Bubble PPM vs. Kantata PSA vs. Planview Portfolios

No stage gate or portfolio reporting solution can overcome poor input data. The organization has to be willing to commit to consistent and rigorous updates of the information, or the reporting becomes useless. From what I've seen of competitive systems, Bubble Innovator is the easiest to use in this regard, so the excuse of not having good data because it's painful to upload or cumbersome to retrieve goes away. And the ease with which you can produce customized reports allows you to immediately find the gaps and weak points in your data, and take action to address them. That's not to say that every report and function in Bubble Innovator is perfect. But the close collaboration and responsiveness of the Bubble Innovation team has made it relatively easy to triage, prioritize, and implement improvements along the way.

Mavenlink is useful for planning and maximizing our resources. Improved resource visibility and control. It helps us determine who is accessible in terms of skill and competency, as well as the amount of work they are capable of handling. Mavenlink is beneficial for forecasting resource needs and reallocating resources to meet goals. Mavenlink is useful to have a control over the work minute by minute, without having to wait for answers. It's flexible to monitor how time, money and margins are managed from anywhere at any time. Mavenlink allows us to examine and act through an industry-leading
business intelligence layer that provides you with dozens of well-crafted
reports to solve pricing, profit, usage, and availability issues.

Incentivized

Planview Portfolios is well suited to provide a single, central, view of the truth. There is clear expansion capabilities to integrate it as a true Enterprise toolset with existing organisation wide (not just delivery) - you can pick and choose what you need to implement and that list gets longer. The ability to quickly gain an understanding of resources within the overall portfolio and some really clever tools regarding capacity and demand modelling. I think the only challenge we have encountered is modelling our Business as Usual activity to a level of detail - this is due to other tools being very embedded not just in the organisation but across a lot of industries.

Incentivized

• The Bubble team is outstanding at providing technical support, query response times are often within an hour and resolutions (depending on the level of complexity of the query) follow very quickly after this. They provide a professional, reliable service.
• The software design is simple, intuitive and more accessible than many of the alternatives on the market. It does not require licenses, installations, internal servers, extensive training programs. It doesn't interface directly with 'business management' software which provides flexibility and development opportunities.
• The Bubble team have a depth of knowledge for new product development processes and relevant industries, and provide much more than just the software. The teams are actively involved in process design beyond the software, and their recommendations have been invaluable when establishing a new stage-gate process across our organisation.

• It allows a lot of customization in regards for projects if you want them to be extremely detailed on tasks
• Master planning feature gives a great overall view for me planning my projects out
• The design looks better than Salesforce, color coding certain projects indicating for their statuses

Incentivized

• Out of the box analytics. Canned, but modestly configurable reports that provide quick insights to project and resource performance.
• Flexible configuration enables resource management at a macro or micro level.
• Modeling (what-if). I can create projects, load with resources and quickly stack it against our existing portfolios to identify conflicts and optimize scheduling.

Incentivized

• Only thing I can think of is almost piddly, that is having to scroll on a screen within the web browser - so that you have to scroll the screen then scroll the browser screen to get to the bottom of a chart.

• The Gantt chart does not allow for baselines to be stored
• There is no means to upload an excel task tracker and build a plan using an upload
• The schedule does not allow for planning of holidays
• The status report functionality needs to be improved

Incentivized

• Capturing lower-level detailed expenditures within a project so that financial screens can show the details of the roll-up.
• Reporting flexibility so that end users can create their own quick ad hoc reports for analysis.
• Capturing matrixed skills on resources to ensure staffing is adequate and better align demand to supply.

Incentivized

The business has been extremely satisfied with Bubble Innovator and is in support of rolling this tool out to our other businesses within the overall franchise.

Although the company I currently work for does not use the product I have recommended that we do switch to Mavenlink. We will be opening some new sites internationally this year and I can see that Mavenlink would be a great product for us to use

Portfolios are useful enterprise solutions for new and old use cases. They have robust reporting capabilities and many opportunities to customize the functions without additional costs. Although some desired features are still in development, and the reporting infrastructure has some issues, Portfolios continue to offer more capabilities than we can take advantage of at any time.

Incentivized

The user interface is highly visual and simple. Literally within 10-15 minutes of my introduction to the software, I was up and running. Of course, deeper capabilities become apparent after additional use, but the basic functionality is very simple to grasp. Where there are consistent challenges reported by multiple users, the Bubble Innovation team is quick to connect and put plans in place to address the challenges.

Only the app is bad; everything else is fantastic. It has a logical user flow and I barely needed any guidance on how to use it when I first started. As with most softwares there are unseen capabilities I've needed to be shown in order to use, but for my day-to-day tasks I could have figured it out without any training

Incentivized

Perfect tool for planning resource time management. Giving flexibility with ease in uptodate . Team collabration . Team aligment. Top management aligment. Close the project with feed back . Team aligment. Expert contribution in task . Task management easy for project manager . Nice tool to have for project manager. Cost contol & project management is very easy with Planview

Incentivized

Mavenlink gives advance notice for system upgrades, and they're not during our business day. Mavenlink has always been available when we needed it.

