Planview PPM Pro Reviews

We mostly use this solution for high-level project planning and resource management. We're looking to expand that using the integrations, such as LeanKit or Projectplace.

We do not have LeanKit, yet, but we are looking to move towards Agile, so in my opinion, LeanKit fits well for our use cases.

This solution is valuable because it saves us a lot of time from having to consolidate. Before PPM Pro, we didn't have a good way to consolidate our actual costs from an IT department. This has made it possible to capture all of those, plus mix in outside costs just by putting them in manually and then have that be able to be displayed in a dashboard.

We have projects that we work on, but we also have smaller work in there that is related to our own business. We use reporting for all of our prioritization with the business and the order of when stuff will be released. It's saved us a lot of time and it has been a huge boost for communication between IT and the business side.

From my perspective, our strategy has changed in that we have become more transparent, and Planview was part of the solution for that. Aside from transparency, I don't think that the integrated product portfolio has been part of transforming our strategy.

With respect to transforming our delivery, I would say that this solution has definitely helped with that. We have an on-premises version for all of our change requests, but that was always just on the IT side. With us being able to have it where both IT and the business can easily go into one place is helpful. The way that we have it set up is that it gets prioritized by our business relationship managers. From a delivery perspective, we can actually have them have more of an input and more transparency on costs, hours, what's coming next, and what the timelines are.

This solution is flexible in some ways but not others. There is a decent amount of configuration that we've been able to do to control the different categories of projects. On that side, I would say yes, we can have multiple different requests or project types that have their own fields. Then, on the other side, it's kind of limited. You can configure it, but then you can't take it to really make it into a task management system. It's very hard to expand past just what the basic tasks are. That would be one place that I'd like to see a little bit more. It looks like they are trying to do that by introducing the backlog and putting more Agile context into PPM Pro. It looks like that's on the roadmap for Planview.

Collaborative Work Management has helped a lot by having everybody on the same page and allowing us, within IT, to be able to manage our work resources. It has helped a lot.

This solution has helped us connect funding and strategic outcomes with work execution. A lot of our dashboards are built around the financials. We're looking at buckets for how much each department has and we roll all of that up into dashboards that allow us to keep track of where everybody is, the actual expenditure for the year, and who has what left. We definitely use all of that capability.

The biggest impact that Planview has had on our organization is related to resource management. It was really helpful, because before we were so siloed into project teams that it was hard to get an idea of who is available from other teams if I need a resource. This has made it possible for us to actually get capacities and see what the schedules are going forward. This has been a huge benefit.

The most valuable feature of this solution is reporting. It is one of the biggest things for PPM Pro because we do all of our resource management within it, including the timesheet tracking and financial tracking, and a lot of that all rolls up. We have lots of dashboards built out, and we definitely use the reporting capabilities a lot. From IT to the business side, we use the actual projects to report statuses and do all of that kind of management as well.

Managing a project at the executable level is very difficult using PPM Pro alone, so it is necessary to use one of the integrations such as LeanKit of Projectplace.

This solution does not work well as a task management system because it is very difficult to expand beyond just the basic tasks, and this would be a worthwhile area for improvement.

The dashboards are very blocky. You can get all of the information but they just don't look great.

One of the issues that we have is related to capacity, where it is very limited in how you can input the capacity for people in future items. One of the things that we would like to see is the ability to have more control over scheduling. For example, you can switch into a scheduling mode but then it just takes whatever the time period of the task is and it spreads the entire workload for that resource over that entire time period. It doesn't take into account if they are off work, and I can't put them in twice. So if they have a gap, I'm still going to show that they have all of this free time, but really they only have the two chunks before and after their time off that they're available. More control in this aspect is a big thing for us right now.

Performance and stability have been fine. We have not had any issues with that.

In terms of scalability, I think for what it's built for it scales well. It's just whenever we get into the integrations it's something I need to see more because we get to a point where it's hard to track everything within just Planview. I think the integrations that they're doing improve that scalability, hopefully.

LeanKit and Projetplace both have the cards and the actual task-level definitions that can just build into what's in PPM Pro.

The technical support for this solution is good. We haven't had a lot of tickets, but anytime we have had a problem or needed something fixed, it's been great. We have had no problems.

There are changes in the product roadmap that I am excited about, including improvements to the reporting and enhancing the dashboards. I think it will help a lot.

