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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Smartsheet
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Smartsheet is an online project management and collaboration tool. It includes automated alerts, instantaneous updating and sharing across team members, resource management, nested tasks organized in a hierarchy, a Gantt chart view, exportable and automated reports, and integration with email.
We are just in the process of deploying AgilePlace and will connect with Portfolios Smartsheet, which does have the functionality we need. We are just starting to use AgilePlace. We have a business group doing a proof of concept.
We are currently in the process of evaluating but so far Planview seems to fit our needs the best. Portfolios was selected prior to me joining the team.
Planview Portfolios has an extremely robust data structure that supports many different use cases. Its customizability, large suite of features, and great customer service makes it a fantastic and scalable solution for many different businesses and business process …
Planview has much more potential in terms of it's products and capabilities. It can integrate more easily with many more of our other products and software. Planview reporting is much more intuitive.
Planview Portfolios is well suited to provide a single, central, view of the truth. There is clear expansion capabilities to integrate it as a true Enterprise toolset with existing organisation wide (not just delivery) - you can pick and choose what you need to implement and that list gets longer. The ability to quickly gain an understanding of resources within the overall portfolio and some really clever tools regarding capacity and demand modelling. I think the only challenge we have encountered is modelling our Business as Usual activity to a level of detail - this is due to other tools being very embedded not just in the organisation but across a lot of industries.
For teams and users who are very familiar with Excel and its mode of operation, Smartsheet will feel like a walkover. If you have a number of users who use Excel or Google Sheets for their personal project management then you will find this tool to be very useful and somewhat familiar.
Teams that may be used to other project management suites or styles would find Smartsheet a bit challenging to adapt to, as formulas and formatting can be challenging to adapt to.
Smartsheet set up is similar to Excel, yet when you upload an Excel file, things like conditional formatting are lost. Smartsheet has its own conditional formatting, and you have to reinstate the rules. It would be great if those would apply automatically once a file is uploaded
Some Smartsheet management and access rules can take some tweaking to work properly. This may be a case of offering more info to admins so they can apply these better and with more efficiency
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.
It definitely meets our needs as far as organizing and archiving our tasks and files. As we train more staff to view it, I see opportunities for more improvement, which I am sure this program can handle. I look forward to seeing continued improvement from Smartsheet on their capabilities and functionality.
The toolset is provisioned as a SaaS solution making it very easy to scale up / down as our user bases increase/decrease. There are some features around the planning capability that could be improved to enable ease of access to our PMs e.g. dependency management (while powerful) dependency management doesn't allow you to add constraints in the same field - you have to click to a separate area
Smartsheet is very easy to learn. However, while I have been able to pick it easily, Microsoft Excel and Project super users that I have trained on Smartsheet get bogged down in the differences and can find it frustrating. Explaining the differences ahead of time and why Smartsheet is being chosen instead of a different software seems to counteract those reactions
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.
There are occasions when the system is a bit sluggish. However, it may not always be on the Planview side. We are investing in better tools to monitor our network performance, which will help us diagnose issues more effectively in the future.
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.
I give this rating because it fills a niche in the market. MS Project scares many away from proper task management but there are limited tools our there, especially cloud-based that are mobile-friendly. Smartsheet fills this market gap, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. IT is not fair to compare it to MS Project, but fairer to see what gaps it fills.
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
It's absolutely paramount to take a few minutes to actually play with the software. It's nearly impossible to do anything wrong or make a mistake which cannot be fixed easily. Under the help menu is Live Training option. After you familiarize yourself with the commands, watch the live training for some in depth understanding of how to make the software fit your needs perfectly.
We are currently using Planview AgilePlace. Also we use Tasktop Hub for integrating with other applications within the organization. We would like to use ProjectPlace which is integrated with Planview Portfolios in the future.
Jira and Redmine are much more robust and technologically advanced project management solutions. I enjoy using either when managing a very large project. However, I prefer to use Smartsheet for my smaller to medium sized projects. As for Google Drive - I would say that Google sheets and Smartsheet are almost identical in my opinion when it comes to functionality. Personally I prefer to manage smaller projects via Google Drive, but it is a personal preference!
We are constantly growing and expanding. It is challenging to accommodate different user needs, but the system does provide means of doing that as we desire.
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.
