Kantata Erfahrungen

Awesome platform that's only getting better

Kommentare: Overall, using Mavenlink has been great - it has made a very positive impact on day-to-day functions as a business. I would recommend it highly to agencies for its flexibility and extensive functionality to manage resources and projects.

Vorteile:

The reporting functionality Mavenlink offers is extensive and has enabled us to get much better visibility to our project, program, portfolio and resourcing data. Which in turn has allowed us to set/adjust our KPI/KRIs and better inform business decisions with the data we have available. In using Mavenlink how it's meant to be used, not only have we improved our business practices but our PMO has gained valuable insight into important aspects of the business that were previously siloed. The fact that Mavenlink actually continues to improve its platform based on user feedback is a massive plus, as new functionality becomes available to better utilize the platform.

Nachteile:

There are some small (very small in most cases) problems we have with some functionality i.e. the naming/categorization of metrics in the reporting suite could be clearer, when approving/rejecting timesheets, adding a comment to a specific entry would be preferable, rather than the comment being published to all entries.

It's a fantastic time and task management system

Kommentare: Mavenlink sits directly on our Salesforce platform, and it has been great for our business to have a more comprehensive perspective from Pre-Sales through project close-out ever since we implemented the product about three years ago with the help of Mavenlink's amazing support. From the perspective of Resource Management, I find everything about Mavenlink to be extremely well executed.

Vorteile:

My preferred time management application is extremely feature-rich, allowing for extensive customization of how time and money are spent. Mavenlink is a great addition to our corporate finance tools since it provides us with a new way to examine data and monitor progress on several fronts simultaneously. For me, it's a plus that Mavenlink is always working to enhance its platform and provide new educational resources for its users.

Nachteile:

I haven't utilized many goods or features, but it would be helpful to have a consolidated dashboard where I can observe how everything is interacting with one another.

Easy to use and implement.

Kommentare: Overall it has been a positive addition to the business.

Vorteile:

Ease of use and implementation. Knowledgebase is extensive.

Nachteile:

Some basic features lack customisation and could use with better enhancements.

Good system but some frustrating issues

Kommentare: Useful overall, but the more time I spend with it the more I realize it is missing some key functionality that would save a lot of time. It's much more difficult to update a project in Mavenlink than past systems I've used, and I think there are some beneficial tweaks that could be made

Vorteile:

From an ease of use standpoint, time entry and project creation is fairly straightforward. It's also nice to have access to so many reporting features, although I imagine that's even more valued by the leadership team rather than staff.

Nachteile:

Three major issues stand out to me and my colleagues: 1- the software is very slow at times, and the more time I spend making edits to a project the longer it takes. In some cases, the lag is so bad that a task that should take 10 minutes ends up taking 30 since I wait so long for the system respond. The more tasks and individuals assigned to a project, the worse it is. Customer service suggested I delete my cache, but this was a temporary and fairly ineffective solution 2- It'd be great to have a simple place where I can see exactly how many hours a team member has on a project. Right now, we can only see time assigned to individual tasks, and then need to calculate the total manually 3- When tasks get extended or shortened, it'd be great to have a way to have Mavenlink automatically distribute time accordingly. For example, if I have 1 hour assigned for a 1-week long task, it'd be nice if I could automatically change this to 30min/week if that task were extended to being 2 weeks long. I know time can move automatically if the gantt is updated, but that only works if the task stays the same duration and hasn't started yet. Other systems offer this feature

Professional Services Automation and Project Collaboration in One Package

Kommentare: The overall experience was positive - the implementation went well and the consultant kept us focused on the core items we wanted to implement first.

Vorteile:

The best feature of Kantata is that is provides a combination of Professional Services Automation (the ability to track time, assignments, tasks, project margins, etc.) along with an end-customer collaboration capability to jointly track project task progress, shared documents, and shared task progress.

Nachteile:

The more challenging part of Kantata is the custom reporting aspects. During implementation, we have several custom reports built by the Kantata team. These are working acceptably, but if you want to modify or change those reports it takes a pretty high level of knowledge and experience.

Effective tool with ease of use and a broad range of features

Kommentare: Very good. We have made suggestions that have been listened to and implemented, we have worked with their customer success team extensively to our benefit. Their help support is excellent when you encounter problems and the software was adaptable to all our needs.

