Planview Daptiv vs. Projector PSA

I would recommend Daptiv for anyone who is look for a collaborative tool that is easy to use and provides excellent results for project management and resource allocation. The tool offers many various capabilities and is not isolated for use with one or two workgroups. Its versatility allows many workgroups across many different organizations to use it. In my previous role, I used Daptiv in both a Project Management and Account Services Information Technology role. In my current workplace, I would like to leverage Daptiv for Product Launch and tracking as well as change request visibility in the Release Management Organization of a pharmaceutical company. Both roles and companies are vastly different however Daptiv would serve a great purpose in both situations although my needs are different.

We think Projector PSA is a great tool to track and manage people in a professional service environment like management consulting. This system is easy to set up, easy to understand and should easily suit the needs of smaller and medium sized firms. It may be less appropriate for firms that rely very heavily on project management through another system (like MS Project) or firms that rely very heavily on a sales pipeline tracking system. While still very much possible to use, you would (I believe) have to do some re-keying between systems

• Time management - it's a great tool for tracking time spent working on different projects.
• Reports - I love being able to run a report at the end of the year to see how much time I spent on specific projects, how many projects I completed, and how many types of projects I worked on. This really helps me write my annual review.

• Time tracking. For a service company that typically bills retainers, it is very important to be able to assign a direct cost to your resources at all levels and analyze your profitability.
• Expense reporting. Projector easily tracks expenses of all types and allows you to categorize them under non-billable projects, client billable projects and/or client development ventures.
• Reporting. Projector has a large list of standard reports right at your fingertips. These reports can be extracted as Excel docs, mdp files and other useful formats. They are intuitive, clear and easy to analyze. For those you need on a standard basis, you can set them up to pull on a recurring basis. It should be noted that all reports are easily customized and Projector's support team is always there to help get you the information you need.

Incentivized

• We often had slow performance from the system due to the large number of users we had accessing the tool.
• Daptiv could improve on the access they provide to administrators. Would be nice to have access to our data in backend database tables so that we could easily make mass updates to user accounts and projects.

• The split between the desktop and web environments was awkward at times.
• While the reporting modules are powerful, creating reports can be complex and required a fairly deep knowledge of the product.
• The appearance and interface of the desktop application appears somewhat dated.

As previously mentioned, we were not able to get the product to solve our particular problem. After time spent implementing a custom solution, it was the decision of the executive team to discontinue the agreement. The costs of training the team didn't outweigh the cost of hiring an employee to do the translation of schedules to web view.

We have been using this tool for a year now and find our use of it continually evolves and broadens. We are also very excited about the overhaul that's under way and feel many of the improvements being put in place will help make us that much more effective and efficient. The Projector team is also very responsive and collaborative in terms of user feedback and improvement suggestions, which helps us know they will work hard to help us get what we need out of the tool.

The main thing that I have to apologize for is the UI. Does the job but just not the flexible responsive experience that most users are used to.

Incentivized

Desktop interface feels complex to new users.

In the 3 years I have worked with Daptiv I think it is been down once. The ONLY partial outages I have ever had have been with report automation.

Incentivized

In 5 years of use we have never experienced an unscheduled outage.

Good support team! Developed relationships and were very pleasant to talk to. Daptiv went above and beyond on ensuring the customers were satisfied

I recommend using daptiv resources on your implementation to help with setup and training.

AdaptiveWork might not necessarily have robust Analytical abilities that Daptiv IBM Cognos BI tool have, but from the introduction I have seen of the product it has impressive capabilities. It is still work in progress and still learning about AdaptiveWork and looking forward to implementing and supporting it in the near future.

We switched to Projector from Open Air. While Open Air was a good tool, we found it wasn't really designed for project management at the level of detail we needed from our PSA and used MS Project and Excel to supplement Open Air. We also struggled with the invoicing side of it, manually combining invoice summaries with custom time and expense reports in Acrobat. Projector however, was designed for project management. We are able to manage projects, track time and expenses, and invoice all out of one system. The project setup can accommodate a wide range of complexity, including milestones, dependencies, etc. Project and resource dashboards also help see the services portfolio and team at a summary level and allows us to zero in on particulars easily and more meaningfully than we were ever able to with Open Air. Invoice templates are also easily customized and we were able to get several set up quickly to meet our needs. Lastly, Open Air required us to purchase and pre-pay licensing for a year, so if we lost staff mid-way through the year, the unused seat was not prorated. Projector licensing is paid monthly based on actual number of active users that month, which makes more sense for a team with fluctuating headcount.

We are quickly able to add more users as needed.

Incentivized

• I am in the process of establishing a hard dollar ROI received from Daptiv. However, there have been many soft dollar benefits we have achieved. Soft benefits include IT teams that are more aligned to business objectives, "one version of the truth" for where work is being performed and resources consumed, and more accurate estimation of project requests.

Incentivized

• Even in the small time that I stayed to see Projector PSA reporting I saw ROI projections become more realistic. There was real data to analyze that proved we were spending way too much and charging way too less on some projects.
• Although employees were not used at entering their hours, this single reporting improved operations management and validated employees concerns that more people were needed to manage workload
• Project proposals were more realistic because they were driven by real data.
• Decision making overall for the department became more efficient and effective

Incentivized