Planview AgilePlace Reviews

In our organization, a lot of individuals have been using it to plan out their work or keep track. Some people here are using it for things they know are coming but haven't started. They are using it to track the progress of things going on in their department and then be able to see and share it with their staff to give visibility.

We are using its most current version because it is accessed through the web. It is SaaS-based.

The ability to see the progress is important for us because there is so much going on, and it provides a way to have a quick glance to see how busy people are and how much they have going on. From having a whiteboard or sticky notes in their office that only they could see, people now have been able to go to a place where anybody can see it. Moving those things that were traditionally on a physical wall into a shareable place is a big benefit.

It is much easier for a coworker to see and know what people are working on in her department because she can assign them to those cards. So, she can go back and see at a glance, which makes things a lot easier when decisions have to be made about other things that have come to fruition or are going to start eventually.

In terms of its effect on our ability to get the answers that we need about a given card's status, especially when comparing how it was before using LeanKit, we didn't have anything previously. So, it must have been a lot harder to dig for that information. Now, if somebody is working on a project, that person on their own can go and view it versus having to maybe ask their boss what is the status or find some Excel report that was sent in email.

People found the ability to set up different lanes and the ability to see where they're within the progress most valuable. They can use different colored cards or sticky notes, and then they can separate out which cards belong to a department or the initiative they're working on. They can filter who's working on it, and I've got good feedback about that.

Board Layout Editor is very flexible and user-friendly. We can create with minimal training. We had staff that was able to go in and easily get going themselves. They've found it really user-friendly.

It is a pretty good product. It is really hard to think of things that I'd want to be improved. Sometimes, we use it for project management lessons learned. So, we have three columns, such as Could be Improved, Keep Doing, and Works Really Well. It would be helpful if there was a template set up for something like that because we code different cards based on the category. For example, if something belongs to the Could be Improved category, we may have those cards as yellow, but then I have to change the color of them and put a header. It is not as smooth, but it still works fine. To be honest, I don't have a lot of complaints about it.

We've been using it for about four months.

Its stability is good. I haven't run into any issues.

I think it can scale. If you have a bigger team, you just have more users to get in there. There doesn't seem to be any limit in terms of the number of boards you could use. People can create pretty easily and connect with other people. I don't see any issues there.

We have probably 10 people using it, and we definitely plan to use it more often. We want to get to a place where we connect it to PPM Pro. We have PPM Pro as well, and I just need to go through the process. After that, there would be more push to let people know that they can use it and decide if they want to work in PPM Pro or in Projectplace.

I use them all the time for many different things. My experience with them has been really good. I haven't had any issues. I always got the help that I needed and within a good and reasonable amount of time.

We didn't have anything quite like this. We do have Projectplace from Planview as well, which is definitely different. Projectplace can accomplish a lot of the same things, but people tend to feel more comfortable with the whole sticky note presentation type of thing, or they're used to doing that, or they just like the colors. For some people, it definitely went from zero to 100, where they felt that they were doing way more than what they ever expected to do with it.

It was straightforward. It was a piece of cake. It was pretty much knowing how to log in. I may have watched a video. There are good board templates that you can look at to get an idea of how it works. After that, you just need to set up other people. The funny thing is a lot of people were like, "One more thing. I don't have time for this. I don't want to go to one more place." When they started using it, they were like, "Oh, this is so much better." They didn't have anything like this.

We didn't really need any implementation strategy because, for the most part, we were really at the point where we just said, "Hey, there is this tool. If you want to use it, feel free." We haven't really pushed it and said, "Okay, everybody has to use this, and we're going to use it to manage this project." However, anytime we've set somebody up, it has been really easy to get somebody started, and people, in general, are pretty excited about it.

We didn't need any integrator or any staff from Planview to help us with its deployment. It was that simple. There were sufficient videos to watch if we had any questions or needed any help.

In terms of maintenance, it doesn't really require a lot. I'm the admin, and basically, all I really had to do was do a little bit of training for people. The only other thing was just to set them up as users. It is pretty simple and low maintenance, for sure.