My advice for anybody who is researching this type of solution is that Planview is definitely a good option. Whenever you're setting things up though, try to think of things at the big picture because once you start creating your solution, you're kind of in that solution. It's really hard to backtrack. So, just make sure you're thinking it through. Don't just give everybody access and tell them to give it a try, and then try to work backward whenever you figure out which one you want. Use sandbox environments. The tool works very well, but because it does have the ability to be extended and configured pretty well to what you want to do, you can make a mess of it as well.

This is obviously a leader in the market and there's a reason for it. It does what it's built to do very well. There are a few places where it can be improved, but overall, it definitely seems like it's in a good spot and it's going in a good direction.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have been using the tool for portfolio management with the resource allocation piece being a big part of it. We are using it to generate data to try and get a real-time report out of all the information needed to prepare for our quarterly reviews, etc.

It gave us a clarity of purpose. Everybody knows what they are doing and that they are all aligned:

• Managers know what employees are doing. 
• Employees know what they are doing and the managers think they should be doing. 

That is the clarity which really helps in efficiency. 

When you look at your organization, and what everybody is working on, you now know what capacity you have to take more things on.

The biggest impact was making sure that people were aligned on what they're supposed to do. This has really helped us because we're all going in the same direction and we know it.

It makes clear what people are working on. It is not just for managers but it is also for the people themselves. They are able to see and say, "I am on this project, and it's official. My manager knows it. Everybody knows it." That helps them with their motivation.

Anyone can go in and jerry-rig it. We would like the tool to be more locked down.

We found that sometimes when they have monthly rollouts that there might be some unintended consequences. However, the program is so flexible that sometimes we're not sure if the issue is because of the rollout or because we did something wrong.

It should grow with us for now.

I don't interact with the technical support of Planview that much. We have our own IT department. Usually, we interact with them first. Then, if they have issues, they contact Planview.

We were using something called PDWare. People hated it. Then, we had a team that went out and looked at the other things out there. I'm not sure of all the things that they considered but when they showed us what PPM Pro could do, it was such a big difference from what PDWare was doing, we said, "Let's give that a try."

Before we started using a tool like this to track what people are assigned to, we would have people who the managers thought should be on certain projects but they apparently had never heard of them. They didn't know they were on those projects and they would be working on some other projects that they thought they were supposed to do. The managers were like, "No, you're supposed to be on this one." So, there was a lot of miscommunication going on. 

Now, everything is clear. They can go through the tool, look at it, and go, "I'm on this one." Or, if they see something that they don't agree with, they say, "Hey, I thought you told me..." and then at least those conversations are happening and clears things up.

The setup is pretty straightforward. 

With upgrades, we have had Planview come in and talk about what they're thinking about with the new features coming in. Some of them we see that there is a use for them. Others, we are not at a stage to really see the usefulness of them.

I would rate it at about eight (out of 10) only because we've been using it for two years but there have been some growing pains as we are learning how to use it and getting the team adopted. I definitely see that adoption has happened and people like what they're seeing. However, I also see some areas where they could make it stronger.

Some of the things that we are looking at seem to be maybe in Enterprise One. So, a lot of the talks are now on Enterprise One. We are saying, "Oh wow, they are pretty similar." Then, we start to talk with people, and they're like, "Yeah, we can do this there." So, we should maybe be looking at what the differences are and what exactly they can do

We are not using Projectplace. We have been using JIRA. A lot of our technical teams is still using JIRA and most of the type of stuff is happening in JIRA, then we do a lot of the PMO stuff on PPM Pro.

• Project data
• Reporting: My job involves data analysis, so the reporting feature is the most valuable feature for me.

• Project data is used to make business decisions. It is used for objective analysis of project delivery, in terms of the project being on time and within the budget.
• Prior to implementing this solution, there was no centralized system for project data, either collection or reporting, in the organization.
• As the organization previously had no centralized PPM tool or a method of reporting on projects, having this data available via reporting assists in business analysis and decision making.
• This solution has provided a tool for consistent reporting and for the information from which decisions are made.

• Resource management
• Planning: My organization has to plan manually using multiple reports from Innotas. This means that planning is neither “real time” nor efficient.
• Visibility: The tool allows visibility to what resources are working on. However, there is no meaningful method for “What If” planning if the organization has more than a handful of projects and resources.

