc.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

The deployment took us three and a half months.

We deployed it ourselves. We did have an integration with our SAP environment, but that was through Planview. We didn't have a third-party do it.

The Planview consultants were very good. They came in with a plan. They said, "If you execute this, then this, then this, and then this. This is how long it will take. This is how much it will cost, and it did. It took this long across this much, then we were up and running.

We have several hundred licenses. It costs us several hundred thousand dollars a year. 

We overbought our licenses. We looked at our needs three to four years down the road and tried based our contract on that. 

However, we were over aggressive. We use about a third of the licenses that we have. We're looking to adjust the makeup so we can start utilizing the amount of money that we are spending. Right now, we're overspending, and my organization is not seeing the value in Planview because we are paying so much for licenses that we're not using.

At the time of evaluation, there were only four or five environments in the entire world that could have met our requirements. Planview by far was the best. 

We evaluated SAP, Oracle, Planisware, and another vendor who dropped out. 

Listen to what they have to say. They know what they have to say. Start small and grow into the environment. Definitely get executive management buy-in for the environment.

What I usually hear from our own implementations and other implementations, they tried to do all the modules, integrations into this environment, SAP, Windchill, and Integrity together. Instead of that, just get the thing up and running. Get people used to the interface. You will have the executive management screaming at you to get it all in one place. But, if you can't get the actual users onboard with using the environment in a simplified manner, then you're never going to get the advanced solution in.

We are beginning to use the solution’s Lean/Agile delivery tools.

I think it's an eight (out of 10). I really like it. I don't really rate anything a 10 I just don't think anything's perfect. I'm happy that they've worked on improving the reliability of the environment over the last year, and I think they need to finish the integrations with all the different components that they purchased over the last year. Once they get that all together, it will be something special. But, let's see it happen first.