The way our licensing is structured makes us more likely to stay or not want to go and look at other options. The overall value proposition with Planview is good. The more remote we've had to work, having these things that anybody can access is important.

I don't know what it would be on its own. It was basically included with what we were already paying or using. So, it was a no-brainer. It wasn't like we had to sell the company on making a purchase or anything like that. There weren't any costs that came in after implementing it.

We didn't evaluate other options because the way our license was structured for our other software allowed us to use this as well. So, it was like, "Oh, we now have access to this. Cool."

The biggest lesson that I've learned from using this solution is that once you are tracking everything, there is a lot more work going on than you think. It's easy to forget that things are going on, or you are going to do this task or that task.

My advice would be that if you're going to use it, you really need to be going in there on a routine basis, and that's probably daily. If you don't go into it tomorrow and you also don't go the next day, then by the time you come back to it, you would be like, "Oh! I was supposed to do that," or, "I forgot about all these other things to do," or, "I've been doing these things, but I haven't been tracking them. Now I have to go add these things up in the last three days." So, you really have to get a routine of using it to get the most out of it.

I don't use its board and card hierarchies, but I know other people have connected cards across different boards. I don't know whether they affect the speed, but it would be less likely for things to fall through the cracks. So, it probably helps in one way because it is always there, and you're always seeing it. So, things don't fall behind.

I haven't used LeanKit's Card Health feature, but I am familiar with it. We are definitely going to explore it in the future. Similarly, we haven't used it for reporting. There might be reporting capabilities, but based on my knowledge, there are not a lot of reporting capabilities. I haven't used it a lot, and I don't think anybody else has. It is relatively new, and we are at a point where we are just getting people to use it.

It has probably not reduced our cycle times. We used other things to manage projects. In some way, it is helpful because things are always there visually, and you can see them in front of you. So, if you're checking it, you're probably much more likely to get things done sooner because they are visually there.

I would rate Planview LeanKit a nine out of 10.

We do it to make work visible on one board in the area of sales and transformations on another.

I am just a user. I do not administrate it nor do I manage it. I do not set anything up for it. I am just opening up cards.

Our clients use LeanKit heavily. I have seen it at Walmart, for example.

It makes work visible, so everybody knows where everything is. It uses Kanban, and that makes work visible.

It is pretty easy to find your way through LeanKit.

It supports all of the classes and services associated with the cost of delay, so various types of swim lanes. So, it is very flexible that way.

I do not know what it can do in the area of scrum. Maybe it has that functionality. I have never tried to set it up. You think of LeanKit from the perspective of Kanban. I don't know if there is a template for scrum, a scaled agile framework, or any of those scaling frameworks. 

The stability seems good.

I have seen it used by a lot of people at the same time concurrently.

Our company is small, but Walmart has a large number of users in Bentonville, Arkansas.

I haven't contacted technical support because the product is stable, and I am not an administrator.

I have seen AgileCraft, which is now JiraAlign. I have also seen JIRA. Those other products are more centered around scrum and scaling, which are completely different types of products, but that is what they are sold as. JIRA is sold as doing scrum, but doing Kanban also. Whereas, LeanKit is Kanban.

Training documentation was originally provided by my company during the onboarding process. They gave us the links and a user guide. I did not watch any videos. I am an agile coach and trainer, so I teach Kanban. I have administered other systems.

When you think of LeanKit, you think of Kanban. You don't think of anything else. Maybe it is because it has the word has lean in it.

I would rate the product as a 10 out of 10. What it does, it does well. It is fine for Kanban.

We are currently using LeanKit as a task tracking tool for all of our teams. Since COVID hit, we just wanted to use it to see where our teams are on their work, see where they need help, and also to keep track of how long specific projects are taking. We also use it to make sure our employees are not being overloaded with any work.

We're still early in our organization of actually adopting it. We transitioned to LeanKit from JIRA. We wanted to find a way to cut costs. We realized that we can use both, but since they're both task tracking tools, we wanted to just utilize the one.

