Planview Enterprise for a 400 resources in a 14,000 person organization
December 10, 2015
Planview Enterprise for a 400 resources in a 14,000 person organization
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Portfolio and Resource Management (formerly Planview Enterprise)
Overall Satisfaction with Planview Enterprise
We have 400 Planview users across our employee base of 14,000 people.
We use Planview Enterprise primarily for project management in IT and our enterprise PMO, as well as for resource management within the IT team at WellStar. Planview specifically helps us show executives a snapshot of our entire project portfolio, including which projects are at risk and which teams are overcommitted.
- PVE helps us manage the supply and demand of labor - it enables us to show which operational tasks and projects are consuming our team's time, and it lets resource managers up through executives see how we're choosing to spend our time.
- PVE summarizes the key elements project status across an entire portfolio of projects. The tools make it easy to see which projects are in trouble, which projects need attention right now, and which projects are proceeding as planned.
- PVE lets us create different "what if" scenarios that show the impact on our team if we change the overall timelines for the projects that are in our plan. It lets us determine when we'll need to go find a bunch of contractors, and helps us make appropriate financial decisions for efforts where time is more important than cost.
- Until the version of Planview Enterprise that was released in November 2015, it relied upon Silverlight technology for some of the user interface... which made it slow and difficult to use with Chrome.
- Planview is like a Swiss Army Knife for project, portfolio and resource management - but it is only useful if people enter accurate data into the tool... To that end it needs to be something that is supported by senior team members that can monitor and enforce usage of the tool. The difficulty is that it's easy to configure Planview to be simple for the people who use it, or you can make all the tools in the Swiss Army Knife available at the risk of alienating project and resource managers who are less sophisticated. Organizations shouldn't start a Planview implementation until they have alignment from the executive level down to the project and resource manager level around how they want to use the tools.
- Integration with ServiceNow is still in its infancy - more robust integration around how these two tools handoff work tracking will be a huge win.
- Planview Enterprise has provided concrete data to support adding members to teams that are over utilized.
- Planview Enterprise has helped us make data-driven decisions about which projects to continue, pause or cancel.
- Planview Enterprise has helped us quickly show executives which projects need their attention.
In a mature SharePoint environment the Microsoft Project Server can be an appealing option - in prior environments I saw very easy integration between Project Server and SharePoint. Microsoft Project is a great tool for projects that are conducted in isolation, meaning they don't rely on shared resources and they don't require aggregated status reporting alongside other projects. Planview, on the other hand, is much more effective than the Microsoft projects for long term management of a scarce group of resources that need to be allocated across a broad range of work efforts. Planview Enterprise's reporting clearly shows which projects are in trouble, which resource roles are overtaxed, and when resources will be available for additional work - this doesn't exist in MS Project, and I don't know how easy/hard it would be with Project Server.