Fortes Change Cloud vs. Planview AdaptiveWork

If you have a need for tracking projects and keeping the teams on the same page with the status and updates within a project, Planview AdaptiveWork works well. I do like how discussion posts automatically go to folks email addresses and every note is stored within the project. I also like the flexibility of reporting and configurations that can be made. Depending on how you use the system and what your needs are, the configurations can sometimes impact each other and it's not automatically known what the impacts will be unless you read through each configuration that has to do with your problem. It would be great if the configurations were more user-friendly instead of easy for people with configurations backgrounds. It's not always apparent which formula you should use for what you need - and the formula options require some training or some experience in coding to understand immediately. If the configurations could be "dumbed down" a bit and then warnings for impacts to other configurations before being saved, that would be helpful.

Incentivized

• Highly customizable, can develop organization specific workflows, modules, etc.
• Interface (in most instances) is easy to use. Timesheets, project details, and report modules are fairly easy to navigate and understand.
• Good comms tools like discussions, group pages, automatic reminders and notifications.

Incentivized

• Planview AdaptiveWork's ability to create relations between work estimates, resources, and time is one of its strengths but also one of its drawbacks. The average user is a little less considerate of the way these things interact with each and the automatic way in which Planview AdaptiveWork will affect one or the other can occasionally create a confusing scenario if the user is unaware of how changing one will affect the other

Incentivized

I give my renewal of this product a 9. It's only because we never know what product may come out next and how other factors in our office political environment may cause impact upon this. If I always had my way, this is what we'd settle on as our de facto project management system.

It is easy to configure, intuitive. The customization process is in some ways better than Salesforce.com. It has a great UI. It does however depend on how it's implemented.

The design of it is generally fine, however the ability to data upload people from a spreadsheet is an obvious miss.

Sometimes it is slow when everyone is entering their time on Fridays or Mondays but other than that we rarely see downtime and maintenance notifications are well in advance.

Reports: Quick to Reasonable

Most Ancillary Pages: Quick to Reasonable
(By "ancillary" I mean lesser used/master data maintenance pages - e.g. People, Customers, Individual Tasks, Milestones, etc.)

Work Plan (with 100 sub items): Reasonable to Slow

It's a good experience overall. Clarizen was useful when needed. It's mostly needed for advice on how to do more sophisticated actions or how to change something that was set up administratively. It's seldom used otherwise. The product consistently works, the documentation is acceptable, and the generally intuitive product is easy enough for most staff to pick up without much issue.

Incentivized

• We worked with a Project Manager on their side. He was very good about developing a project plan to hit our goal. I think we had weekly or twice weekly calls – very steady cadence over 3 month period.
• Their PM skills were great – kept us on task. For the last week, they sent 2 people on site and they did training for power users. After that a couple of them revisited here

Our trainer, Alex, is exceptional and knows the product really well. I swear he must have wrote the product himself! His manner with training is very easy going, gives you homework that is applicable to what you need to learn and stages it correctly for you. It was a pleasure to be trained by him.

I performed the implementation with our Clarizen provide trainer, who knew the product 100% and it went quickly and without a problem. It was a pleasurable process without the problems other software implementation often encounter. Kudos to the Clarizen team for making this a worry free process for their clients because it is worry free.

Planview AdaptiveWork was the right size, at the right price point that fit our customization and integration flexibility. It is intuitive to use but allowed us to add complexity as our needs grew

Incentivized

• Time tracking, of course, has a big impact on ROI, as we can see what and how much time is spent on certain projects and clients, therefore better letting us scope and forecast future projects. That said, this is not something that is individual to Clarizen. The same goes for any time tracking software.

Incentivized