One Database to Bind Them All
December 10, 2015
One Database to Bind Them All
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Portfolio and Resource Management (formerly Planview Enterprise)
Overall Satisfaction with Planview Enterprise
Planview is being used to manage capital projects including the long range capital planning process all the way through the design, construction and completion of the project. Planview is a tool for the project managers to plan/track the project as well an administrative tool for managing other parts of the project such as project closeout. Having a centralized close-out entry screen, utilized by the project manager as well as the 7 departments involved in the project closeout, has allowed us to eliminate numerous emails prompting individuals for information or projects slipping into being closed without all the documentation being captured. In addition we have opened up Planview, read only, to our larger volume customers so they can see their project schedules and some project information; Facilities Management so they can see what capital projects are happening on their campuses/buildings; and Purchasing so they see what projects are headed their way and can better anticipate spikes in their workload and can better manage contract closeout.
- Portfolios-Planview is the only company I have come across which has this feature. I can't say enough positive things about portfolios. We are so reliant on portfolios because we can quickly view our projects in countless ways.
- Column sets-we have hundreds of custom fields, most of which we have set up as column sets. This in conjunction with portfolios allows us to filter even further how we are looking at outr project information.
- The search feature-this is one of the easiest ways to search for projects.
- Custom fields-Last I knew I think we had the largest customization of Planview. We created hundreds of custom fields which allowed us to consolidate the date from numerous Access databases and Excel spreadsheets. One thing most people don't realize is that this type of customization doesn't break when there is an upgrade. Other systems don't allow for much customization for that reason.
- By Planview allowing for so many custom fields we are able to have only one system to track all of the related project data-most other systems wouldn't allow that which means I would have to have another method to track all the data which doesn't fit into "their" definition of what is important to a project.
- Making Notes available as a column set. We had to create a current update field on an entry screen so that it could be set up as a column set and the information could then be viewed in a portfolio. The downside with that solution is that in order to maintain the historic information the project manager has to do double the amount of work by cutting and pasting the update into the Notes section.
- Be able to distribute hours on project by using the same methodology as with MS Project. Planview distributes the time evenly unless you manually distribute the hours. In MS Project you can pick a turtle curve etc, and quickly spread out the hours.
- When viewing a Gantt chart you can compress it to view only the milestones however when you print it the schedule is expanded to see all the lines. There are times when presenting to either customers or senior management when you want to show them only the highest level of detail which would be 6 lines vs. 54. Again with MS Project this feature is available.
- Increased employee efficiency-considerable reduction of sending of emails.
- By having the ability to add hundreds of custom fields in one system we were able to eliminate several Access databases and 4 or 5 Excel spreadsheets.
They don't have a resource management feature, no portfolio feature, it would have cost hundreds of thousands each year for us to have our data transferred to our data warehouse nightly in order for us to do real time reporting.