Vorteile:

There is a lot to like about the product. Easy task management with lots of capabilities, time and expense tracking that is simple. Extended resource management options for minute details or broad allocations and a really engaged Customer Success team.

Nachteile:

Not a lot to write here. I think the only issue is that it is hard to use at a hourly scale where you need to set time deadlines in the day.

OK for the basics, advanced functionality is either missing or not well implemented

Kommentare: Implementation was not very well executed. We basically had to figure it out on our own. THe "integrations" through thier integration tool are very poorly built and the tool is terrible. It gets the basics right but more advanced features like the Insights reporting add on are poorly executed.

Vorteile:

Ease of use, Reporting, Project Financials

Nachteile:

M Bridge integration platform is a complete failure. Its terrible. Training during implementation was not good. We've learned more on our own in a few classes. Time entry is weak and poorly designed. Lacks subprojects. User permissions are all or nothing in most cases.

Kantata has transformed project and cost management

Kommentare: Using Kantata , we finally have a way to track the time and effort put in by our engineers across all of the projects they're working on. We were able to respond to questions from our leaders much more quickly, which helped us avoid certain personnel problems.

Vorteile:

Kantata has revolutionized our approach to budgeting and task management. The opportunity to centralize all of our initiatives in one place and provide individualized reports that tracked our development in relation to our key performance indicators is something we are really grateful for. We also take pleasure in learning where we may be under- or over-allocating our engineers, so that we may swiftly adjust our course.

Nachteile:

As far as we can tell, employing Kantata does not come with any major drawbacks. Reports are not sorted alphabetically or numerically, however these are minor issues.

Kantata e is great!

Vorteile:

Customization and the integration with Jira

Nachteile:

Some features could get and improvement to make ir easier to user

Professional Services - Product with great potential

Kommentare: Really happy with the product and continuing to learn more each day

Vorteile:

User friendly and insights configuration

Nachteile:

Reports not able to update in real time. Takes 30-40min to refresh data

Too complicated time entry

Kommentare: Too complicated as an end user just trying to get my time entered.

Vorteile:

There's a lot of functionality at the higher up space

Nachteile:

As a user who enters their time the time entry screen is an extremely overcomplicated experience. It should be as simple as picking a project, sub-code and then entering time. My experience so far is vastly overcomplicated with different places and ways to enter it. I came from using harvest to track time and their weekly view with a row of the project and code i use frequently is most excellent.

The Ultimate Services & Operations Management Software

Kommentare: The only way to describe this would be "It has been and still is fun to work with". It's a great piece of software, and once you get used to its logic you will be able to do great things - and by great things I mean measure exactly how much you sell your services for and how much resources you are actually using.
This, plus see employee performance, project performance, you can create custom fields to cover for any special requirement.

Vorteile:

- Integrations and API - An excellent Salesforce bridge is available and can be fully customised (if you know Java!). You also get other connectors for Jira, Slack, and an API that allows you to do virtually anything. - Integrated GoodData reporting - If you are technical enough you can improve your workflows by adding custom fields and creating custom metrics. I used this solution to monitor the performances of the entire Professional Services team at Emarsys. - The software itself is essentially like Microsoft Project but online and with conversations & invoices generation - you can manage anything from a very small and basic project to a massive 2 years project thanks to the versatile task management interface. GANTT charts are available and, of course, if you know how to use GoodData you can dig even further into the project reports. - Resourcing wise it has a Master Planning tool which looks a bit like Resource Guru but completely integrated with the software, so you are really buying the full package with Mavenlink.

Nachteile:

I believe the biggest flaw in Mavenlink is the absence of a "real" administrator. Essentially, you can be an admin but if a project is set to "Invitation only" you cannot join it unless someone invites you. So being a Mavenlink admin is not like being a Jira admin where you can do anything you want, you are more of a "open projects administrator". The workaround is to have an integration user creating the projects and a good integration with your CRM that allows you to update fields that would be otherwise not accessible. Mind that you can still remove the integration user from the project, and at that point the only way to re-enter the project is to ask the project lead to invite you. This should clear any security concerns, if your projects require extreme privacy.

