Planview AdaptiveWork

It's like the rolls royce of project management systems. Super powerful and hard to really throw stones at the functionality.

The biggest learning curve because it has specific ways that it manages workflows. It's great. But you need a dedicated team member to just learn and train people on it.

The ability to customize Clarizen is one of it's strongest features. While not as advanced as some of the bigger SaaS players like Salesforce, it still provides a robust set of features to allow you to create custom business processes to accomplish your companies goals. They compete pretty well against other companies with much larger teams.

Another great feature we use a lot is the expansive and complex WBSs you can have for projects. This allowed us to have a better sense of project flow and visibility to where our projects are at.

Our biggest struggle comes with the idea that a PSA should be a three legged stool (projects/task management, time tracking/resource management, and project financial management). We can only seem to make two work at a time with Clarizen. Our PMs want some pretty detailed project plans to really understand where tasks are and who is responsible, but when you implement that with time tracking it becomes a nightmare for resources to know where to submit there time entries.

As our organization grew, the financials and resource management became more important that detailed project plans so we struggled to find a balance of how detailed our WBSs should be because everything within the project plan was tied to time entries and drove project cost. It has become pretty administrative for some of our PMs.

The way you can link all facets of a project from bugs to requests. I also like the searcability of the interface.

I would like to see the ability to add conditional logic to customized fields in order to create work flows.

The ability to automatically track the tasks start/end dates if there are dependencies set up as well as when there are vacations or holidays for a person. The automatic smart systems make huge help for any human mistake on those calcualtions and future possible changes. Thanks for this!

When someone creates a vacation request in Clarizen, it would be good to have a notification mechanism to inform the project manager about it, if the person is assigned to a task of this PM's project(s). Otherwise, only the direct manager of the person is being announced. And if there is no established manual process, the vacation request gets approved without the PM being informed about it. This is really serious problem.

The tool offers A LOT of functionality. As I'm not a system administrator, I am not aware of everything that Clarizen can do, but whenever our admins unleash a new feature, I'm always excited by it. The new Android app is super nice/handy to have, especially for logging time. The support is great: we have logged bugs before, and these are generally resolved very fast. I am not blocked for long whenever something like that happens.

The fact that there are so many features also has a downside. I feel like there is a lot more to discover, and sometimes, things are no consistent. For example, in some views, I can hide the right-hand vertical "space" (or menu) and in others, I can't. I also find that column resizing is quite burdensome, and I have to resize columns in multiple views (it doesn't propagate.)