Certinia PS Cloud vs. Planview AdaptiveWork

Simplification of multiple operations within the business and easy scheduling and task management through FinancialForce PSA is effective and easy tracking multiple previous project activities is easy. Automation tools stability is good, and flexibility on services production and even the connection of customers with services providers is amazing and the development life cycle management is incredible.

I've been an AdaptiveWork (Clarizen) admin for the past 14 years, so I've seen much improvement since I started working with the product. I'm very happy we can utilize the hybrid mode by using the cards, I think this was long overdue but it works very well.

Incentivized

• Simplicity. I never felt like the system was too complicated to figure out, even as I was just starting out using it.
• Efficient. I like how easy is it to get through the entire process and see all of the data in an easy to read manner. It's good for the company to be able to organize its expense data using the product.
• Fast. I was able to complete my expense reports fast and pain-free.

Incentivized

• Many ways to acclimate to the system; documentation, videos, community, and contacts.
• Planview provides scalable customization options tailored to the unique needs of each business unit or department. Easily add or remove fields in the system. As the admin, it was easy to learn how to configure.
• Offers flexibility to adapt to existing systems and align with organizational workflows and processes. There are multiple ways to customize each part of the system to meet our needs.

Incentivized

• The only part of FinancialForce that is very frustrating, is that we are unable to edit an invoice after it has been posted. The invoice is permanent and any small error can't be fixed, which means I have to create another invoice. Because of this, we have multiple "discarded" invoices in the system--forever!

Incentivized

• Planview AdaptiveWork's ability to create relations between work estimates, resources, and time is one of its strengths but also one of its drawbacks. The average user is a little less considerate of the way these things interact with each and the automatic way in which Planview AdaptiveWork will affect one or the other can occasionally create a confusing scenario if the user is unaware of how changing one will affect the other

Incentivized

There is another PSA software program that we have been looking into (DreamFactory) that could potentially replace FinancialForce PSA in our organization. Like FinancialForce PSA, it is cloud based on the force.com platform. Licensing is slightly less than FinancialForce PSA, and the Resource Management tool is far superior to FinancialForce PSA. With that said, our renewal falls in Q4 2014 and I don't foresee us implementing a new system this fiscal year.

I give my renewal of this product a 9. It's only because we never know what product may come out next and how other factors in our office political environment may cause impact upon this. If I always had my way, this is what we'd settle on as our de facto project management system.

From my standpoint, FinancialForce PSA is relatively easy to use. As a System Administrator, I am able to maneuver around the software with ease. As a user of FinancialForce PSA, I am able to input my timecards and expense reports without any issues. I have received very positive and very negative feedback about using FinancialForce PSA, however, from users in other functional roles in my organization.

It is easy to configure, intuitive. The customization process is in some ways better than Salesforce.com. It has a great UI. It does however depend on how it's implemented.

The design of it is generally fine, however the ability to data upload people from a spreadsheet is an obvious miss.

We have maybe had 1-2 outages over 3 years.

Sometimes it is slow when everyone is entering their time on Fridays or Mondays but other than that we rarely see downtime and maintenance notifications are well in advance.

Most of the time it is fine. There are peak periods of usage where performance noticably slows down (i.e., Monday mornings when time is due and many reports are being run)

Reports: Quick to Reasonable

Most Ancillary Pages: Quick to Reasonable
(By "ancillary" I mean lesser used/master data maintenance pages - e.g. People, Customers, Individual Tasks, Milestones, etc.)

Work Plan (with 100 sub items): Reasonable to Slow

Every time I submit a new help request, whether it's an actual help request or just a question about FinancialForce PSA, I always feel that I'm receiving world class support. The support we receive from FinancialForce PSA is always very detailed and professional. There are some requests that take longer than other for the initial response, which is why I did not give a full 10.

It's a good experience overall. Clarizen was useful when needed. It's mostly needed for advice on how to do more sophisticated actions or how to change something that was set up administratively. It's seldom used otherwise. The product consistently works, the documentation is acceptable, and the generally intuitive product is easy enough for most staff to pick up without much issue.

Incentivized

It was fine.

• We worked with a Project Manager on their side. He was very good about developing a project plan to hit our goal. I think we had weekly or twice weekly calls – very steady cadence over 3 month period.
• Their PM skills were great – kept us on task. For the last week, they sent 2 people on site and they did training for power users. After that a couple of them revisited here

It's easy to access and frequently offered. Often I'm amongst only a few people on the call and get virtually individual attention. I also learn and share with the other attendees and we can see how we've each solved similar challenges.

Appirio did a good job, however, the user team didn’t know enough to make all the right configuration/customization choices. The team focused too much on replicating existing processes vs. reengineering them. In hindsight we should have had deep dive reviews at key milestones and enforced more focus on how the software would operate. We didn’t have access to true best practices expertise. In hindsight, a consultant from the outside would have been helpful to drive this.

We have been able to implement AdaptiveWork pretty easily but it requires updating of resource availability and continuous training as roles change and new people join the company. Other documentation is used such as spreadsheets for longer range planning and project approval

Incentivized

PSA comes with a lot more data and reporting capabilities than were available at the time we switched from BigTime IQ. You get more features and functions with PSA, but the user interface is much much more difficult than BigTime. It was a fairly big trade-off to get more data and increase user accountability vs. a clean and simple tool that was easy to understand and use.

Incentivized

Planview AdaptiveWork was the right size, at the right price point that fit our customization and integration flexibility. It is intuitive to use but allowed us to add complexity as our needs grew

Incentivized

• We are a boutique consulting company and having FF PSA has allowed us to concentrate on the pre-sales side of business instead of being mired in the admin of projects and people.
• There is some redundancy for our consultants in managing Project Tasks and timecards, however, this is more based on our business process than the product.
• As a Managing Partner I love the 360 view of our business we get with SF and FF PSA.

Incentivized

• Planview AdaptiveWork allows us to report out on the status of our real estate projects on a regular basis. We have internal objectives that need to be met for on-time delivery and Planview AdaptiveWork provides us the data to be able to show how the teams are tracking on delivery.

Incentivized