Bubble PPM vs. Planview PPM Pro

No stage gate or portfolio reporting solution can overcome poor input data. The organization has to be willing to commit to consistent and rigorous updates of the information, or the reporting becomes useless. From what I've seen of competitive systems, Bubble Innovator is the easiest to use in this regard, so the excuse of not having good data because it's painful to upload or cumbersome to retrieve goes away. And the ease with which you can produce customized reports allows you to immediately find the gaps and weak points in your data, and take action to address them. That's not to say that every report and function in Bubble Innovator is perfect. But the close collaboration and responsiveness of the Bubble Innovation team has made it relatively easy to triage, prioritize, and implement improvements along the way.

PPMPro is well suited for tracking new product introduction projects, as well as process changes. It serves to reliably track ongoing action items, issues, resource allocations for projects. Areas where PPMPro is less appropriate for use: Project to project dependencies, automating action item notifications on multiple platforms, integrations of PPMPro into other platforms PMO typically uses (like MS Projects, Teams, ppt, etc)

• The Bubble team is outstanding at providing technical support, query response times are often within an hour and resolutions (depending on the level of complexity of the query) follow very quickly after this. They provide a professional, reliable service.
• The software design is simple, intuitive and more accessible than many of the alternatives on the market. It does not require licenses, installations, internal servers, extensive training programs. It doesn't interface directly with 'business management' software which provides flexibility and development opportunities.
• The Bubble team have a depth of knowledge for new product development processes and relevant industries, and provide much more than just the software. The teams are actively involved in process design beyond the software, and their recommendations have been invaluable when establishing a new stage-gate process across our organisation.

• New request workflow/kanban board helps visualize where new requests are in the process of the quote to cash/request to completion
• The time tracking tool is tied directly to project tasks for seamless integration of time tracking, estimates, and actuals
• The reporting capabilities and ease of use has allowed us visibility to data that we never had before
• The tool is easily configurable by Administrators. We can add fields, change reports, add new dashboards within hours vs. days of trying to track things manually

Incentivized

• Only thing I can think of is almost piddly, that is having to scroll on a screen within the web browser - so that you have to scroll the screen then scroll the browser screen to get to the bottom of a chart.

• The base API is not a REST based interface and is difficult to use for integration with other systems in the enterprise.
• The UI for the maintenance of the task schedule for projects can be a bit cumbersome , although the spreadsheet style editor helps somewhat. The Gantt view is not interactive.
• The workflow engine is designed only for initial project intake, and does not allow for an integration of the work flow with the project from start to end, so it can't be used for routing artifacts like change requests, ancillary project approvals, etc.

Incentivized

The business has been extremely satisfied with Bubble Innovator and is in support of rolling this tool out to our other businesses within the overall franchise.

As I previously stated I am no longer in the role where I acted as Innotas admin, but because our license has been twice renewed since initial deployment and since I am in the business and have used the IT request process I created and have not heard anything to the contrary

The user interface is highly visual and simple. Literally within 10-15 minutes of my introduction to the software, I was up and running. Of course, deeper capabilities become apparent after additional use, but the basic functionality is very simple to grasp. Where there are consistent challenges reported by multiple users, the Bubble Innovation team is quick to connect and put plans in place to address the challenges.

PPM Pro has very effective process capabilities around Project, Demand, and Resource Management as well as Reporting/Dashboards. Very stable platform, never any downtime. We now also have PPM Pro Sandbox which we have leveraged for any new major developments such as Request Management.

Incentivized

Never any availability issues or outages. The few process issues we have ever encountered were addressed and resolved quickly.

Incentivized

No issues with overall response time and performance. There have been some occasions where a Report could take few minutes to render but this is vary rare. No integration issues...

Incentivized

Outstanding response times, and solutions to issues requiring support are quickly implemented. For bigger issues or longer term developments, Bubble happily takes the time to meet in person and discuss requirements to drive detailed solutions.

Their ability to assist and answer questions when needed is incredible. They create innovative ways to share information and help customers trouble shoot. I didn't give it a ten because I believe they could do a better job of personally reaching out to customers and providing improvement guidance based on where the customer is at and their needs at the time

Tim Srjezter was an excellent trainer.

The number of variables made this extremely challenging (org changes, stage gate harmonization, pipeline prioritization, and new governance model). I think the implementation was handled very well in spite of this, and managed to deliver on time and on budget.

It's been since 2009. A lot has changed. We have not grown as much as we could have because of executive backing.

Incentivized

Prior to Bubble PPM we attempted use of many of the well-known project management tools to manage our product development work. Those other project management tools were met with frustration in attempts to implement them because they are more focused with the timing and scheduling of individual projects rather than capturing the full portfolio of possible candidate projects and selecting the most strategic and valuable projects to move forward. Bubble PPM was the first system we found that was purpose-built for managing product development work, and its implementation was very successful from the beginning with the personal help given by the team at Bubble.

Microsoft Project does not integrate the data or provide meaningful dashboards. We needed a tool that could manage a portfolio of projects versus just a single project view. In addition we needed a tool to track financials and internal effort all integrated into one product. Planview PPM Pro addressed all of our needs

We have always used PPM Pro across multiple Business Units and Business Functions and have never encountered any scalability issues. PPM Pro offers flexibility in how the various Entities are configured across the Enterprise

Incentivized

• Bubble Innovator helped us drive new product on time deliveries to 80% on-time product launches.
• Our corporate target was new product making up 20% of our annual revenues. Bubble Innovator helped us manage our resources to plan and exceed that goal.
• Bubble innovator allowed us to redeploy a full time team member that was managing spreadsheets of information for monthly updates. It also saved our project managers significant amounts of time that they could dedicate back to their projects.

• Planview PPM directs all the resources in the right channel, hence, credible performance.
• Planview PPM initiates proper time, and resource tracking and hence is friendly for company functions.
• Planview PPM is competent in managing diverse projects, and this offers highly sustainable business continuity.

Incentivized