Our Next-Generation Project Management Tool

Kommentare: Our overall experience has been wonderful over the past few years. We were able to enable our PM team to become more metrics and data-driven, expanding their capabilities. Change Orders are a big business process that we solved by using Mavenlink. Approval and communication have been GREATLY streamlined! Before, we were managing change orders through written communication and supporting documentation, but now we are able to have the discussion in project meetings, then pass through the Change Order approval as a budget change and there is an affirmative action on their part. It's great!

Vorteile:

The activity dashboard is the best part of Mavenlink. A feed that allows you to keep track of official communications and notes is perfect, plus it keeps clients involved. The API is also very strong and allows us to generate reports FAR beyond what is offered by Mavenlink. Our ability to manage projects and people has greatly increased due to the features that have been implemented since we switched to Mavenlink.

Nachteile:

The Gantt chart needs a lot of work. The interface is slow and clunky, plus it is not a great view for the executives and sponsors, visually speaking. The purpose of this chart is not really to "manage" the project, but instead show a high level overview of everything. There is currently no great way to show this to execs and sponsors. There needs to be a better mobile experience as well. We need a fully functional way to log time, complete tasks, post activity and generally manage projects from Android and iOS.

Software well tailored for our business needs

Kommentare: Overall, the experience is become better and better. I'd say the UI still has some usability issues.

Vorteile:

Great master planning for resources and allocations.

Nachteile:

Two biggest pet peeves are the following: 1. It's irritating that you must delete a recreate a time entry if you enter it on the wrong day of the week on the Timesheets view. Should be able to just change the date of the entry. Other similar software allows this. 2. On Master Planning, I want to see how many hours are represented in the allocation every week not just how many hours by percentage across the span of weeks the allocation runs. This make it hard to determine quickly how many hours the resource has for each allocation for that week.

Mavenlink feedback

Vorteile:

The reporting and overview of the project is very helpful. .I also like how you can budget towards individual tasks/milestones. It's also good to see an overview of staff's availability and schedule them on specific days for projects.

Nachteile:

It's very frustrating when you need to allocated in the same amount of time per user across a long period. You have to go in individually to each week to add that time. When you have to do this for multiple users across different projects, it takes a lot of time!!! Should be able to do a recurring staffing - define the time period, how many hrs for which user and project. If there are changes to hrs or staffing for a project, you then have to go in and change across the board - should be able to change that recurring staffing to a different number/person

Mavenlink is feature rich and user friendly

Kommentare: Mavenlink has been a feature-rich tool that has been adaptable to our unique model.

Vorteile:

Mavenlink has a lot of custom features and functionality which was an important factor in that we needed to find a tool that met our many custom processes and workflows.

Nachteile:

Mavenlink does not allow customers to see budget in hours or dollars, so clients can't see any sort of project burndown. New features and functionality are slow to be released, but for a platform its size, ML does a decent job of staying on top of squashing bugs.

Mavenlink is a very advanced project management tool for medium as well as huge enterprises.

Vorteile:

The application is very stable and you will find a lot of features to work with. In comparison to other tools, the features provided are more advanced and data-driven with high emphasis on metrics. I just love the dashboard, it helps you to keep track of all the official meetings and interactions and with mavenlink, you can build superb reports. It helps in collaborating with tasks from start to end of each project. You can set updates as notifications to your mail id, so you would get to know of the status o different projects. We can set these notifications for clients too, so they would get to know the proceedings and status o each task.If you hate opening multiple tabs like me, you can use this Gantt chart tool which I should say is the best feature!

Nachteile:

One of the biggest turn off is that we take a lot of time to get started with the system like to set up and install. The date has been set in US formats which had been an issue to us, hope they do something about it. I found it really difficult to trace back archived projects cause you have to know the exact name of the respective project to get them traced back!

Corporate user review

Kommentare: I really enjoy mavenlink but I see so much more potential and I keep asking them to make simple changes that would absolutely rock the software into the next phase of a PSA but I don't ever get a response.

Vorteile:

I like the ease of use and the simple layout of mavenlink

Nachteile:

I wish there was a way to put non-billable time into projects such as accountants time on invoicing, marketing, and finance. These items are the bleed on a project if you don't factor them into the profitability margin.