We are long time Planview users and its availability is only limited to our internal SLAs for nightly backups. I have never experienced any unexpected or prolonged software downtime from Planview itself.

Very good integration with Google apps. Some complexity is called however in the synchronization between Google Tasks and Maven links tasks. This can sometimes lead to duplicate records in Google Tasks. It has been dissolvable that becomes cumbersome if not properly curated.

There are occasions when the system is a bit sluggish. However, it may not always be on the Planview side. We are investing in better tools to monitor our network performance, which will help us diagnose issues more effectively in the future.

Incentivized

Outstanding response times, and solutions to issues requiring support are quickly implemented. For bigger issues or longer term developments, Bubble happily takes the time to meet in person and discuss requirements to drive detailed solutions.

Kantata support is fantastic! Any issues that arise are always handled quickly and efficiently. Granted, we haven't had many issues to report. Typically, my team tends to only reach out to support if they need assistance remembering how to do something or asking about an improvement. We had Kantata build an integration when we first started using the software, and the support team worked hard to listen and improve the integration.

Incentivized

Consultants are knowledgeable and friendly; it is easy to build relationships with the support people you work with and they learn how best to help you. The vendor is continuously looking for honest feedback about their tool and they use that information to design their product roadmaps

We prepared questions in advance, and our trainer was an expert in what Mavenlink was and wasn't able to do. We were able to have multiple people trained at once.

The training was very well-organized. We were able to send questions in advance so the instructor knew what to cover, and the brought up related topics to maximize the usefulness of what they were teaching us.

Generally good. Sometimes, users are a bit overwhelmed, and it takes multiple sessions for them to get the hang of it.

Incentivized

The number of variables made this extremely challenging (org changes, stage gate harmonization, pipeline prioritization, and new governance model). I think the implementation was handled very well in spite of this, and managed to deliver on time and on budget.

Dedicate as much internal time to the implementation effort as possible, even if you're using a 3rd party or Mavenlink services. Your team knows your processes the best

Always have a pre-implementation meeting or conference call with Planview to ensure all are on the same page, disclosure of all and any customization (including reports) and plan for support after implementation of a specified amount of time with the assigned implementation resource. And document everything

Prior to Bubble PPM we attempted use of many of the well-known project management tools to manage our product development work. Those other project management tools were met with frustration in attempts to implement them because they are more focused with the timing and scheduling of individual projects rather than capturing the full portfolio of possible candidate projects and selecting the most strategic and valuable projects to move forward. Bubble PPM was the first system we found that was purpose-built for managing product development work, and its implementation was very successful from the beginning with the personal help given by the team at Bubble.

I have not had much experience with this other product, It was only for a few months during a part-time so I did not have to interact with the product on a regular basis. However, Mavenlink is much more intuitive and requires little to no training prior to using it. It is also more flexible in its ability to display project status in a variety of ways.

Incentivized

We are currently using Planview AgilePlace. Also we use Tasktop Hub for integrating with other applications within the organization. We would like to use ProjectPlace which is integrated with Planview Portfolios in the future.

Incentivized

It's very easy to add users and contractors into Mavenlink. There's also an option that let's you manage access for teams in multiple locations.

We are constantly growing and expanding. It is challenging to accommodate different user needs, but the system does provide means of doing that as we desire.

Incentivized

• Bubble Innovator helped us drive new product on time deliveries to 80% on-time product launches.
• Our corporate target was new product making up 20% of our annual revenues. Bubble Innovator helped us manage our resources to plan and exceed that goal.
• Bubble innovator allowed us to redeploy a full time team member that was managing spreadsheets of information for monthly updates. It also saved our project managers significant amounts of time that they could dedicate back to their projects.

• Manvenlink is perfect for showing expenses and income over time and across people.
• Manvenlink is adaptable for the integration and automation of the processes of each of our projects in order to optimize resources and improve operational performance.
• Mavenlink allows us to determine if our projects are profitable or not, as well as save significant time by automating components such as recurring tasks and having templates, among other things.
• Manvenlink is advantageous for our operations due to its simple portfolio management of our projects: manage several projects at once and receive a complete perspective of the development of each one at a glance.
• Manvenlink kindly provides us with robust discussion threads, access restrictions, and built-in document management, allowing us to contextualize communications.

Incentivized

• The positive impact is the ability to manage our projects enterprise wide.
• Managing and reporting on projects and programs via portfolios makes it easy to identify troubled projects/programs that need immediate attention.
• The negative is that pushing too much change too quickly is hard for us. We need to get our users focused on the basics of PM before we can adopt everything else. We need to introduce change to different companies based on their maturity level. Too much change too quickly is not always beneficial. We need to focus on core competencies.

Incentivized