EPM Live vs. Planview AdaptiveWork

EPM Live is well suited for a business that feels they are slightly disconnected between departments. If you think you're sales and support staff need to be better connected with your development and programming (like us), then you can benefit immediately. There are a host of other features to help any business that has a lot of "irons in the fire". They make it a lot easier to pinpoint what areas need more attention and what areas probably should be spending so much money.

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

• EPM Live has several modules that users can use for their project management solutions.
• EPM Live can be customized by the company that is using it.
• It integrates well with Microsoft products.

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

• Performance is not always consistent. There are periods of time where everything goes wrong with the tool, and there are times when everything just goes perfect. It seems like a cycle that lasts couple months.
• Support is not that great in terms of solutions provided. Most of the time the support responses are not helpful at all.
• The vendor is not proactive in planning the releases specific to customer. We had many issues because of inadequate release planning.

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

Our staff have found it easy to implement and use. Virtually any company can improve the way it manages its resources, and those improvements can deliver real competitive advantages. If you are finding your current software wanting, look at EPM LIve. We are happy we did.

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

When we have needed help (infrequently), the help has been prompt and understandable.

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

The experience with TaskRay was like night and day. The TaskRay representative has always been responsive and helpful. EPM's promise to integrate with Salesforce was limited at best.TaskRay exists within Salesforce, so the install and customization took less than a day. Ultimately we are still evaluating solutions and working with EPM made it easy to see what we were not looking for in a partner.

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

• This product has actually caused major frustration for the IT team and we were never able to deploy it past IT.

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