Mavenlink Rocks

Kommentare: We use Mavenlink to project management all new school openings and are now starting to use it for all of our large national events. Mavenlink has definitely helped us open more schools worldwide efficiently and effectively. Before Mavenlink, communication and documentation were major issues around our projects. With Mavenlink, we are able to document our calls and follow ups within the system itself. Tasks linked to communications are also very helpful. The features I like best are ease of use, Dashboard view of all projects, Templates, sync to Google Apps, and Gannt.

Vorteile:

Ease of use and communication. The ability to start threads regarding specific tasks, upload/share google docs, post messages that also go to email, etc. has been critical to successfully completing projects.

Nachteile:

The only dislike I have is that I cannot push a change across multiple projects at one time. We use templates for almost every project we launch. Sometimes those templates get updated and those changes need to be applied to current projects.

Difficult to reconcile with our accounting software - rounding issues

Vorteile:

Easy for resources to book time against multiple different projects - good data contained in time entry exports (granular, gives lots of information that I can pivot off of to provide different views to the end customer)

Nachteile:

Mavenlink rounds time entries billed at an odd number (such as $171.77/hr) that are logged in half-hour or quarter-hour increments differently than Sage IntACCT - this makes reconciliations arduous when it's time to invoice the customer.

Very easy platform to engage with clients and to manage reports.

Vorteile:

When a client assigns a project to our team we add a new page to our Mavenlink platform and share that with client and all the team members who will be working on the project. Clients can see updates, modifications and even daily reports. Our team don't have to update each time with the client or send them an email at the end of each day. Even if a client has different projects, they will see it on different pages which avoids confusion. The Gantt charts are the best feature included to avoid keeping multiple tabs open.

Nachteile:

One of the main cons is that it will take considerably more time setting everything up. One has to dedicate for at least 4-5 hours to learn everything pretty well. The date format is given only in US standard and troubled us a lot in the beginning.

Reliable tool but not ideal for Finance Reporting

Kommentare: Easy to use, reliable in terms of saving data but this tool feels outdated due to the manual staff allocation process. Also the finance and staffing reporting doesnt work for me. Im not a fan of that.

Vorteile:

I like that my staffing projections are easy to access, view and share across digital teams.

Nachteile:

Forecasting hours by the week/month needs to be automated - this is too manual and time consuming at the time. Need to be able to drag and drop hours, or somehow more speedily be able to populate staff allocations. Also finance reporting / utilization reporting is incredibly difficult of not impossible due to my current access level. I have to rely on the finance and resourcing department for all reporting - this is not sustainable for project management.

The basics are there, but too many features fall flat.

Kommentare: Benefits include matching estimates and budgets to tasks and breaking apart milestones with tasks and sub-tasks. Activity communication is pretty good.

Vorteile:

I can add a project, estimates and budget and track overall progress. It has given us a more robust look at what is happening across all projects.

Nachteile:

Too many features feel incomplete. The invoicing, estimates and user permissions are convoluted and lacking enough that our company cannot use them. Resource Management requires duplicate entry of information between planned and scheduled time. It should be easier to link the two together and plan around exceptions.

Good value all around

Vorteile:

The tool is quite easy to learn and is very intuitive. It was easy to set up and customer support was great (at least in 2016 - we've been clients for almost 5 years). It integrates with a few other platforms like Salesforce and can be customized using API. In addition, it provides client access and we see constant improvements.

Nachteile:

Two biggest concerns: 1. You can't perform mass actions on tasks/milestones/issues. I.e. if you need to update multiple tasks with the same dates or status or assignee - you can't do it. You'll need to edit each task manually. 2. There are issues with email notifications - there were a few outages last year that resulted in delayed notifications which impacted our work.

Worst UX/UI in a project management tool ever.

Vorteile:

I dont think I can think of one thing in Mavenlink that another tool did better. It is simply inferior in so many ways, even to free project management tools.

Nachteile:

It is extremely slow! Every click results in a loading.gif. In comparison to Asana which is INSTANT no matter what you click. I cant find my projects where I need them, I cant find my tasks where I need them, I cant get to important information without clicking 10 things and sifting through scrollable windows and sliding boxes. They are HIDING content behind and Show More; links. They are using PAGINATION on lists of projects... omg. No. Show everything, list everything, please stop making us bob for apples every time we need to find something. Oh yeah, and the proofing system doesnt even notify you or the task about a conversation happening within it. Changes to your proof? No clue. You cant mention someone in each area, only in the activity feed.