Good for collaboration; great together with Innotas
Updated December 20, 2017
Good for collaboration; great together with Innotas
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Projectplace
We're using Projectplace to collaborate between multifunctional product development teams. The teams are all collocated in the US, so English is the language used.
We chose Projectplace because it offered multiple needs (planning, document sharing, portfolio view, agile/kanban style planning, time tracking) within a simple-to-learn package. More importantly, we were interested in the integration between Projectplace and Innotas for resource management, project prioritization, and requests.
We chose Projectplace because it offered multiple needs (planning, document sharing, portfolio view, agile/kanban style planning, time tracking) within a simple-to-learn package. More importantly, we were interested in the integration between Projectplace and Innotas for resource management, project prioritization, and requests.
- Document sharing and automatic versioning of documents as users review and edit documents.
- Boards: Allowing users to "plan their own destiny" and detail out activities they need to complete for each project task. On boards, team members can plan when to work on which activities.
- Planning is weak in Projectplace. The Projectplace plan is essentially an illustration only; there is no critical path determination and activities can start before dependencies are complete. We are building project schedules in MS Project, then importing to Projectplace and manually highlighting the critical path as a 2-step process. Projectplace only offers start-to-finish dependency between tasks, other relationships will be useful.
- No undo button. It's too easy to accidentally change the project plan (duration, or start/end dates) with a mouse click.
- Document edits... Word documents, when opened for editing and with change tracking enabled, do not inherit the audit trail of Word. We cannot tell who made edits or comments to a document because they are all marked with "author".
- In Planning, duration assumes calendar days vs. working days. No ability to override and input holidays or non-working days.
- There is no correlation between cards and plans. If an activity is expected to take 1 day and there are cards that total more than 24 hours of activity, Projectplace does not alert or indicate that an impossible scenario has occurred. The effort estimates vs. actual are simply a tally of information entered. There is no checking or validation of planned vs. actual effort.
- Prior to Projectplace, we did not have project time tracking so we had no sense of the actual project cost. Now that we have Projectplace and have set up everyone to enter and track time, we have better visibility and actual data for projects.
- Prior to Projectplace, teams were used to a project plan given to them with task durations and estimates done by someone else. With Projectplace, team members are planning the activities they need to perform and estimating effort. They are more accountable for their deliverables.
- Since Projectplace's planning isn't powerful, we are maintaining an MS Project schedule and a Projectplace schedule, which requires effort we didn't need to do before.
Microsoft Project is most powerful for scheduling, critical chain analysis, resource leveling, etc. However, Microsoft Project could not resolve resources allocated across multiple projects, schedules are not dynamically updated with progress, and difficult to build a portfolio view.
LiquidPlanner has a great Monte Carlo simulation estimation engine and supports Agile methodology. However, LiquidPlanner's premise of prioritizing projects and tasks linearly made it difficult to run projects using LiquidPlanner. Also, there's no 'offline' sandbox area to run scenarios for building new projects.
Playbook has a great collaboration, Agile workspace. It's easy to use. However, the tool was buggy and needs maturity. Also plans needed to be very detailed in Playbook, which is not scaleable for any sizeable project.
Projectplace by itself is an easy to use collaboration tool which provided enough planning, enough collaboration, enough time reporting and enough Kanban/Agile methodology support. The true benefit of Projectplace over the other tools is the collaboration between Projectplace and Innotas for resource management.
LiquidPlanner has a great Monte Carlo simulation estimation engine and supports Agile methodology. However, LiquidPlanner's premise of prioritizing projects and tasks linearly made it difficult to run projects using LiquidPlanner. Also, there's no 'offline' sandbox area to run scenarios for building new projects.
Playbook has a great collaboration, Agile workspace. It's easy to use. However, the tool was buggy and needs maturity. Also plans needed to be very detailed in Playbook, which is not scaleable for any sizeable project.
Projectplace by itself is an easy to use collaboration tool which provided enough planning, enough collaboration, enough time reporting and enough Kanban/Agile methodology support. The true benefit of Projectplace over the other tools is the collaboration between Projectplace and Innotas for resource management.
Planview ProjectPlace Feature Ratings
Using Projectplace
53 -
- Program Management
- R&D
- Quality
- Manufacturing Engineering
- Regulatory
- Product Management
- Senior Management
3 - Detailed oriented
Global understanding of project management practices
Knowledge of company organizational makeup: project team makeup, roles & responsibilities
Global understanding of project management practices
Knowledge of company organizational makeup: project team makeup, roles & responsibilities
- Time tracking on projects
- Project execution using boards & cards
- Portfolio reporting
- Plan to use Projectplace with Innotas for resource management
- Plan to use with Innotas for scenario building to plan potential new projects or to reprioritize existing projects