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.
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Scoro
Score 8.3 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Scoro is a comprehensive work management solution for creative and professional services. It helps to streamline work and eliminate routine tasks to ensure a business runs as smoothly and efficiently as possible – from sales right through to billing. Scoro’s project management tools allow users to create project budgets, allocate non-billable and billable work, manage meetings, tasks, invoices, expenses, files, and more. All project information can be managed in a single…
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!
Scoro would be ideal for a larger business who is truly interested in developing a stronger and more efficient workflow. I honestly would have recommended it had it not been for the cost, the hidden fees, and the fact that I'd have to upgrade to an even more expensive plan if I wanted to get the most of the program for our level. We only needed one item, so would have ended up paying much more to not use a great deal of additional features. So, if you want to increase your workflow and have the funds, use them - absolutely. You will not regret it. But I cannot recommend it to someone who is on a tight budget
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.
Cost. I ended up not recommending this product simply because of the cost alone. There are hidden costs you will not know about until it is too late. Their pricing model is geared for bigger businesses, and can cripple smaller ones. The pricing is by user. If you get the most basic of plans (with a 900 onboarding charge), you will realize that all the things you actually need to make the program effective are on the next tier up...
Quickbooks. At the time I was exploring this, Quickbooks was not very well integrated. If you wanted to include billing (which they do show promise for), then you will have issues here.
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.
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.
Scoro could have had a wonderful impact on the workflow of the business. It allows for integrations most programs don't, including accounting and time tracking, and could have easily eliminated the need for an FTE through the streamlining of tasks alone.
If we had implemented this program, we would have saved time, but all of the gains would have gone to pay for Scoro. It would not have balanced out, especially if they ever were to raise their rates.
