Planview AdaptiveWork vs. Workamajig

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

I think this holds true to almost any CRM, but if you want to truly utilize it you sort of need to go all in. This can become tough with WMJ because it doesn't offer some critical options that many other CRMs do, like the ability to create and send emails, e-newsletters, to throttle and invite outside clients to look at projects, etc. As such we're pairing Workamajig with Hubspot (and slowly phasing out Mailchimp) and trying to keep the data clean and flowing between them all is pretty tough. I'm also not aware of any API bridge from Wordpress to Workamajig so while I can program and feed my leads from my site into the other spaces, Workamajig remains a manual entry for any insertions you want, even if simply as a CSV import.

But - if you're not worried about that and simply want to manage projects, budget time, and scope things, it's a robust system allowing you to do so.

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

• WMJ is a full-stack solution, so you can track the life of a project from beginning to end, and all of the financials associated with it.
• Time entry is easy.
• Project management is robust and yields a tremendous amount of information.
• WMJ has a "sheets"-based interface, which makes navigating thru modules easier.
• There is more than one way to complete any particular task.

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

• Auto-schedule population - The most inconvenient thing about using JIG was that the dates wouldn't auto-populate. Example: I move the review date but the rest of the dates stay the same. Depending on each project level, if one date is adjusted the rest should update as well. That way we aren't spending a lot of time moving dates around manually.
• Notifications - JIG should have desktop notifications so we can see when tasks are on us even when we aren't in JIG.

Incentivized

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

We've used QuickBooks and it didn't align well with our business, so there were a lot of insights I wanted from the numbers, but couldn't get. We use Basecamp, which is easy, but can get disorganized pretty quickly and takes discipline to stay structured.

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

• The subscription expense and IT overhead has been substantial. That being said at the time of implementation, most other competing platforms were in line with their pricing.
• As more competitive alternatives have come to market we would have probably gone with an entirely cloud base alternative at a lower price.
• We ended up with ClickUp as our primary project management platform. If our finance/accounting software wasn't already so integrated with Workamjig we would probably switch to it entirely.

Incentivized