Is Planview for You? My collective experience across two corporations and ten years of use
December 06, 2016
Is Planview for You? My collective experience across two corporations and ten years of use
Score 10 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 by our IT organization and our business unit that manages customer installations. For IT, it helps manage our portfolio of projects and the resources used to execute those projects. The tools give us visibility into our capacity and demand management needs and lets us forecast our resource and investment needs. We are also able to manage programs and portfolios consisting of multiple projects. For our business unit handling customer installations, the tool captures the quote and tracks the labor and cost associated with each installation. As we perform the installation, we also able to forecast the effort and cost needed to complete the install and see how it aligns with the quote.
- Provides visibility into specific resource's utilizations and highlights weeks where a resource has been over committed. The screens used and data presented are easy to digest and respond to. This gives us the ability to see potential conflicts and take proactive steps to resolve them before becoming issues.
- Allows us to manage and forecast at the program or portfolio level. The screens allow our program managers to group work together and see the resource demands and cost at a consolidated level and allow easy drilling into the details to see the impact for specific projects.
- Reporting and tracking of historical results. The tool allows easy tracking of both cost and effort comparing what was planned against what actually occurred. The standard reporting has dozens of out of the box reports that assist with portfolio, project and resource management.
- With power comes complexity. Users are sometimes not sure of which screen to use for certain activities. Planview has done a good job of improving the UI over the year but there are still some areas that could be simplified for the users.
- The financial planning module does not offer enough granularity to track non-labor costs at a detailed level. Costs are grouped by unique attributes. If I want to track the purchase of 10 servers individually within a single project, I need to use a different tool.
- I can't quote specific numbers, but, before our current installation of Planview, data would exist in multiple sources and was duplicated across the organization. It took practically a full FTE to produce monthly reports on cost and effort across the portfolio of work. Plus, with duplicate sources of "truth", much time was spent reconciling the data across the multiple sources and debating which was correct. Now, the data comes directly from a single source and anyone in the company can view it real time.
- The cost is not insignificant. If all a company needs is something to run project plans for a handful of projects, Planview is not for you. Planview is better suited for companies with multi-million dollar portfolios of work involving dozens or hundreds of resources. By getting that consolidated view into resource needs of the future, companies are able to make better strategic decisions around which projects to accept and which ones to defer or cancel.