Kantata vs Polaris PSA: Which is a better fit?

Mustafa C.: Hi, I'm Mustafa. And I work in the Information Technology industry for a SAS company, and I give Mavenlink four out of five. Mavenlink is using an organization to solve a couple of problems. The first one is resource planning. Organization gets all the resource information for various projects for the professional services function onto Mavenlink. And then that helps them evaluate how much bandwidth that they have for future projects, what sales [inaudible 00:00:30] they have that can be applied to projects, and really is a robust tool for the source planning and managing a portfolio of projects. The other piece that we really use it for is project management itself for our professional services team. We are obviously a SAS company that's deploying the solution for clients, and we want to be able to use Mavenlink to manage those deployments. So I, as a project manager have a portfolio of number of projects ranging from 10 to 15 that we have to manage on Mavenlink. essentially we set up the work breakdown structure, set up the tasks, resources, the schedule on the Gantt chart and manage that on day-to-day basis. We also use Mavenlink for recording our time sheets and time entries. And that enables us to get a view of how the resources are consuming time on the project and how much has been the billable and non-billable time. And we also then finally use Mavenlink for reporting on the projects so that we're able to produce a health dashboard for each project, to be able to gauge how that's performing against its baseline indicators and give the client an indication of how well they're doing on a winner deployment. What I really like about Mavenlink is its ability to get everything that's relating to a professional services, project management environment in one single place. What that means is you have an activity feed that enables you to really drag and interact with your team about various things that are happening like risks and issues, progress on tasks, et cetera, anything that relates to communicating with your team. It also gets the task tracker in the same view, so that you're able to add all project deliverables and the work breakdown structure onto the task tracker and assign resources and put in dates, but also put in the budgeted amount for each task. And then it gives you a view on a Gantt chart, which would enable you to really schedule those tasks out. So essentially it's bringing all these functionality to one single place. The interface is really user intuitive so that you can flip between various aspects very quickly and giving you access to all information, either at a portfolio level or at a project level in one single place. That's something that's really good about Mavenlink. It also enables you to track the health of the project through a very easy to input a health panel on the right-hand side, that gives you quick information, but also enables you to jot down quick notes on the health of the project. So those are the couple of features that are really strong about Mavenlink that a user will enjoy. Some of the opportunities that Mavenlink really has to take the solution to the next level is, one is especially producing status reports that we send out to clients. We have found that those are not in a ready format. So we usually have to take out snapshots from Mavenlink to produce status reports. However, if we are able to get a status report in the format that we required to send out to clients directly, that will be really helpful. The other thing that we really would want Mavenlink to do is on the Gantt view, to be able to not only show baseline on the Gantt chart itself as snapshots, but also have columns so that we can track and manage baseline of the schedule. Those are the two aspects that Mavenlink could really improve upon. And just the task tracker is also going through a revamp on Mavenlink. But we have found that, that is a bit clunky when we have to move tasks around or add resources or move columns in the task tracker, it is not as flexible as you would anticipate it to be. So those aspects if improved on really make Mavenlink a much more powerful tool.