Kantata PS Cloud vs. Planview Portfolios

Mavenlink is useful for planning and maximizing our resources. Improved resource visibility and control. It helps us determine who is accessible in terms of skill and competency, as well as the amount of work they are capable of handling. Mavenlink is beneficial for forecasting resource needs and reallocating resources to meet goals. Mavenlink is useful to have a control over the work minute by minute, without having to wait for answers. It's flexible to monitor how time, money and margins are managed from anywhere at any time. Mavenlink allows us to examine and act through an industry-leading
business intelligence layer that provides you with dozens of well-crafted
reports to solve pricing, profit, usage, and availability issues.

Incentivized

Planview Portfolios is well suited to provide a single, central, view of the truth. There is clear expansion capabilities to integrate it as a true Enterprise toolset with existing organisation wide (not just delivery) - you can pick and choose what you need to implement and that list gets longer. The ability to quickly gain an understanding of resources within the overall portfolio and some really clever tools regarding capacity and demand modelling. I think the only challenge we have encountered is modelling our Business as Usual activity to a level of detail - this is due to other tools being very embedded not just in the organisation but across a lot of industries.

Incentivized

• It allows a lot of customization in regards for projects if you want them to be extremely detailed on tasks
• Master planning feature gives a great overall view for me planning my projects out
• The design looks better than Salesforce, color coding certain projects indicating for their statuses

Incentivized

• Out of the box analytics. Canned, but modestly configurable reports that provide quick insights to project and resource performance.
• Flexible configuration enables resource management at a macro or micro level.
• Modeling (what-if). I can create projects, load with resources and quickly stack it against our existing portfolios to identify conflicts and optimize scheduling.

Incentivized

• The Gantt chart does not allow for baselines to be stored
• There is no means to upload an excel task tracker and build a plan using an upload
• The schedule does not allow for planning of holidays
• The status report functionality needs to be improved

Incentivized

• Capturing lower-level detailed expenditures within a project so that financial screens can show the details of the roll-up.
• Reporting flexibility so that end users can create their own quick ad hoc reports for analysis.
• Capturing matrixed skills on resources to ensure staffing is adequate and better align demand to supply.

Incentivized

Although the company I currently work for does not use the product I have recommended that we do switch to Mavenlink. We will be opening some new sites internationally this year and I can see that Mavenlink would be a great product for us to use

Portfolios are useful enterprise solutions for new and old use cases. They have robust reporting capabilities and many opportunities to customize the functions without additional costs. Although some desired features are still in development, and the reporting infrastructure has some issues, Portfolios continue to offer more capabilities than we can take advantage of at any time.

Incentivized

Only the app is bad; everything else is fantastic. It has a logical user flow and I barely needed any guidance on how to use it when I first started. As with most softwares there are unseen capabilities I've needed to be shown in order to use, but for my day-to-day tasks I could have figured it out without any training

Incentivized

Perfect tool for planning resource time management. Giving flexibility with ease in uptodate . Team collabration . Team aligment. Top management aligment. Close the project with feed back . Team aligment. Expert contribution in task . Task management easy for project manager . Nice tool to have for project manager. Cost contol & project management is very easy with Planview

Incentivized

Mavenlink gives advance notice for system upgrades, and they're not during our business day. Mavenlink has always been available when we needed it.

We are long time Planview users and its availability is only limited to our internal SLAs for nightly backups. I have never experienced any unexpected or prolonged software downtime from Planview itself.

Very good integration with Google apps. Some complexity is called however in the synchronization between Google Tasks and Maven links tasks. This can sometimes lead to duplicate records in Google Tasks. It has been dissolvable that becomes cumbersome if not properly curated.

There are occasions when the system is a bit sluggish. However, it may not always be on the Planview side. We are investing in better tools to monitor our network performance, which will help us diagnose issues more effectively in the future.

Incentivized

Kantata support is fantastic! Any issues that arise are always handled quickly and efficiently. Granted, we haven't had many issues to report. Typically, my team tends to only reach out to support if they need assistance remembering how to do something or asking about an improvement. We had Kantata build an integration when we first started using the software, and the support team worked hard to listen and improve the integration.

Incentivized

Consultants are knowledgeable and friendly; it is easy to build relationships with the support people you work with and they learn how best to help you. The vendor is continuously looking for honest feedback about their tool and they use that information to design their product roadmaps

We prepared questions in advance, and our trainer was an expert in what Mavenlink was and wasn't able to do. We were able to have multiple people trained at once.

The training was very well-organized. We were able to send questions in advance so the instructor knew what to cover, and the brought up related topics to maximize the usefulness of what they were teaching us.

Generally good. Sometimes, users are a bit overwhelmed, and it takes multiple sessions for them to get the hang of it.

Incentivized

Dedicate as much internal time to the implementation effort as possible, even if you're using a 3rd party or Mavenlink services. Your team knows your processes the best

Always have a pre-implementation meeting or conference call with Planview to ensure all are on the same page, disclosure of all and any customization (including reports) and plan for support after implementation of a specified amount of time with the assigned implementation resource. And document everything

I have not had much experience with this other product, It was only for a few months during a part-time so I did not have to interact with the product on a regular basis. However, Mavenlink is much more intuitive and requires little to no training prior to using it. It is also more flexible in its ability to display project status in a variety of ways.

Incentivized

We are currently using Planview AgilePlace. Also we use Tasktop Hub for integrating with other applications within the organization. We would like to use ProjectPlace which is integrated with Planview Portfolios in the future.

Incentivized

It's very easy to add users and contractors into Mavenlink. There's also an option that let's you manage access for teams in multiple locations.

We are constantly growing and expanding. It is challenging to accommodate different user needs, but the system does provide means of doing that as we desire.

Incentivized

• Manvenlink is perfect for showing expenses and income over time and across people.
• Manvenlink is adaptable for the integration and automation of the processes of each of our projects in order to optimize resources and improve operational performance.
• Mavenlink allows us to determine if our projects are profitable or not, as well as save significant time by automating components such as recurring tasks and having templates, among other things.
• Manvenlink is advantageous for our operations due to its simple portfolio management of our projects: manage several projects at once and receive a complete perspective of the development of each one at a glance.
• Manvenlink kindly provides us with robust discussion threads, access restrictions, and built-in document management, allowing us to contextualize communications.

Incentivized

• The positive impact is the ability to manage our projects enterprise wide.
• Managing and reporting on projects and programs via portfolios makes it easy to identify troubled projects/programs that need immediate attention.
• The negative is that pushing too much change too quickly is hard for us. We need to get our users focused on the basics of PM before we can adopt everything else. We need to introduce change to different companies based on their maturity level. Too much change too quickly is not always beneficial. We need to focus on core competencies.

Incentivized