Projectplace is a collaborative work management solution. The vendor says the product is built with teams of all sizes and complexity in mind, from virtual teams of five to entire global enterprises with tens of thousands of active users. It is also designed to incorporate waterfall and agile workflows.
$29
per seat
ServiceNow IT Service Management
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
ServiceNow is a fast-growing service management provider that went public in 2012. Built on the ServiceNow Now Platform, the IT Service Management bundle provides an agent workspace with knowledge management, and modules supporting issue tracking and problem resolution, change, release and configuration management, and (on the higher tier ITSM Professional plan) ITAM and software asset management.
ProjectPlace has formats that ensure every project is handled in a friendly manner and that results attained are optimal. Besides, ProjectPlace has an excellent time locating system, where every action is well planned and resources channeled to meet the needs. Further, ProjectPlace has the conventional way of demand planning by learning the market.
In our organization, we are using ServiceNow extensively. Change Management, Incident Management, Problem Management, Time tracking are few modules which we use extensively. This sort of model will work for any product or service based companies as the product is built on ITIL framework. So this product will be suited for small or large scale companies to better organize and add controls and track SLA's for technology or business process.
As a cloud based solution, Projectplace is one of the few true multiple location, multi person project management tools available for large teams. The reliability for large projects (with teams of anywhere between 50-200+ people) was a huge selling point for this and I witnessed this first hand.
The Windows and Mac applications for Projectplace are well designed and work impressively well for a project management tool. I found most of the teams had either application installed on their machine and did not have any complaints about it.
Features like AI and project management viewing styles like Kanban, Ganntt and others make the experience customizable for each user and made them adapt it to their preferred project management style.
When I have a number of requests to make, for example a request to add a dozen or so user accounts to more than one group account in Active Directory , I can put all the needed information into the initial form, add it to my "shopping cart" and all of that information remains on the screen for the next item for which I only need to edit a few items (like the AD group name in this example), and keep adding them to the shopping cart until I have them all. When I "Check Out" each of those items is generated as a separate task under the one request. It simplifies and expedites the creation and tracking of these kinds of requests.
I can easily and quickly see what tickets are currently assigned to me in order to prioritize them and remain aware of my workload.
Numerous fields for CIs can be used when trying to find the entry for a particular item. For example, IP Address, server name, raw text, classification, and so on.
To help with making sense out of related tasks, when a task is assigned to me and I need to open another task for a different team to work in order to complete my task, I can open a sub-task from my ticket so that the relationship between the two can be pulled up later into reports. For example, I may have a task to build a new vm, and need to open tasks for networking, security accounts, software installation and so on. By opening sub-tasks from my assignment, the time spent by all parties concerned is tied together for more meaningful cost accounting.
Under the time tracking, it would be nice to have a set template that would load each week and not have to click a button to load the previous week's template.
Somehow making it more intuitive.
Having to add in each service line and each detail that I cover for every service line each week is a bit ridiculous.
It is hard to find areas for improvement, the tool is very powerful. That said, building the CMDB still involves some manual interaction which was not how it was presented in demos.
The CMDB data is almost too deep and detailed. When you build the relationship map it can be so large that it is overwhelming. You can limit this, but the default maps are massive if you are discovering lots of device classes.
The product is expensive. Since they are the leader in the industry and the product has tons of features, they definitely charge for it!
We're committed now & have >50 users on Projectplace. All our projects are now tracked in the tool. We this investment of time & training, the cost of maintaining Projectplace is relatively low for the benefit. So we will renew, even if there are some idiosyncrasies in the tool & there are opportunities for improvement.
To be completely honest setting up a new ticketing system can be a pain in the ass. Once you have it setup and customized the way you want it, you don't want to switch unless you're unhappy with the product. Unless future releases and updates really muck the system up, I wouldn't change.
Planview ProjectPlace is consistent in delivering the promised performance, which is a functional part that brings clarity. Further, Planview ProjectPlace increases the value of every transaction, where recording and documentation are well enhanced to bring a concrete way of business coordination. Finally, Planview ProjectPlace has an orderly way of bringing substantial communications.
The dashboard is so confusing, [there are] many clicks to open a task and search by a ticket. The Enterprise customisation [we did] has finished to kill the software and creates a really bad experience on a daily basis. [It is] So slow, and so many clicks to process a ticket. Works only on IE so, that [should] make you realize that [it] is a bad idea.
Planview ProjectPlace is quite complex, but it demands better engagement with various stakeholders to initiate a useful work environment. There are credible ways of establishing more live engagement, from direct chats and audio engagements. More so, Planview ProjectPlace is more formal, and this limits some users from outlining their demands or desires in matters of program performance.
I would give it this rating because we have had no major issues with the support for ServiceNow after we implemented it at our organization. They seem to respond promptly and efficiently if we ever do need to open a support case with them about an issue we are having.
To type in what should be a text box, you have to click an empty cell, a tiny text box pop up opens with a check box and an X. You the. Type in the text box and have to click the check mark. If you have a bunch of fields to fill out, doing this is very annoying. Absolutely know thought went in to this. I'm sure somebody in marketing thought it was a good idea. It wasn't.
Without exception, every client I have worked with has been very happy with their resulting product. While this is partly due to my work, I must point out that the platform is the winning decision, not the implementer.
It offers a simpler alternative that's easier to manage by the less tech-savvy people. I also think that Planview Projectplace has managed to keep the product updated compared to other project management tools. Miro is perhaps the one that comes to mind, but while evaluating, we saw fewer issues with Planview Projectplace. Overall, the decision came down to the project manager, that had previous experience and recommended the product. For me, using a product from a smaller company is better because I know that there will be a focus on improving it, unlike, for example, Microsoft products that can be discontinued at any moment.
We used to use Jira to handle service tickets but it's way too robust for something this straightforward. Due to the nature of Jira, you needed to already have a lot of documentation and knowledge about who should be assigned the ticket, so the lift of creating a ticket was time consuming.
[We have the] ability to support remote work through projects that scale across multiple groups
We have large-scale quarterly projects, so the ability to save and duplicate project templates are helpful for us to keep track of tasks down to the specific card
Overall ServiceNow has a positive impact on getting the SLA of tickets down in supporting our customers.
One negative impact has been the amount of time to get the product to produce an ROI, it's almost too big to fail and too big to replace. You almost become committed to the product. Good or bad.
Another negative impact would be if you track metrics of employees and time tracking, there is a lot of scenarios where engineers will track time on tickets but not get credit for closing them as the assignee function of tickets can only be tied to one user and credits only the engineer who closes the ticket.
Another positive impact would be the level of security for permissions and scaling the workloads is robust and you will get out of the system what your team is willing to put in.
