Planview Portfolios is an end-to-end project portfolio management and enterprise architecture management tool. It includes two components: Portfolio and Resource Management and Capability and Technology Management. The platform is available as a cloud-based or on-premise service.
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Projector PSA
Score 7.5 out of 10
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Projector's cloud-based Professional Services Automation (PSA) software helps project-based services organizations track time and expenses, invoice clients, schedule resources, and manage projects. Its three modules span a more comprehensive set of uses than typical project management software. The Accounting module helps the user track time and expenses and manage invoices and billing. Also it syncs with the company's accounting systems as a sub-ledger. The Resource Scheduling module matches…
Planview Portfolios allows the ability to establish strategic goals, set financial targets, and then associate work so that business areas can easily see current forecasts compared to baselines. Lower-level resource management is handled nicely within Portfolios, allowing Resource Managers to pivot the assignment data quickly to do a variety of analyses. There is room for improvement in the ease of connecting Ideation to Delivery. Companion tools are available but it does not flow smoothly between applications. I would rather have Ideation embedded within Portfolios so that projects can be created/aligned more easily.
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
Capture potential opportunities using the Requests Module and analyze and rank these opportunities via lifecycles and promote (dispatch) approved opportunities into Projects. Information captured during the request process automatically get transferred to projects.
Robust schedule management; time reporting; resource management and financial planning and management
Risk and Issue management controlled via robust lifecycles.
Extensive reporting capabilities via SSRS and Power BI Dashboards and delivered to users via tiles in Project and Portfolio views.
Projector is a very well designed tool for project management. It has allowed us to eliminate a number of auxiliary tools for project timelines and WBS for the vast majority of our projects.
Time and expense entry is intuitive and quick for our staff.
Our forecasting and resource management capability has improved greatly with Projector and allows us to grow our team efficiently with minimal additional administrative burden.
Reporting is extremely robust. It does require some time to really get a handle on the full functionality of the reporting tool, but once you do, you can get almost any kind of report you want out of the system!
this is the area I can see Planview Portfolios is very much lagging behind. If you see Atlassian, they are having a robust API information and using that we can securely access the necessary information based on the role. I think a similar kind of approach need to done in Planview Portfolios as well.
User Information and Resource information is separate. Expecting that, during the User creation, when a resource is linked, automatically all the basic fields should be populated with the values, also if a person is having an User account there is no way for that person to know that what User role that he/she is having. Also none of the reports covering that details.
Automation - It's mentioned using the UiPath some of the Automation has been done in the User creation but don't find any necessary document for better understanding.
Release management process needs to be improved. Currently no facility is provided to test the impact of new releases in a sand-box. This introduces business risk if there are interfaces into Projector PSA as part of it's use in the business.
We have been a Planview customer since 1999 and have seen it grow and mature as a tool. We have looked at other tools and have found that PV continues to meet our needs and is easy for our resources to use. They work to stay up on the project management industry and the direction it is going, keep on on current technology so that we can work more effectively, provide excellent customer support and have great pricing for what they offer. We can purchase only the modules we need versus buying a tool where we would only use a portion of the functionality.
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.
There is a learning curve that needs to be overcome for new and occasional users. Need to clearly training users on how to filter the data with "Portfolio's"
We are long time Planview users and its availability is only limited to our internal SLAs for nightly backups. I have never experienced any unexpected or prolonged software downtime from Planview itself.
Going through proper channels of support is fine for minor to moderate issues. However, lately the critical issues that arise have been frequent and the standard support cases do not always seem to relay just how critical these issues are and we have to utilize our customer rep to help escalate. Fortunate to have that escalation method.
Always have a pre-implementation meeting or conference call with Planview to ensure all are on the same page, disclosure of all and any customization (including reports) and plan for support after implementation of a specified amount of time with the assigned implementation resource. And document everything
Odoo, like this platform, has allowed us to efficiently organize our projects so that they can be prioritized by importance, to know which is the most urgent, in addition, it has also allowed us to assign work in an organized way among our collaborators, and their reports have allowed us to improve.
We did pursue Quick Arrow another tool that was similar. We found that be in inflexible in use. Projector allows a lot of flexibility in setup. Our organization has very specific business processes and we were able to set up Projector to work with those processes. Several other systems we tried were not as flexible in allowing set up to our needs.
The positive impact is the ability to manage our projects enterprise wide.
Managing and reporting on projects and programs via portfolios makes it easy to identify troubled projects/programs that need immediate attention.
The negative is that pushing too much change too quickly is hard for us. We need to get our users focused on the basics of PM before we can adopt everything else. We need to introduce change to different companies based on their maturity level. Too much change too quickly is not always beneficial. We need to focus on core competencies.
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