Flexible, versatile solution to managing portfolios, programmes & projects

Helping us to standardise our project practices, particularly the reporting process.

Pros

I liked the flexible structure of portfolio, programme and project which was easy to set up and adapt to our various departmental approaches. Lots of reporting options offered as standard, and easy to tweak these to suit our needs. All our portfolio of projects are now in one place where all the PMs can access them – it’s also an advantage that you can access them from anywhere rather than needing to be in the office. Helping us to standardise our project practices and particularly the reporting process. Support and training from Bestoutcome is excellent.

Cons

Because the range of functions and options is huge, it's sometimes easy to forget where the option you need is... however, I'd sooner have the options than a simpler product without them

Highly configurable and user friendly

Very positive. The Bestoutcome team have been very supportive through the initial trial to implementation and training. Looking forward to building on the current configuration and putting the system to the test fully.

Pros

Easy to get to grips with. Particularly like how you can select which functions you can switch on/off so you can start small and build on that as maturity and familiarity with the system grows.

Cons

Although you can configure some fields and change them to what you want, it would be useful if you could create additional fields to be able to capture more variety of information in the system.

Refinement

As a business we are still in the very early stages of using the tool. Initial observations are that it is excellent on some things and other areas need much more work to make the tool intuitive to use. This can be resolved via more updates I'm sure. Support via the help desk and via my account managers has been first class and Best Outcome have shown great flexibility around changes in Licence application during the Covid 19 period when our Programme was put on hold. Management of updates is clear and very thorough with release notes easy to follow.

Pros

The ability to draw a no.of projects together into a Programme and/or Portfolio and to draw in reports form all in selected views. The ability to hold all major project governance in one place e.g risks/issues/ dependencies. Reporting flexibility and range across plans/projects/programmes/portfolio Ease of user control and self configurable access controls

Cons

Plans - Gantt Chart usage - This is clunky at best and not intuitive. Convincing users of Microsoft Project to switch to using the tool has been an on going challenge. An easier import function may help resolve this. Using X to exit the plan. Many users forget and has caused frustrations in plans with joint PM use. Inconsistency of areas with auto save functionality and those where it requires manual save.

Straightforward, comprehensive and clear

Driving consistency in reporting across the change community provides a balanced view of progress and challenges providing clear insight at multiple levels from delivery through to senior management enabling focus on prioritisation for dependencies and support for challenges. From a Project management perspective you don't spend hours feeding information into the system and from a Programme, Portfolio or PMO perspective the output provides clear information regarding progress, trends, dependencies and issue management

Pros

Focus on on top down visibility of core P3 metrics via dashboards that can be shared, without customisation, to senior stakeholders. From a delivery perspective updating is intuitive and efficient and drives consistency from all project and programme managers. Especially like the governance dashboard, an excellent tool to provide a clear presentation of change health and compliance

Cons

PM3 isn't a one for all solution, still requiring planning tools such as MS Project for detailed scheduling, however I've not found a P3 product that does both effectively and efficiently. This is a minor gripe as most PMs are used to using separate planning and reporting toolsets

Brilliant experience of PM3 - perfect project management software!

We have around 104 projects in total on PM3, around 30-40 of them are live ones. I have had a very positive experience with PM3 and I do really enjoy using it. I think the Best Outcome Team are also very responsive and useful and are always happy to deal with any requests, which also adds to my PM3 experience. We have many projects which are completed and finished, and over the past year there has been an increase in the uptake of staff on PM3. I think there are many useful tabs/functions in PM3 which definitely support staff in completing their projects.

Pros

I really like how PM3 is very methodical and logical and a very easy software to navigate round. You can capture all aspects of your project and it can keep track of all your actions/tasks/milestones as well as notifying users with email reminders. PM3 definitely ensures that your project remains on track and is fantastic in generating a wide range of reports that can be printed/emailed very easily. The layout is very clear and simple and when I first started my role in PMO, it did not take very long for me to come to grips with the system, there are also brilliant user help guides and videos that are available which provide you with lots of new information.

Cons

The only thing I like least about this software is that unfortunately the milestone and task pages are not linked to the actions page which causes users to duplicate information (i.e. milestones that have been completed and closed do not appear as closed on the actions page). However, I understand that these are 2 separate and independent pages and it would not be feasible to join them together, this is only a minor issue and does not cause users problems. Apart from that I see no other fault with the software.