Their PPA (Predictive Portfolio Analysis) module is extremely cumbersome and does not readily offer a method to move projects in/out/delay to see the impact on role availability. There is also limited reporting on which roles are causing staffing issues. The What If Dashboard in Innotas is also EXTREMELY limited, and does not permit all projects to be included in an analysis. When we attempted to include all active projects and all upcoming projects, an error was received that our data set was too large. When we limited it to only our active projects (those currently being worked), the “too large” error was again received. If “What If” planning cannot accommodate all projects, and if Predictive Portfolio Analysis cannot offer a method to adjust schedules and see the impact, the tool is not useful for resource management.

We have had to develop our own methods for resource/portfolio planning, using information from multiple reports from Innotas joined in an external workbook. Since we have to work outside of the system (Innotas) to get all of the data we need in one place, the data must be refreshed manually, thus it is never real-time. This also means that users cannot refresh this information on their own, but must rely on specific employees to pull, compile, and analyze the data.

I have used this solution of over three years.

There were stability issues. There are monthly releases for this product. Following most releases, the system is either not available, or has major issues.

The new features in the release occasionally cause other functionality to break, making one wonder how extensively the new features were tested prior to release.

There were some scalability issues. Our organization is too large/complex to use the planning tools (Predictive Portfolio Analysis and What If workbench) with this solution.

Other than that, there were no issues with scalability on day-to-day project management and reporting.

I would give technical support a rating of 4/10.

Technical support is requested via case submission, and Innotas rarely contacts you to discuss the issue.

The first response to a case is often “standard” and indicates that they did not read the description provided, or did not understand the case.

The first response is often “clear your cache”, which any user with experience with this product always does first before submitting a case.

Cases can take months to resolve, and occasionally remain unresolved. Sometimes Innotas cannot determine the cause of an issue or provide a meaningful solution.

This is the first PPM solution used by my organization.

My organization purchases a block of 500 licenses. We have flexibility to add and remove users easily. I am not aware if there are other licensing models available with this tool.

I was not part of the decision to implement this tool, but it is my understanding that there was no evaluation of other products.

We are currently evaluating other options, as the organization has matured and we need a tool that provides resource management and planning capabilities beyond what Innotas can provide.

If you are relatively immature in your project management journey, this is a pretty good tool to start with. Your in-house administrators can do much of the customization that you want. Reporting is quite easy and straightforward with this tool.

If you are a small organization with only a few project resources and projects, this tool could likely provide you with what you need in a PPM solution.

I appreciate the project and timesheet tracking for our staff.

It has brought our organization to using one tool for requests, project management, and time-tracking.

Innotas is revamping their UI. They need to focus on their request management area. I believe it is scheduled for 2017.

We would also like to utilize their budgeting process, but they need to match how we do budgeting.

We have used it for two years.

We only encountered the usual web application anomalies and slowness at times. But this could be due to different behavior when using different web browsers, such as IE or Chrome.

We did not encounter any stability issues, as we are a fairly small shop.

I would rate technical support as very good!

We previously used various tools that didn’t map to our processes very well.

I think it is worth the price

We evaluated ServiceNow.

Do it in phases if you can.

I particularly appreciate the Timesheet and Resource Management.

It has helped to improve our resource forecast functionality and identify resource availability.

Financial management and workflow process setup could be improved.

I have used it for two years.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

I would give them 9 out of 10.

Initial setup was straightforward.

We previously evaluated Epic Clarity.

It’s a very intuitive product and easy to use. If you are a young and developing/maturing organization, it is a good first product to implement for a PPM solution.

This solution is cloud-based and that is most beneficial.

It allows the leadership to pull out the project status whenever they want to.

There should be another option for capacity management, besides entering of the time sheets against the tasks.

I have used this solution for one year.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

The technical support has been great, although sometimes responses can take up to three days.

Previously, we were using Basecamp and Microsoft Project. We needed a global solution that would meet with the leadership project reporting expectations.

The fast start process was straightforward. There were some opportunities around the unique requirements.

Make sure you understand the licensing structure, i.e., full verses T&E.

We looked at another solution namely the CA Clarity tool.

You must understand the needs of your organization and as to what you are trying to resolve with this product.

The product feels like a toy. The tool needs to improve its roadmap. It needs to improve things on a project management level which includes communication as well. 

I am working with the product for two to three years. 

The product is not scalable. We have around 15-20 users for the product. 

My experience with the support is not good. 

The product's deployment is straightforward. However, the solution is very difficult to customize as per customer requirements. 

I would rate the solution a four out of ten.