EPM Live vs. Projector PSA vs. Rocketlane

EPM Live is well suited for a business that feels they are slightly disconnected between departments. If you think you're sales and support staff need to be better connected with your development and programming (like us), then you can benefit immediately. There are a host of other features to help any business that has a lot of "irons in the fire". They make it a lot easier to pinpoint what areas need more attention and what areas probably should be spending so much money.

We think Projector PSA is a great tool to track and manage people in a professional service environment like management consulting. This system is easy to set up, easy to understand and should easily suit the needs of smaller and medium sized firms. It may be less appropriate for firms that rely very heavily on project management through another system (like MS Project) or firms that rely very heavily on a sales pipeline tracking system. While still very much possible to use, you would (I believe) have to do some re-keying between systems

There is project management tracking from the start till the end (onboarding till hypercare). The bifurcation of project stages and pre-built templates is good; you can assign client tasks. Less appropriate: Raising tickets for developers because there is no escalation management option. Let’s say the developer didn’t reply in 24 hours for a high-priority task; this should be automatically escalated to their senior.

Incentivized

• EPM Live has several modules that users can use for their project management solutions.
• EPM Live can be customized by the company that is using it.
• It integrates well with Microsoft products.

Incentivized

• Time tracking. For a service company that typically bills retainers, it is very important to be able to assign a direct cost to your resources at all levels and analyze your profitability.
• Expense reporting. Projector easily tracks expenses of all types and allows you to categorize them under non-billable projects, client billable projects and/or client development ventures.
• Reporting. Projector has a large list of standard reports right at your fingertips. These reports can be extracted as Excel docs, mdp files and other useful formats. They are intuitive, clear and easy to analyze. For those you need on a standard basis, you can set them up to pull on a recurring basis. It should be noted that all reports are easily customized and Projector's support team is always there to help get you the information you need.

Incentivized

• The project timelines and tasks feature is nice.
• Status updates can be published, which can be seen by external stakeholders/clients even though they are not on Rocketlane or they have not taken Rocketlane subscriptions.
• Timesheets can be easily tracked through which resource utilization can be planned.

Incentivized

• Performance is not always consistent. There are periods of time where everything goes wrong with the tool, and there are times when everything just goes perfect. It seems like a cycle that lasts couple months.
• Support is not that great in terms of solutions provided. Most of the time the support responses are not helpful at all.
• The vendor is not proactive in planning the releases specific to customer. We had many issues because of inadequate release planning.

Incentivized

• The split between the desktop and web environments was awkward at times.
• While the reporting modules are powerful, creating reports can be complex and required a fairly deep knowledge of the product.
• The appearance and interface of the desktop application appears somewhat dated.

• Project Opening time
• Automated time tracked should be there
• Every phase has a option to make a call and zoom so time tracked real time

Incentivized

Our staff have found it easy to implement and use. Virtually any company can improve the way it manages its resources, and those improvements can deliver real competitive advantages. If you are finding your current software wanting, look at EPM LIve. We are happy we did.

We have been using this tool for a year now and find our use of it continually evolves and broadens. We are also very excited about the overhaul that's under way and feel many of the improvements being put in place will help make us that much more effective and efficient. The Projector team is also very responsive and collaborative in terms of user feedback and improvement suggestions, which helps us know they will work hard to help us get what we need out of the tool.

It really helps to support us in supporting our customers.

Incentivized

Desktop interface feels complex to new users.

Because of the impact, it has created in terms of saving resources and time by helping them with project-related timelines.

Incentivized

In 5 years of use we have never experienced an unscheduled outage.

When we have needed help (infrequently), the help has been prompt and understandable.

The experience with TaskRay was like night and day. The TaskRay representative has always been responsive and helpful. EPM's promise to integrate with Salesforce was limited at best.TaskRay exists within Salesforce, so the install and customization took less than a day. Ultimately we are still evaluating solutions and working with EPM made it easy to see what we were not looking for in a partner.

We switched to Projector from Open Air. While Open Air was a good tool, we found it wasn't really designed for project management at the level of detail we needed from our PSA and used MS Project and Excel to supplement Open Air. We also struggled with the invoicing side of it, manually combining invoice summaries with custom time and expense reports in Acrobat. Projector however, was designed for project management. We are able to manage projects, track time and expenses, and invoice all out of one system. The project setup can accommodate a wide range of complexity, including milestones, dependencies, etc. Project and resource dashboards also help see the services portfolio and team at a summary level and allows us to zero in on particulars easily and more meaningfully than we were ever able to with Open Air. Invoice templates are also easily customized and we were able to get several set up quickly to meet our needs. Lastly, Open Air required us to purchase and pre-pay licensing for a year, so if we lost staff mid-way through the year, the unused seat was not prorated. Projector licensing is paid monthly based on actual number of active users that month, which makes more sense for a team with fluctuating headcount.

Ease of User, User Friendliness, Customer Onboarding, Task Management, Effective & Efficient communication, Project Management, E-mail reminders/notifications, Publishing status report, Overview of all projects, Templates, Resource management, Timesheet

Incentivized

• This product has actually caused major frustration for the IT team and we were never able to deploy it past IT.

Incentivized

• Even in the small time that I stayed to see Projector PSA reporting I saw ROI projections become more realistic. There was real data to analyze that proved we were spending way too much and charging way too less on some projects.
• Although employees were not used at entering their hours, this single reporting improved operations management and validated employees concerns that more people were needed to manage workload
• Project proposals were more realistic because they were driven by real data.
• Decision making overall for the department became more efficient and effective

Incentivized

• As an admin and end-user, Rocketlane has saved me at least four hours of work every week. Multiply that across the entire team, and we're saving two full days of work by removing all the manual tasks.

Incentivized