People and projects are the heart and soul of a business. So Deltek created Vantagepoint, which they present as a powerful, intuitive solution that helps users manage projects from start to finish. Deltek Vantagepoint’s 360-degree view of projects puts client, project and financial details in a single location. The vendor states this adds up to making well-informed tactical and strategic business decisions and a more efficient, productive and profitable company.
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Planview ChangePoint
Score 7.6 out of 10
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Planview Changepoint is a platform that marries professional services automation (PSA), project portfolio management (PPM) and business analytics to provide managers broad operational visibility and control over their strategic business portfolios.
I have used Vision/Vantagepoint with 5 different companies. Where the business model is project-based it works very well. This is the rule for most AEC companies. My current organization does not really have a project-based business model as they have many, many small "projects" that never get entered into Vantagepoint as it would be time prohibitive to do so. This makes the use of the system very limited for all employees outside of accounting and unreliable for reporting pipeline and historical revenue data. This is not the fault of Deltek, however, just an observation of how it is used with my current company.
Changepoint is basic and would, therefore, work for businesses with uncomplicated requests, pretty straightforward workflows and willingness to work with an unsightly solution. It is basic, from the UI to the search option and the way the information is captured, which can be frustrating and counter-intuitive at times. It is relatively robust (i.e. I have been using it for almost 2 years and have not seen it crash once) but it does log me out when the system has been inactive for about 30 minutes - and I am only notified about being logged out upon clicking the Submit button, meaning many a line of text have been typed more than once!
Changepoint has significant reporting capabilities, though of course, the data that comes out is only as good as the data that goes in. I enjoy being able to use the standard reports to understand exactly how much a project has cost us and to compare it to how much we are charging. This allows us to more accurately set our prices. Though we have not used the report designer capability, I understand that custom reports can be designed with relative ease.
Changepoint has a versioning capability for changes made to user profiles in the system manager, which I find particularly helpful. As a non-power user, it is valuable to be able to see what changes I have made to various profiles so that I can troubleshoot a problem down the line.
Changepoint has significant functionality well beyond the features that we are currently using, and for this reason, I think it is affordable and a good deal. Particularly if your organization is interested in dedicating the time and resources into using all of the features around project planning, resource allocation, etc., the price is well worth the value.
We use Changepoint to manage the IS organization. I would like to see more advancement in order to do benefits management.
I would like to see a capability where a project manager can build a very detailed work breakdown structure, but only require project resources to charge time and provide a task status at a higher level.
Sometimes the decision to renew boils down to an old adage "if it isn't broken don't fix it". Previous to moving to Changepoint, it was obvious that we needed a better project management tool. Projects we completed on time but the time zone difference between the teams and several iterations of back and forth caused a number of communication issues with projects. The difference is night and day.
It is ok to use; it is not the easiest to use in terms of usability and user-friendliness but it is not the worst. It still feels somewhat outdated. Many cloud options are cleaner or look more modern. But it is good enough and you should be able to get the hang of it.
I would rate Deltek VantagePoint highly in terms of the overall support. You can receive support any time you need it and there is a representative from Deltek assigned to your account so that you can always get the help when you need it. Sometimes, they want to go more in-depth than I would like, however.
BQE Core. I think that BQE Core is definitely harder to use, and has a lot of features atleast from the users perspective that dont seem entirely neccesary. Deltek is very straight forward and easy to use.
Planview Changepoint helps us to understand our key customers enabling us to capitalize on every financial opportunity and helps us to forecast demand against the capacities required for new opportunities, and also it automates and monitors contractual terms and conditions. It gives us visibility into our employees' skills and helps to optimize resource allocation.
Employee efficiency has decreased significantly within our Project MAnagement team. The main causes are lack of logical steps/not user-friendly and the slowness of the entire program.
Changepoint PSA has greatly improved being able to track budgets for all projects. Before this software, budgets were done manually by hand and cross-referenced with Accounting. Now, we can pull a report out of the system, as long as all parties entered their time and data correctly.
