Planview AdaptiveWork vs. Socialtext (discontinued)

I've been an AdaptiveWork (Clarizen) admin for the past 14 years, so I've seen much improvement since I started working with the product. I'm very happy we can utilize the hybrid mode by using the cards, I think this was long overdue but it works very well.

Incentivized

We use Social Text as a platform to air our issues with different departments. We voice our concerns and suggestions so we can help find a solution to the problems we incur on a daily basis. We need to have social text as an app so we can communicate in real time not only during work hours.

• Many ways to acclimate to the system; documentation, videos, community, and contacts.
• Planview provides scalable customization options tailored to the unique needs of each business unit or department. Easily add or remove fields in the system. As the admin, it was easy to learn how to configure.
• Offers flexibility to adapt to existing systems and align with organizational workflows and processes. There are multiple ways to customize each part of the system to meet our needs.

Incentivized

• Version history - Always keeps the edited versions and one can revert back any time
• Creating and Editing an article is very easy and intutive
• Sharing the articles with peers

• When it comes to reports, it would be great if there was an easy way to roll-up the results instead of having to create configurations to summarize data.
• The consultant experience has not been great when it comes to more advanced needs for configurations. The consultants are in a different timezone which limits hours to work together and it seems hours are spent trying to determine what the requirement is and when the initial thought is that the configuration is possible, it may result in not being able to assist.
• Charts in the reports section are not able to be exported
• When pulling a report together, you need to make sure you pull from the right "item" or level. If you decide you need data that resides in another "item" or level, you need to re-do the report from the beginning.
• Because the system is so configurable and I imagine different clients use the system differently, when you need something automated in your account, where you need to pull a consultant or SME in, the person doesn't necessarily understand your configurations and how things work so they are unable to give recommendations on how to solve problems that don't impact other configurations you already have set up in the system.
• Templates cannot be updated unless they are pulled into a project and then re-saved. In the templates module, you are not able to open a template and edit to re-save. Therefore, making updates to a template can be very time consuming having to find a project to use to pull it in, make updates, re-save and then pull out. It would be great if the templates module allowed you to edit the templates and re-save.

Incentivized

• Search needs a ton of improvements. It was very slow a year ago
• Search result quality was also not that good
• I know they have improved their UI recently but when i used it last year it did not really have any design elements which could be used to make the articles look more presentable. It was important for us as we used it for external communication as well.

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.

We have a lot of info in Socialtext already. It would be hard to get all that info out and port it to a different 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.

We have been able to implement AdaptiveWork pretty easily but it requires updating of resource availability and continuous training as roles change and new people join the company. Other documentation is used such as spreadsheets for longer range planning and project approval

Incentivized

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

I frankly like Confluence better than socialtext because of the speed and the quality of search. They also have better design elements which can help make the articles pleasant to the eyes.

• By implementing Planview AdaptiveWork on a company-wide level, we have been able to remove the other project management tools we have been using and consolidate our costs for technology down to a single tool
• The ability to incorporate cross-departmental work and communication has streamlined our project management processes to a point where we can work seamlessly together without interruption trying to consider the gaps between tools
• Reporting capabilities from the unified tool has given our leadership insight and the ability to make strategic business decisions more effectively than ever

Incentivized

• We get solutions to concerns much faster
• We promote interactions with the other depts
• We listen and have discussions