Certinia PS Cloud vs. Digital.ai Agility

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.

Incentivized

Scenarios where it works well: 1) Retros can be very well facilitated & notes/action items
can be captured against the sprint. 2) Product Owner can effectively track the story
progress with all the test-cases, design etc. 3) Being good scaling support, it provides good visibility
across multiple teams, programs and agile portfolios, providing a centralized
environment where all our stakeholders can easily work together regardless of location. 4) It provides easy tracking all of your epics,
stories, themes, defects, tasks, tests and issues 5) I like its intuitive UI as for moving stories
around, burning hours. 6) It allows top leadership to visualize
and report their strategic plans, giving all stakeholders the relevant data
that they need to stay dedicated to the project priorities. 7) It can be easily integrated with slack
so for few teams we used slack for collaboration Scenarios where it did not work well: 1) Test Management need improvement in
terms of tracking tests, team had hard time tracking regression test cases. 2) Version one comes with lot of features like
Rally but here we don’t get customizations which is there in Jira where from workflow
to issue everything can be customized based on your team/program/portfolio
requirements. 3) Lot of navigation to access basic
stuff. Example I want to go to bug attachment , there are lt of clicks &
navigation need to do which should be pretty straightforward I feel.

Incentivized

• 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
• FinancialForce PSA support is outstanding!

• Automated saving of changes, no records can be lost because all items are saved in real-time.
• The watch function, optional but beneficial when managing multiple teams or projects.

Incentivized

• The product is still maturing as a full featured PSA tool. The feature roadmap is compelling but is still being built out.
• Tool is ideal for managing a services business. It is not yet a project manager tool.
• Limited reporting
• Maturing change order process
• Limited integration to back-end financial systems beyond Financial Force Financials. We use Netsuite.
• The underlying SalesForce UI is constrained and can be keystroke intensive at times
• Limited archiving of historical data

• Although Digital.ai Agility supports customizations, they can be somewhat cumbersome to set up and maintain
• The Analytics engine's user experience for digging into the data does not have the same feel as the rest of the system and, as a result, can be hard to work with

Incentivized

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 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

We have maybe had 1-2 outages over 3 years.

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)

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.

VersionOne provides outstanding training. They have Product Owner training that I recommend every Product Owner attend. They have scrum master training and other agile training that was well worth the money paid because it made the teams more productive. And the support for the tool is incredible. These people live and breathe Agile and are evangelists and enthusiasts.

Incentivized

It was fine.

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.

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.

Incentivized

JIRA appears to be more extensible with the ability for Scrum, Kanban, bug/incident tracking, and the ability to customize dashboards. However, VersionOne's performance over the same teams is extremely fast in comparison and therefore allows users to be more productive over the same amount of time.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It has made it easier to implement Agile processes. Since our team is fairly new to Agile, this has been extremely helpful.
• Our organization is quickly growing, and V1 has made it easier for new hires to look at everything that our team has in the works.

Incentivized