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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PSA
Score 5.8 out of 10
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Upland PSA helps professional services teams grow their business.
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!
We have discovered over the last few years using Tenrox that we could adapt our needs or processes to fit in the Tenrox box rather than adapting Tenrox to fit in ours completely. I feel like Tenrox would be better suited for a company that has fewer clients and projects over the course of a year, as well as fewer users. We have approximately 350 clients, 21,077 projects in Tenrox at this exact moment (we close projects as we can), 188 active users currently, and 415,635 tasks (some of course assigned to now closed projects). With this much information hosted through the Tenrox cloud server, we experience increased lag time frequently. This causes a lot of unwanted rejection towards Tenrox in our company.
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 love that our timesheets are pre-populated with all our employee's assigned contracts and we get to control what is on their timesheet as far as funder and contract codes.
Tenrox did very well with our integration and getting a timesheet that exports well with our payroll provider.
Tenrox has a great email reminder system for when people need to submit or approve timesheets.
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.
Tax calculation per state tax rules. Tenrox's current capabilities relative to tax codes is extremely limited and we have to do several time-consuming work-arounds in order to apply the tax as needed for our business. What is particularly frustrating about this aspect is that our need is based on tax laws and codes set by states and I feel a financial system should be able to sufficiently structure for legally-defined tax codes.
Tenrox Project Planning add-on module. This portion of the system has never worked as seamlessly as you would assume given they were designed to work together. We've run in to many bugs and just oddities over the years. It's very finicky in my experience. We only use TPP for a small portion of our projects - those being our smaller or need to have huge task lists per client naming requirements.
(The bad that became the good!) In the past, we have had significant customer-service challenges with Tenrox and then Upland, however over the past several months we have noticed a marked change in this. If we had not previously experienced issues with the customer service, I would not have any issue with the level of service that we are currently receiving. Given the history, I am cautiously optimistic that our current level of customer service will continue. I think our service concerns finally reached the 'right' people and I am reasonably confident the positive changes are here to stay!
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.
I am not in charge of renewing the Tenrox contract. However, if it was up to me, I would renew in a heartbeat. Tenrox is an asset to our organization and it keeps us focused. I am not aware of other products similar to Tenrox that provide the depth that they do.
I feel like if the user interface could combine time and expense for users to be entered on one screen rather than two completely separate locations it would greatly improve usability. If the expense entry process could be improved completely, it would greatly improve the usability as well. Everything else within Tenrox, makes everything very user friendly.
The support team is always very helpful and strives to ensure they have met your needs and corrected your issues in a timely manner. If they need more information or cannot recreate the issue themselves, then they will follow-up to gather the necessary data themselves. They are constantly striving to meet the needs of all users and understand so many different industries and types of environments out there, it is very impressive.
The main thing with implementation is to make sure you have taken full advantage of the "sandbox testing" site that Tenrox provides to you during development. Try out every scenario you can think of, have other people enter information if needed, so that you can make sure you have not missed any big items. If you have the opportunity, roll out implementation to small groups of users. Depending on how your company is set up, I would choose groups that are not all in the same department so that you can address questions across all areas before adding in more users in the next wave of implementation.
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.
The Tenrox software looks and feels older and is not as user friendly! Harvest, for example, is an upgraded version that is easier to track and compile. This is what I'm comparing it to and it's not even close! We only selected Tenrox because it was cheaper and we had a connection in the company with someone at Tenrox to use that platform. We are currently looking for a change.
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.
Tracking, tracking, tracking. It keeps the data we need and gives us the ability to look at it in countless different ways with just a few clicks, which is a big time saver. Without Tenrox, we would definitely have to increase our headcount in order to accomplish billing and payroll.
We recently were able to automate a huge portion of business that was still (yes, still in 2014!) being managed out of an Excel spreadsheet. We experienced a great deal of resistance to the change with our own employees, however now that we have it going we have cleaned up our invoicing and impressed the highest-financial officer for two consecutive months - our first/only two months billing directly from Tenrox for that group.
A newer development for our team - Some client managers in the other divisions our company have begun to look at what we are able to do with Tenrox and our other primary system and get some of their work moved over to our group. This is great and is giving us new opportunities - we will likely need to increase the headcount of our admin. team, but for a good reason (too much work coming our way!).
