People and projects are the heart and soul of a business. So Deltek created Vantagepoint, which they present as a powerful, intuitive solution that helps users manage projects from start to finish. Deltek Vantagepoint’s 360-degree view of projects puts client, project and financial details in a single location. The vendor states this adds up to making well-informed tactical and strategic business decisions and a more efficient, productive and profitable company.
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Planview ChangePoint
Score 7.5 out of 10
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Planview Changepoint is a platform that marries professional services automation (PSA), project portfolio management (PPM) and business analytics to provide managers broad operational visibility and control over their strategic business portfolios.
It is well suited to connecting customer relationship databases and a project lifecycle. Business development people and other personnel should be able to get good use out of it in their daily jobs and functions. It is helpful to keep a record of ongoing projects and new pursuits among the team.
Changepoint is well-suited for consulting firms and other companies that charge clients for their time and have a need for significant project-management capabilities along with reporting and invoicing. It is not well-suited for companies that want a more basic solution to time reporting and expense reimbursement. The key questions to ask during the selection process revolve around this basic question: how are you going to use this software? Though it has a lot of functionality, the learning curve is steep and basic functionality is not as easy as one would expect.
There are lots of reporting options. Once you figure out how to work the parameters of a report, the system is able to provide detailed and accurate compilations of data. There are also many custom reports than can be setup, as well. In my experience, we have told Changepoint PSA administrators what kind of report we were needed and they set it up for us, available in a 'custom reports' folder.
You can have several things open at once -- 'portals'. These are up at the top of the screen, much like how Google Chrome has tabs at the top. This is useful.
Reporting is very clunky and anything but intuitive.
Compared to Vision, Vantagepoint layouts are very cookie-cutter. The latest release allows you to create up to 5 columns, still, it is so much less customizable than Vision in look and feel.
Customer service is poor. If you have a question or issue you can expect it to be addressed in 2-4 weeks, minimum.
Software testing has been poor in the past. Too many bugs have made it through to release on things that should have easily been caught, such as certain workflows not working, etc.
The site could become slow with high volumes of traffic. This may have been due to the way that our infrastructure was setup.
Analytic reporting was not available in the version that we used. We created external reports to slice and dice the data and view it as the business demanded.
Sometimes the decision to renew boils down to an old adage "if it isn't broken don't fix it". Previous to moving to Changepoint, it was obvious that we needed a better project management tool. Projects we completed on time but the time zone difference between the teams and several iterations of back and forth caused a number of communication issues with projects. The difference is night and day.
It is ok to use; it is not the easiest to use in terms of usability and user-friendliness but it is not the worst. It still feels somewhat outdated. Many cloud options are cleaner or look more modern. But it is good enough and you should be able to get the hang of it.
I would rate Deltek VantagePoint highly in terms of the overall support. You can receive support any time you need it and there is a representative from Deltek assigned to your account so that you can always get the help when you need it. Sometimes, they want to go more in-depth than I would like, however.
The one-stop-shop of CRM, accounting, reporting, and planning is the biggest appeal for Vantagepoint. When you set up your system to provide a "single source of truth" it makes use of other systems impractical and obsolete. Other systems can provide a portion (CRM, accounting, planning, etc.) of what Vantagepoint offers in a single package, but very few provide the one-stop-shop Vantagepoint provides.
The system predates me as I was not working for the company when the solution was chosen - I understand this may have been an 'overpromise, underdeliver' scenario. However, we are now moving towards replacing it with Supportworks - and having seen Supportworks in action I genuinely cannot wait to switch from Changepoint and move on...
Our ability to maintain a global IS Scorecard helped us to maintain a focus on completing projects on time and within budget.
Having a single instance of Changepoint with projects aligned to specific portfolios helps senior management to maintain a focus on the investment of IS resources. It is foundational to our governance processes.
