Certinia PS Cloud software is a cloud-based services solution that is built on the Force.com platform. It allows companies to manage professional resources, customers, projects and financials in one integrated services management application. Because the solution works natively with Force.com, it utilizes the same data for sales, services and finance on one system.
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ClickUp
Score 8.6 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
ClickUp is a productivity platform that brings together work apps, data, and workflows. Also presented as a Converged AI Workspace, ClickUp eliminates work sprawl to provide context and a single place for humans and agents to work together. The platform currently boasts over 20 million users worldwide.
PSA is great at capturing all the data you would need to accurately track and report on consulting projects. It captures project financials, calculates projected GM%, and (among others) allows for hourly tracking of employees, which breaks it up between billable and non-billable for utilization tracking to accurately understand costs. However, the user interface is tough to learn, and the stability of the data reporting functions is questionable. This tool would be great for smaller consulting shops that fit the standard contracting mold. If your business is fairly straightforward without a lot of shades of gray, you shouldn't have much trouble with the tool. However, if your business practices have a lot of exceptions based on clients, then you'll have a tall administrative task on your hands.
Great for project management, reoccurring task management, building trackers and keeping track of what everyone is up to. Like all software that has great functionality, having solid governance and control over access is essential. I recommend ensuring that your admins/owners have a close eye on what is going on across the space or it can turn into an unmanageable nightmare.
The biggest strength of FinancialForce PSA is that it's built upon the force.com platform, which means it is very easily customizable to our business needs.
Projects are easily created, as well as milestones and assignments.
"Actuals" (dollars and hours) are calculated automatically, and are easily reported on.
Resources are easily managed by using the Resource Planner
There is another PSA software program that we have been looking into (DreamFactory) that could potentially replace FinancialForce PSA in our organization. Like FinancialForce PSA, it is cloud based on the force.com platform. Licensing is slightly less than FinancialForce PSA, and the Resource Management tool is far superior to FinancialForce PSA. With that said, our renewal falls in Q4 2014 and I don't foresee us implementing a new system this fiscal year.
It has been a game-changer in terms of project tracking, as animation is a demanding product that requires multiple layers of analysis, revisions, tracking, scheduling, etc. ClickUp simplifies many approvals as anyone can easily add items, and you can tag the people who need to look at them.
It is maturing and does what it does well although it is not fully complete.
Integration to SF is great.
Gives great visibility to incoming services projects and allows the staffing process to start on pipeline deals.
There are certain processes that take more click-throughs then needed so there are refinement opportunities around the UI.
The resource management screen and project status views have really matured since our original purchase, and while not perfect, allow business leaders to do their jobs.
Configurations vs. customizations. We seem to have to bring in an Apex developer to do a customization for changes I would think could be configuration settings
Far easier to use than any other PM tool. ClickUp is incredibly intuitive and had us saving time and energy within the first week of implementation. In my opinion, PM software should make it easier to focus on the deliverables - it shouldn't take all your time and energy to learn how to use the tool in the first place. ClickUp is a user-friendly tool that actually helps us focus on what's important.
For over a year ClickUp was unavailable to us just twice for a couple of hours. I would say for a system this big and working globally that was a minor issue. They managed to fix all the issues within a couple hours and then it was back up and running perfectly fine.
Most of the time it is fine. There are peak periods of usage where performance noticably slows down (i.e., Monday mornings when time is due and many reports are being run)
The speed of ClickUp is average to be honest. This is one of the biggest flaws of the system, sometimes it's also lagging a little bit but we also have a lot of documents, lists etc. on our workspace. However, with the next version of ClickUp I've seen they are planning to increase the speed by almost 500%, probably by changing the technology, so I am more than looking forward to it.
Every time I submit a new help request, whether it's an actual help request or just a question about FinancialForce PSA, I always feel that I'm receiving world class support. The support we receive from FinancialForce PSA is always very detailed and professional. There are some requests that take longer than other for the initial response, which is why I did not give a full 10.
I started using ClickUp when it was what most would consider a baby company. There were the occasional bugs that made working in ClickUp a little bit of a headache, but the support feature allowed me to chat with a real persona and communicate my issues. I would always get prompt support and someone willing to really help me, not just point me to FAQ pages. Not feeling like a number really makes a difference.
There are multiple guides on literally all of the functions you can find within the system, therefore it's easy to learn anything you'd really like to use, starting from project and people management, down to Gantts, mind maps, time tracking, inviting Clients as guests to work with you on the projects and so much more.
Appirio did a good job, however, the user team didn’t know enough to make all the right configuration/customization choices. The team focused too much on replicating existing processes vs. reengineering them. In hindsight we should have had deep dive reviews at key milestones and enforced more focus on how the software would operate. We didn’t have access to true best practices expertise. In hindsight, a consultant from the outside would have been helpful to drive this.
Start small. Don’t try to build the most elaborate plans first. Resist the urge to get into Gantt charts if no one is used to them. Just get work written, add dates and assignees, and start getting used to it. If you did not use a work management tool before, you need to be gracious with yourself about the fact that you likely do not have the muscle memory for working this way yet. But you will get there.
And leverage people who know it if possible. Look for ClickUp experts and vendors. They can really supercharge your effectiveness at building the tool out and speed up the process.
FF PSA is a robust Project Management solution that can be configured to fits any size business. We have tried several other applications and PSA so far has met and exceeded our needs. We run our day to day operations on Salesforce so having a solution that is native was a must have. PSA met that requirement and much more.
I did not make the decision to move to ClickUp, but I did provide feedback and hear feedback from our internal team about how ClickUp centralizes a lot of the company wides resources into one space. I feel that ClickUp provides more dynamic workflow building beyond Jira and Karbon, and tasks and questions are more searchable cross team, causing more time saved and less time reaching out to ask for an update. All Apps have their individual strengths, but ClickUp has it all live together in one space, making it easier overall for searching and updating items internally as a team.
Scaling with ClickUp is superb. If you create a workflow best suited for your organization then it's all about creating new accounts and teaching the new employees the workflow you're using. It's that simple. There is no black magic when it comes to Clickup.
FinancialForce PSA has helped us improve our data tracking and allows us to get more granular about our financial information and performance.
PSA has given more tools and reports to individual contributors to take greater ownership over their own data, and has increased accountability across the organization.
PSA has added a fairly hefty administrative burden to individuals, project managers, and our financial team.
Before ClickUp, my team would have multiple different project trackers, all in different locations, formatted in different ways. ClickUp has allowed us to move all those trackers into one location with a specified template and the ability to directly link tasks to tickets. This has greatly impacted project deliveries in a very positive way.
The time tracking feature of ClickUp has been amazing for our development team. Instead of them having to track in a separate document or at the end of every day, try to remember what they worked on and when, they instead can just hit a timer button on the ticket and go off to work. This alone has saved time and improved the accuracy of tracked time to projects.
