Planview makes us Plan-True, a PPM solution that towers among the greats
September 30, 2021

Planview makes us Plan-True, a PPM solution that towers among the greats

Joe Lamden, (MBCS) | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Portfolio and Resource Management (formerly Planview Enterprise)
  • Ad-Hoc Tabular models for Power BI

Overall Satisfaction with Planview Enterprise One (formerly Planview Enterprise and Troux)

Currently, in Allianz Insurance, we use PV to manage our inflight projects through a gated waterfall approach with an active desire to explore Leankit Agile functionalities, we use the Financial management elements to track ongoing project costs and how those actuals vary against the forecasts made initially, allowing us to easily pick out financial variances with little to no effort, this allows us to spot which PMs need to provide variance commentary. we also have recently refined the way we track Risks, Issues and Changes by both implementing the out-of-the-box feilds and alternate structures, as well as adding our own custom fields to taylor the informtation gathering to our company's internal process requirements. this gives us very rich information on where our priorities should lie when mitigating risks before escalating to issues, and where we should be raising change requests to get projects back on track and revisions to their resources. Planview is currently used mainly within our UK and Germany delivery organisations and subsiqently used by our practice leads to perform resource management tasks, such as requirement approval and creating allocations on projects, however, in previous organisations, i have also seen PV work effectivly with dedicated departmental resource managers. with the use of resource portfolios, resource management and capacity planning becomes a walk in the park, and living in a day and age where flexible working has become the norm and mental health has become far more important than ever, tracking individual resource utilisation from a singluar page is a line manager/resource managers dream. Planview really ticks all the boxes.
  • Project Planning
  • Risk/Issue/Change management
  • Financial Planning
  • Strategy & Planning
  • Resource Management
  • Depedancy Management
  • Time Recording (although, we find explaining what time recording impacts to be the only way to explain the benefits to Project managers)
  • Waterfall Gate Management (through the use of Lifecycles)
  • Power BI integration using Ad-Hoc Tabular models (The Greatest thing you guys have created so far.... just saying)
  • Column Sets, makes quick updates and tabular data a breeze.
  • Loading times... even if there is no VPN running or the Internet connection is blisteringly fast, Planview in all of my organizations has been clunky and slow... which is the biggest user turn-off and where we Admins get all the grief from the user base... seriously needs addressing.
  • It's browser-based only... id love to see this as an App or a Client... at least for performing basic tasks such as recording Time or Risks, etc.... would speed things up and utilize more of the performance of whatever device is being used.
  • Fastrack analytics.... guys, it's 2021, these reports look fresh out of a 1988 Bill gates portfolio, some of these graphs look like they should be loaded on a gigantic CRT monitor running on Windows 3.1... jokes aside, the information quality is great, but the visuals are just so dated.
  • deleting/adding our own attributes to ad-hoc tabular models which we have purchased... as you guys are aware, processes mature all the time in organizations... meaning the information we ask of people changes with it, which means, we need a faster/more cost-effective way of adding and removing attributes to Power BI Tabular models instead of raising tickets and paying for consultancy every time.
  • Having some kind of mechanism to track Risks/Issues/Dependanies that have been accepted into BAU after a project has closed would be useful... although I understand the purpose of a PPM tool, keeping track of active risks and issues that have been delegated to a central BAU risk and issues log would be very helpful.
  • Financial Management
  • Tabular Models/Power BI
  • CRI
  • Lifecycles (For Gate Management)
  • It has allowed us to keep track of our Resource utilization, and spot when our colleagues are over/underworked, this can assist line managers in work distribution.
  • Capacity Planning has vastly improved, planning for the next X number of years portfolio has become less of a hassle since no real argument for whether we have the resources to complete certain projects
It's interesting... Planview is far more comprehensive in respect to functionality than any of these tools (hence all the Gartner Magic Quadrant awards) but there are always Planview users who seem to claim it to be clunky and slow compared to tools that carry a fraction of Planview's power, such as Jira... Developers love ripping on Planview and how "Pointless" timesheeting is, and I feel Planview as an organization could really step up how it is viewed by shining light on why it's better, rather than simply demonstrating its features... people want to know why you are better than the alternative.

Do you think Planview Portfolios delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Planview Portfolios's feature set?

Yes

Did Planview Portfolios live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Planview Portfolios go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Planview Portfolios again?

Yes

We have been struggling to communicate with our delivery partners about the lack of quality when it comes to project-level information and data, when implementing an Ad-Hoc tabular model and getting a real handle of our data in Planview, our governance team was now armed with the ammunition they needed in order to face the issue head-on. using high quality dashboards and information provided by the project managers from Planview, the metrics spoke for themselves, and exposed senior stakeholders to the reality of alot of the unasked and unanswered questions across the organization, "Are these projects really Green?" "Why are these projects proceeding at Risk?" - and the conversations truly began, putting pressure on our delivery team to step it up a gear in respects to data quality, giving out governance organization the support they needed to enforce high quality policies onto our delivery organization.