Planview - a great product and great partner
December 15, 2015
Planview - a great product and great partner
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Portfolio and Resource Management (formerly Planview Enterprise)
Overall Satisfaction with Planview Portfolios
Planview Enterprise is used by our Research and Development Teams. We have approximately 1100 users. The business problem it addresses is to have a singular repository for all our project level data across R&D. It provides robust reporting capabilities so that we can access the data we need whether it be ad hoc or a more standard report.
Pros
- Reporting - It allows users of differing levels of product/data understanding different ways to get to the data they need using tools including tiles and reports in the app, a portal for more standard reports, and an excel add-in for more technical users. And, of course, the capability of querying the database
- As a cloud application, our downtime has been negligible. It's great having a company managing the application so we don't have to worry about patching and downtimes and the like. They do a great job as a partner of ours in keeping the product accessible and stable.
- The all in one package for Project Management is one of the best parts of Planview. We capture all manner of reportable project information in Planview and use it in our project, team, and executive level reporting.
- Being a flexible tool for adding fields and customizing screens within a SaaS solution was one of the primary reasons for product selection as well as one of the reasons for on-going product adoption, satisfaction, and expanding usage.
- The people at Planview are a core strength. When I have a question or an issue, they are always helpful. They have a can do attitude and regularly are willing to go (and often do go) the extra mile.
Cons
- As a SaaS product, they suffer from the same fate as other SaaS products of having sluggishness from time to time. Some of our facilities seem to have better response time than others. We haven't really identified this as a Planview specific issue, but it's definitely an issue.
- Once we had a more dedicated go to person at Planview to solve simple/mid level types of problems, our satisfaction increased dramatically. Their help desk is effective, but, as with many help desks, sometimes response times on non-critical issues can be slower than we'd like and getting simple questions answered can be difficult. That said, their response time on critical issues (there haven't been many) has been excellent.
- Get a good understanding of how much support internal and external you'll need. Getting up to speed on the tool at the very beginning was a bit of a struggle for us as we were hesitant to burn through our consulting hours. Ultimately on hindsight that was probably a mistake by us as we ultimately went through more pain than we had to. That said, having a bit more included support and hand holding on initial go-live would've been beneficial.
- It's not free :)
- Consolidation of our time reporting actuals with our planned hours to provide us with a clearer picture of project variances.
- Robust reporting options for all our users.
- Significantly decreased project management time previously required for tracking and reporting project status.
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