New to PPM Pro? Read This First...
PPM Pro is a robust product that, like all cloud solutions, evolves and improves on a regular basis. To keep users apprised of new features, as well as provide information about "core" features, Planview provides a wealth of information for self-support, as well as several avenues for seeking help from others - both Planview personnel and other customers.
This topic covers the following outlets for information - if there is something we've missed, let us know!
- Customer Success Center
- Online Help
- Tips, Strategies, and Timesavers
- Customer Care
- What Happens to Submitted Support Cases?
- Professional Services
- When is PPM Pro Released?
- Product Release Webinar
- What's New & Release Notes
- What is a Sandbox?
- Product Status Page
Customer Success Center
The Customer Success Center ("CSC") is a knowledge base of product documentation, videos, training material, release notes, and more. The launching page for PPM Pro is here. As shown in the screenshot of the landing page below, the CSC for PPM Pro is divided into 5 areas:
- Product Releases - Information about the latest updates
- Training Center - Access the current training offerings, webinars and free online Training Academy. In the Training Academy you will find courses that blend our success center articles and video library to support self-learning.
- Video Library - View a catalog of videos
The area at the bottom is the PPM Pro documentation, organized by topic area.
Online Help
Every view in PPM Pro is connected to an online help topic relevant to the current view. This is referred to as "context-sensitive" help. The context-sensitive topic is part of the CSC, so you can continue to navigate/explore additional topics. See Online Help for more information.
Tips, Strategies, and Timesavers
The Getting the Most out of PPM Pro section of the online help is a good place to look for general usage information. In particular, the Strategies topics provide great overviews of how to use various areas of the product.
Customer Care
PPM Pro's support team is available by entering a support case via the Customer Care Portal or via email.
Administrators can use the Customer Care Portal: https://support.planview.com - Note that in order to access the Customer Care Portal, you must have an account provisioned by Customer Care. Please send an email to customercare@planview.com if you do not have access. If you are not an administrator, please contact your company's PPM Pro administrator.
Hours of Operation (Includes APAC Regional Coverage)
Sunday, 5 PM to 1 AM Central Time
Monday - Thursday, 7 AM - 1 AM Central Time
Friday, 7 AM - 7 PM Central Time
US Tel: (512) 346-8460
International Tel: +49 721 959 7262
Fax: (512) 346-9180
Email: customercare@planview.com
What Happens to Submitted Support Cases?
The PPM Pro Customer Care team will do their best to trouble-shoot and assist customers directly with their submitted Support Cases. If however their investigation determines that the issue is either a defect (the product is not working correctly or is not as designed) or an enhancement (the product is working correctly or is as designed), then Customer Care will submit the defect or enhancement to the appropriate PPM Pro product teams.
Defects - Support cases that are turned into defects will remain open so that Customer Care can follow up with customers. Defects are also sent to the PPM Pro Director of Product Development for triage and assignment. The development team strives to fix defects as quickly as possible. Factors considered include severity of impact, if there is a workaround, and number of customers impacted. Sometimes this may take a bit of time depending on resource availability but most defects should be fixed quite soon and are captured in the Release Notes. If a defect fix is of critical importance, then an Update release may be performed ahead of the regular monthly release. Such Update releases are also noted within Release Notes as appropriate.
Enhancements - Support cases that are turned into enhancements are closed and sent to the PPM Pro Product Management team for weekly triage. There is a long list of enhancements because they are typically lower priority than defect fixes and Roadmap feature (planned product feature) work, but we do strive to get some completed during each release; the "New" items in the bottom grid of each monthly Release Notes are enhancements that have been added in that release. Enhancements are triaged based on a number of factors, such as how critical the need is, how many customers will be helped by it, how many customers have asked for it, how timely it is with respect to other feature work, and how much effort it will be for development to address. We calculate a WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First) measure from Scaled Agile and use it to prioritize the queue of enhancements. As developers with the right skills have time to work on enhancements during a release, they pull from the top of the queue.
Professional Services
Professional services packages are a great opportunity to work directly with one of our experienced consultants. The schedule and pricing are subject to change; please check back regularly for updates. These services packages are available to employees of current Planview clients.
- Registration requires a login. If you do not have a username and password for the Success Center, contact successcenter@planview.com
- All prices shown are per registrant.
- Private training services are available either on-site at your locations or via our virtual classroom. These classes are tailored to your specific use case and are delivered in a training copy of your environment. Contact trainingrequests@planview.com for more information.
- Looking for generic, instructor-led training at our Austin, TX headquarters or virtually? Click here to enroll in a training class.
- All services expire 1 year after purchase
When is PPM Pro Released?
Planview releases PPM Pro monthly, according to the following 3-week cycle:
- The first Friday of each month the "What's New & Release Notes" are published for that month's release. Click here for more information.
- The second Friday of each month the release is deployed to sandbox environments.
- The third Friday of each month the release is deployed to all production environments.
When we introduce features into a release, we initially give them a status of "Beta".
- Beta features are "rolling", which means they are released into sandboxes in incremental chunks until the feature is complete. In most cases, a customer can request that a beta feature be enabled in their production environment.
- After a feature has absorbed beta feedback and is feature complete and stable, we promote the feature to "Generally Available", which means that it is deployed into production environments. Note that we try to release GA features only in the first month of a calendar quarter: January, April, July, and October. We do this so that new features appear in a predictable way and we don't overwhelm users with monthly changes. Occasionally we release a feature in a month other than the first of each quarter, provided it makes sense and is beneficial for our customers.
Monthly Product Release Webinar
Each month, between the sandbox release and the product release (2nd and 3rd weeks of the month), PPM Pro Product Management and Consulting offer a webinar to share what you can expect with that month's release, including new features, fixed issues, and product enhancements. A link to register to the webinar is posted each month on the Release Information page.
What's New & Release Notes
On the first Friday of each month the What's New & Release Notes web page is published. This page contains a brief description of any new features introduced with the current release, as well as highlights of fixed issues and, enhancement requests, and links to documentation and other supporting information for new features. In addition, if Planview is planning some technicalthere is some future wo
What is a Sandbox?
A sandbox is a copy of your production environment. Many customers find if useful to have this environment to test out new features. All beta features are deployed to sandbox environments. Sandboxes can be updated (except during the week between the sandbox and production releases) by entering a Customer Care Case requesting the refresh. If you would like a sandbox, please contact your Account Executive.
Users that are particularly keen on using a particular beta feature in their production environment often test things out in their sandbox, and if they feel the feature is stable enough to introduce into production, they can enter a Customer Care Case requesting to enable the feature in production. Note that Planview does not patch for beta features - in other words, if you enable a beta feature in your production environment and find a problem, that problem will be addressed according to our beta development process and will not be eligible for a special patch, and so on.
Status Page
Users can subscribe to https://status.planview.com to receive notifications of planned PPM Pro updates (see Subscribe button at top of Status page). You can also manually check this page. The status page/notification include a link to the release notes describing the changes delivered by the update, unless it is a maintenance update, in which case release notes are not necessary.