IBM Targetprocess is a platform for enterprise agile planning (EAP) and strategic portfolio management (SPM) solutions that allows business and technology planners at all levels to dynamically plan and manage work, resources, investments, programs, and portfolios while ensuring continuous alignment to the enterprise strategy in a single source of truth.
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Pivotal Tracker
Score 7.6 out of 10
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Pivotal Tracker is a project management program primarily for software developers. It is built from the ground up to facilitate the agile development cycle, and is optimized for structuring projects in sprints, or “stories.”
The solution is now owned and supported by VMware, and is part of the Pivotal / Tanzu product line up.
Apptio Targetprocess is well suited to track work and progress of that work. In addition it is easy to tie that work to OKRs. Cost and hours rollup across the work hierarchy works well. Our users like the flexibility of Targetprocess and the ability to develop their own views and reports Scenarios where it is less appropriate is to do executive level reporting and develop reports that can pull in all of our time data since there is a 300k record limit
The UI of the Pivotal tracker is really beautiful and amazing, which looks trivial, but we have it open all the time, so it's nice for us. In Pivotal tracker for me its very Easy to create tasks or stories anytime without facing any problems. Pivotal tracker provides us a ton of features to track the tasks and manage a team and the projects. Pivotal tracker allows for a entire team to be on the same page of the tool in regards to where is the project right now, right status of every task, what is being worked on and by whom.
Extremely flexible: We are able to setup work for different groups in ways that work best for them.
Fantastic support group: They are extremely knowledgeable and helpful. I enjoy working with them.
Automation: Their automation capabilities have saved us a lot of time.
Customizing screens: We can go into code for the different entities, move fields around or hide them, add tabs or additional sections as needed to make for a streamlined user experience.
Reporting: Their reporting is flexible and phenomenal. There are so many different ways to pull data and the interface is easy to use.
Their user guide is well built and extremely helpful.
Every feature in this amazing application is of unique importance and also quite friendly in nature that doesn’t consume a lot of time and energy as well.
For me, there is nothing to take care of in this specific application only sometimes it shows errors while updating but that’s not a big deal.
In-story task management is still a weak point. The ability to @mention users in tasks and mark tasks as 'in-progress' would go a long way.
Epics do not span projects. This becomes troublesome when scaling Pivotal Tracker's agile methodology to multiple teams.
Splitting stories is often confusing for team members as there is no concept of a 'parent' story with child stories that have split off of it. There are only two levels: Epic & Story.
Targetprocess is the most flexible application for tracking work among teams that we have found. This power comes from near limitless ability to customize your views on the work tracked in the system, and from the myriad reporting options to draw metrics and stats out of the data there. Custom fields, processes, and mashups all add to this flexibility and appeal.
The UI is intuitive and consistent. The complexity of the app means there is a steep learning curve though, but it is well worth putting in the effort to get the most out of the tool. We have some team members who are learning new ways of doing things after 1-2 years of working in Targetprocess.
It works good enough. I didn't have many problems with that. The user interface is a bit confusing though. The team took some time to understand where some configurations were.
Reports are fast loading, considering they can refresh in a second or less and we have 7 years of work tracked in over 40k entities. Pages can load slowly when the views are very busy, but not frustratingly. I am a console user most of my career and generally prefer it over webUI interfaces, but Targetprocess won me over from the beginning and I spend half my day using it now.
TargetProcess' support is one of its strengths. The support team is very responsive and helpful when there is a problem but they're also proactive in providing good release notes and engaging with the community through a voting scheme to influence the priority of new features.
The team also releases new versions frequently with new features but with no knock-ons to currently working features.
We've never had to request support in the 5 years I have been using it. A solid solution! Everything I have had questions about is on the website. New features are in their newsletter with more details on their website. Often I am using the new features within a few minutes of reading the article.
You should take some time to get everyone to agree how the system should be setup before work starts being tracked in Targetprocess, this avoids difficult and disruptive changes to processes or plugins later when everyone relies on it daily.
Apptio Targetprocess outshone the competition on several benchmarks. The most important for our team was ease of administration, ease of configuration, cost of licenses, and ability to leverage the tool in multiple areas (not just project management or engineering). Apptio Targetprocess ranked top in each category, with anonymous scoring from members across the selection team.
We have had employees in the past look at Drupal, and other open source project management tools to assist in our needs. Unfortunately each solution took too much time to implement, design and configure that we could not stop the work we were doing for clients to complete a full set up of a project tracker. Thankfully Pivotal is a predefined solution with no configuration needed. Simply input your projects, design your Stories with Tasks and begin your tracking.
We use the hosted version of Targetprocess and have never run into limitations or degraded performance due to scalability. Excellent performance over 7 years!
Time is money with development and a lot of things can fall through the cracks. Having a good system for making sure you're building the most relevant product for customers is really important so it was well worth it for us.
The process we used worked for us and it helped us streamline our development which reduced a lot of things falling through the cracks and headaches. I'm sure there are other products that can do the same job just as effectively but Pivotal Tracker worked well for us.
