Planview AdaptiveWork vs. Deltek TrafficLIVE

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

On a scale between 1-10, I would score Deltek TrafficLIVE as a 4 in terms of recommendations. This is due to the fact that as a Finance Analyst, I found it a very difficult system to use when all I could get from the system was raw data. It was almost impossible to create reports within the system. It was good, however, for users to input their time.

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 time sheet area is really good - it's easy to drag and drop and fill in time sheets with allocated tasks quickly, which makes it more likely that people will actually do it!
• It's invaluable to be able to see the time spent on different tasks across a job - both for keeping track of ongoing projects, but also to plan resourcing and costs for the next time.
• It's useful to be able to mark parts of a job as 'complete' before the full job is finished - this makes it easier to track which tasks still have to be finished, and makes sure that people are tracking time to the correct task within the job.
• Job templates are very useful to make sure the same set of tasks is added to each job automatically.

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

• One of the main features I would like to see added is another permissions option that allows Studio/Traffic Managers to the see the 'blue' time added that currently only the user can see when they have added their actual hourly time. This would give the option to view quickly the progress of a job, and to see if its still live or completed. There is the option to look at the 'weekly timesheet' but this in my opinion is not nearly as user friendly as being able to look at a glance each calendar.
• It would be hugely beneficial if along the grey bar on the bottom of the homepage another notification is added that a job had been added to Deltek TrafficLIVE. A simple number would alert you that a new job has been added and needs your immediate attention.
• The job search has been conveyed to me by a number of users as not working efficiently enough. If you have the job number then it works perfectly but if you try to locate a job by the account managers name or project name it will not reliably respond in your search.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

• 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.

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

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

Synergist - does the same thing, but the interface was far more complicated to use. Looked like a bit of a nightmare to use. Didn't get too far reviewing this one. Was too concerned about on boarding with our workforce.

Paprika - saw a demo, looked 'OK', heard bad reviews from friends in the same industry. Appeared to be plagued with the same issues as Synergistic. Paint to use.

Streamtime - Tested this thoroughly. Loved the interface, and very nearly bought this software over TrafficLIVE for that very reason. In the end it did not allow us to separate time into distinct categories such as 'estimated', 'quoted', 'scheduled', and 'actual'. In Streamtime, if you stretched the time next to a task, it seemed to also adjust the estimate as well. In contrast, Traffic separated time into these dimensions for every task, resulting in a far more useful data set for reporting.

Finally, Traffic was cloud based, which meant that I didn't need the added hassle of hosting and maintenance. In my opinion, Streamtime is suited to a smaller business, maybe 5-20 employees. It might have improved now but it's been two years since I reviewed it.

• 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

• We use Deltek TrafficLive in an in-house studio environment, so we don't use all of its features. However, we couldn't function as efficiently without it.

Incentivized