Parallax Reviews & Product Details

I am MJ Davis, CTO of a Professional Services organization focused on implementing and customizing Salesforce.

We have a fair number of consultants who are deployed on customer engagements inside of projects, augmenting customer teams, or in managed service packages. Resource forecasting, role definition, and capacity planning are critical functions of my business. For six years we had been using an old shared Google Drive spreasheet and our own SF-CRM to manage our pipeline and resource assignments. This was fine when we all fit in the same room. As we scaled, the data entry and accruacy of our resource meetings began to wear poorly.

We conducted an assessment of Resource Management tools. Parallax was up against Kantata, some Appexchange packages, building it ourselves, or some other niche resource tools. The straightforward composition of Parallax and the accessibility of the team made the difference for us. Each other solution wanted to replace other tools that we had in place for timesheets and invoicing in order to put everything under one roof to make their features work. Parallax had out-of-box support for the tools we already used. This is specifically about Harvest and Salesforce support.

The implementation of Parallax has closed the pipeline accuracy our deal's impact on resourcing from ~5 days to same-day accuracy. Our Sales team members and Operations leaders each use their own tool to collaborate on the same set of data between the SRM tool and our CRM. This is had a material impact on the agility of Digital Mass.

Adoption and implementation of the software is one dimension. Changing your team's process to have a good cadence is another. At Digital Mass we had some of the resourcing ritual meetings in place already, which made it easy to adopt the recommended cadence. In the case that your organization has not done this, the Parallax team walks organizations through this.

I am a fan of the software and the team.

_MJ Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Parallax straddles an interesting software position between CRMs and back-of-house operation systems. It takes a little time to work with the team and through the documentation to gain the philosophy of where data should be housed. There is a scratch to jam as much as you can into the elastic areas of Parallax like Tags and Notes. It is better to think carefully about what you are trying to solve for.

I would like more transparancy and control of the ingregration and implementation process. Afterwards I understood the exercise in mapping my consultants in CRM and in Harvest in order to make them the same resources in Parallax. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Looking at the market, there were a lot of tools to give us better insight into utilization forecasting from Harvest data. What makes Parallax stood out are the people behind it. Throughout the sales process, implementation, support and success, we have felt supported and confident in relying on this system to transform our business. The tool exceeds our requirements and continues to improve but the people there supporting us are the best! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We are always looking at more granular ways to filter through data and every system has room for improvement here. That said, there are more reports OOTB than we need and we are working to leverage those a lot better for our business now. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Parallax takes our resource management information and turns it into insights that can be used for actionable change in our organization. From forecasting resources (based on active projects & pipeline deals) to forecasting financials - and monitoring utilization, Parallax pulls it all together and from just a few weeks in was already providing data that we started to make business decisions based on. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Every organization operates a bit differently. Parallax is taking commonalities across professional services organizations to build their platform. That means - it's not always going to match up to exactly what you have in your spreadsheet formulas or the way that your company does business. You may have to make some adjustments to the way your organization operates - or you'll have to decide whether your way is better and not use Parallax for that piece. With that being said, Parallax is EXTREMELY open to feedback and has made several adjustments based on the feedback that I've provided and we've been with them for less than a year. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Parallax is really easy to use for the most part. I love how seamlessly it integrates with Harvest time tracking and can create reporting and data based on that information. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Would love for the financial reporting to be more robust. Adding in an integration with QuickBooks for example would be a game-changer!

Also, a lot of the financial reporting basically reflects like a T&M engagement, assigning revenue to the hours an employee or department has conttributed to a project, which isn't always an accurate representation of the data at our organization. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Parallax excels not only in resource planning and forecasting but also as a collaborative partner. Their team is incredibly supportive and proactive, always seeking feedback to enhance the platform and ensure success for their users. The integrations with Harvest and Hubspot are game changers and make tracking projects through the full project lifecycle much easier. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Being such a robust tool there is a significant learning curve to setting it up and using it properly. The interface isn’t always intuitive and occassionally it suffers from performance issues when requesting large amounts of data. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I love that it provides detailed hour plans for my team members who share their time across several projects and client accounts.

From a management standpoint it's amazing being able to project our costs and revenue to this detailed level and explore the potential profitability (or lack of) on potential projects. We've been able to using the hiring forecast to more confidently decide when to hire vs when to pull in a temporary contractor as well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Its a very powerful and robust tool, which I LOVE. It can be a bit overwhelming to master all the nuences and how best to utilize the reporting. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Parallax is an excellent platform for capacity forecasting and resource planning. The tool provides a level of insight that we previously did not have or had to obtain from spreadsheets. The Parallax team is committed to our success and provides proactive support to help us grow. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Getting the full benefit of Parallax may require more effort than you're anticipating. We onboarded with Parallax when many of our Sales, Project Management, and Operations processes were less mature. Getting the benefit of Parallax required investment in our processes and people. Ultimately, I think this is a benefit of the platform, though an unexpected one that you want to be prepared for. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Parallax allows us to see details about employee time that were previously unavailable and allows us to plan ahead for future growth. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The app could use some UX design help - it has a lot of functionality but is not always the easiest app to clearly see the information available because of the way it is organized. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Being able to see employee assignments. Current state of the budget as well. I think the change log was a big win. I use it with Harvest. Not sure what it's competitor is. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Har to find help resources.

Video tutorials

Billable vs. non-billable hours - Parallax doesn't call that out

the help desk is very helpful but it would be better if you could learn from the tool when onboarding Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Parallax has helped enforce a greater degree of data validity across our sales, delivery, and finance operations. The team at Parallax have been great partners in helping us get up and running and also refine the product to our specific needs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There can be some growing pains within your company as individual have to re-orient their work to how Parallax functions. Parallax is very focused on agile work practices…if you don't sell or think about your work that way, it might be challenging to adopt. We use Harvest for our time keeping—the way that Parallax connects to Harvest is a bit non-intuitive to the individual contributor. There isn't a 1-to-1 relationship between Parallax projects and Harvest projects. Now that we're up and running, this is really the only ongoing source of tension. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.