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Innotas Review
Updated March 16, 2015

Innotas Review

David Hill | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

#331

Overall Satisfaction with Innotas

Innotas is used by the IT organization w/in our company to track the separation of capitalized and operational time of all IT resources (contractor and employees). It is also used to manage the intake, processing, and decision of requests submitted by the business to IT. Finally, it is used to create and run reporting of both resource time and IT requests.
  • The robust reporting available from Innotas allows the consumer to drill down to any level of detail desired. It helps to drive the power users (managers, project managers, and leadership) to maintain a high-level of quality input into the system as inaccurate or sloppy inputs translate into the reports.
  • The ability to customize the request workflow from submission to decision and any interim decision gates along the way allows for clear transparency from the submitter, administrator, and decision maker's perspective
  • The level of engagement from the Innotas community has only improved from its implementation. Any question or discussion topic is sure to be addressed in an impressively timely manner and the opportunity to help others creates a perpetuates the sense of community.
  • As our organization's primary Innotas admin, the most common suggestion I heard from our project managers was the lack of capability to roll-up projects into a master plan. Other similar concerns between the functionality of Innotas and MS Project were raised as well, such as the ability to mulit-select, tab to fields and customize project plan columns.
  • Though I improved upon my ability to create desired reports for various consumers, the structure and navigation of the reporting engine was time consuming to learn. I don't, however, have any specific suggestions for improvement in this regard.
  • The last version of Innotas that I used before I left my position made it difficult to view as much of the project plan as was ideal due to the real estate used by the application.
  • It is very common for specific project tasks to be designated as a capitalized or operational expense despite the parent task under which it is created. The system's inability to designate these individual tasks as capitalized or operational expenses made for a cumbersome and somewhat unorthodox creation of the project plan. For instance, rather than having a single development phase we had to create two - one for Capitalized development work and Operational development work.
  • I did not have access to this level of decision making nor analysis, but since our license has been twice renewed I imagine that it is still useful to fulfill the objectives for which it was chosen.
  • From our project managers perspective they would still prefer to manage their plans exclusively in MS Project, however they do understand and accept the business needs to track resource time and their split between capitalized and operational tasks.
  • Our ability to create a process capable of handling requests from the business to IT and the integration of those approved requests into existing projects was a key decision to centralize the communication between the two organizations.
I have not used any other PPM applications, however I do know that overall price was heavily weighted when choosing alternatives to Innotas.
Though the implementation process can be very quick and relatively painless, it is important to ensure that ample training time is allowed for the power users to get up to speed in whatever capacity they will be using the system. Our project managers had the most difficult time of all roles and due to our deployment date of the system and training time necessary, we ended up continuing to allowing them to manage their plans at a detailed level in MS Project so long as the separation of capitalized and operational expenses was entered and tracked accurately. In other words, during the set-up process resources must still complete the tasks to which they are assigned and effectively learn the new system - this adds to the appropriate time after selection, but before deployment.

Using Innotas

1 - Only one FTE in the PMO group is required to provide administrative support for our uses of Innotas.
As I previously stated I am no longer in the role where I acted as Innotas admin, but because our license has been twice renewed since initial deployment and since I am in the business and have used the IT request process I created and have not heard anything to the contrary.