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Sciforma
What Is Sciforma?
Sciforma Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Software is a scalable and robust platform that supports PMOs with these very core PPM capabilities: idea & demand, portfolio & program, planning, work and collaboration, resources, and time tracking. Flexible and functionally scalable, it accomodates various PMO maturity levels and fits many sectors: health care, manufacturing, public, finance, and more. Key customer partners include Netgear, NXP Semiconductor, Deutsche Telekom, EADS.
Who Uses Sciforma?
Perfect for the Enterprise PMO use case. It provides a flexible platform for managing multiple project environments and is functionally scalable to accommodate various maturity levels.
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Reviews of Sciforma
Alternatives Considered:
Best single-platform product on the market for waterfall, Agile or hybrid
Comments: I cannot say enough positive things about the team members I have directly interacted with at Sciforma. From the trainers, to my Customer Success Manager, to members of the support and product development teams. Everyone is accommodating, helpful and collaborative. I was already confident that Sciforma as a solution was the right choice for my organization's needs; the people supporting you are outstanding too! One thing to be prepared for is that the back-end can be a little daunting for admins who are not well-versed in both system configuration and project management. If you are not that comfortable, you will still have a wonderful support team to help you.
Pros:
I have reviewed, implemented, used and replaced several enterprise-level PPM solutions. Sciforma is, in my opinion, the best single-platform solution on the market to enable teams to run various methodologies, yet still report holistically at the enterprise level regardless of the methodology used to run each project. It's a true one-stop-shop for an organization that wants the flexibility to manage projects differently. You are able to do all traditional project management functions related to schedule, Gantt, budget, resource allocation, portfolio reporting and more. The Agile features are simpler than some of the big-name leaders who focus ONLY on Agile, yet robust enough that prior users of those large systems will still find comfort in managing their Agile efforts in Sciforma. For those organizations who are more comfortable with a hybrid-approach, this solutions easily integrates iterations/sprints into the Gantt view. If you have a Steering Committee making decisions about which projects should be started and when, or if your Finance group wants to in-depth financial impacts of the projects, this solution will make everyone happy. Sciforma is going to change how my organization approaches project and resource allocation decisions.
Cons:
There are a couple things I'd like to see improved in the tool, though this may be personal preference. 1) I would prefer more automated data to be shown in the out-of-the-box project status reports rather than subjective text boxes and some high-level project data points. 2) I prefer an Agile burndown chart that predicts the sprint completion. This said, Sciforma does allow you to build custom things (like the status report I want to see), and I've been able to create wish-list tickets for future development--and the product team has accepted several suggestions and placed them on the product roadmap.
Alternatives Considered:
Project Oriented Sciforma
Comments: Our company started using Sciforma since last year especially for the Project Management related things such as planning, managing, and monitoring and controlling.
Pros:
Designer mode, that allows us the flexibility and capability to create and modify our own tools for the production view.
Cons:
So far, I don't see anything that I don't like because the more I explore, the more I learn something new.
Much Left to Be Desired
Comments: Overall, I have had an average experience with SciForma. It's excels in record-keeping but can be quite clunky to use. I wish the UI/UX would be improved so using SciForma wouldn't be as hard to use than it currently is.
Pros:
I like how it keeps track of your previous records and is good for accountability purposes. It is extremely convenient and easy to see what tasks I have been working on the past few weeks.
Cons:
Many times the software UI is very clunky and leaves for a fairly annoying experience. Once in a while, buttons don't work and certain loading screens freeze. Though the effects are not critical, I do find the software to be somewhat of a pain to deal with at time and I think that's something that SciForma shouldn't be.
Beautifully laid out, very intuitive, leverages the best of the tech it's built on.
Comments: Our clients have great visibility on the work we are doing for them, we can easily anticipate risks and be able to manage them in a way that set's very clear and resolute expectations, from an Agile development point of view our team collaborates in a way much much better than before while at the same time giving a clear picture to the client side PMs who typically manage their projects in a waterfall fashion. Everyone is part of the same picture.
Pros:
User adoption is key in any enterprise system, Sciforma's ease of use enables that, it is quite intuitive and a beautiful sight to behold, we've come to see that users highly appreciate that effort. Technically it is very strong (the strongest) yet fully maintaining the balance between technical complexity and ease of use. With the release of Sciforma 7.1 we've seen massive leaps forward on a solution that was already at a peak compared to it's rivals, the introduction of Programme Management amongst, and the focus on building stronger connections with various data elements has seen Sciforma being highly appraised by our clients.
Cons:
There are very little to no cons, everyone ultimately has their preference and Sciforma is ours. We are fully confident in the continuity that Sciforma constantly reassures us with by staying ahead of the race and breaking new grounds in this space.
Great Project Management Tool with Loads of Features
Comments: I am writing this from the user's perspective. Even though I was an admin and in constant contact with our internal development team, I was not directly involved with the developers on the side of Sciforma. The software was rolled out to be used world wide to track internal and external projects for all sorts of different customers. It was this high complexity, why it took us a while to roll it out, set up the initial project templates, tweak the templates and so on. Besides the time it took to implement and some initial hiccups my team, the other teams and myself were very satisfied with the support the software provided. The more specialized your company and your projects are, the more definite the templates can be set up, and the more your company will be able to reap the benefits of this software.
Pros:
- Can be used as boxed solution or customized to your needs - Great visualization and traceability features incorporating different project management styles - Accurate milestone tracking - Start workflows, assign and track tasks - Assign resources and manage the team
Cons:
- Initial roll-out and training was time consuming, like with every major change