Third-party integrations are one of the things that I've heard a lot of users not necessarily happy with. One of the teams is our security team. They use some tools that provide automatic updates and information provided to their tasks and stories in JIRA. But those third-party applications don't work automatically with LeanKit right now. We haven't utilized the APIs at all. I don't know if these other tools have access to the APIs to develop any integration with them. That's something we haven't really done any research into as we're still getting users into it.

The third-party aspect is still the one thing that we liked about JIRA. They have so many third-party extensions and applications along with it and it seems that LeanKit is still gaining ground in that area.

The at-a-glance info, without even having to open the card, provides a lot of information on where a card is at and the basic information of a card. I also like the ability that when you click into the card, you can have so many different options to get all the information you want. You have the comments section, your attachment section, you can add whatever you need to your card to get all the information that you need or you want to send to your users.

My team specifically uses our board for all of our Remedy tickets that come in. We had a card for every ticket that we get, and we're able to add the link to that specific ticket there. If I'm out of office, for example, and someone else needs to work a ticket or someone is being contacted to work on a ticket, I don't have to sign on it. Someone else can easily access that ticket because I put the link in there. It's nice. It has a lot of great functionality in there.

We use a tool called BMC Remedy that our organization can submit tickets via.

My team is not currently using the card health feature. We haven't done an assessment to see where teams are at and what they've used and how they've used it. I think we'll be setting something up here soon to get that information.

I think its insights into card status have helped to increase project delivery time. Being able to see how long projects are taking and their due dates helps us keep on our toes a little bit. Utilizing the board and our daily standups are really helpful. We didn't use to have that functionality. We did with JIRA, but the readability on it was not the best. So having LeanKit helped us have a clearer picture of where we're at for everybody.

The reporting and the readability of the boards are the most valuable features. With LeanKit, I can just see a card and have so much information at a glance, as opposed to JIRA, where I actually have to click into all of my tasks and stories to see specific information about it. The usability of it and the readability of it is so much better than what JIRA is. JIRA's reporting is flawed and it doesn't really provide anything that users want unless they export all of the data. Whereas LeanKit has all the data in it that a lot of people need and if it doesn't have it, it has the ability to export said data and add it to a Power BI report. We didn't integrate JIRA and LeanKit at all. We went directly to LeanKit.

We use the board layout editor quite a bit. We have a board administrator for every board and advise them to customize it as they see fit. So far, no one's really done a horizontal lane. It's more like a vertical split on anything to do any customization but as people get more into using their boards, some sort of hierarchy might take place eventually. Now, it's at a point where it's a very basic high-level use. And as users use the boards more, it will be a growing experience because they'll be able to do more with it than what they could with JIRA.

I enjoy the flexibility of the board layout editor. It's nice to be able to make a board look how we want and that's why we have that board and those board administrators. With JIRA, we had an admin for the entire site, as opposed to a board administrator. All the requests went to one person and they had to do it. It was very tight-knit and complicated to customize it. But with LeanKit's board layout editor, it's so much more easy and flexible to get customizations done to make our board look how you want.

We really enjoy the reports that are in LeanKit. The only thing that would improve it, would be the ability to create customized reports. Specifically, we're looking at the customized field that you can add to a card. That information is not able to be reported on. It would be nice if it were in the application itself rather than having to export the data, like the readability of the reports within Planview or within LeanKit. I don't have any numbers. We haven't done an assessment yet on how our teams are utilizing the reporting within LeanKit, and my team doesn't really use the reporting functionality as much as we should. 

LeanKit has reduced our cycle time by a considerable amount.

The ability to report on customizable fields and third-party extensions needs improvement. I'd like to see more of those being able to be used. I don't know how that works for Planview, but just getting a little bit more added there would be nice.

I have been using LeanKit for four months. 

We haven't had any stability problems. We actually just ran into our first hiccup today but that was just because our SSO refreshed yesterday and we didn't have the key yet, so we needed to forward that along. It was resolved pretty quickly.

Scalability has performed pretty well. It will be able to handle all of our users, and I think once we train up our other administrators, we shouldn't have any problem with handling that. It should be pretty stable. We'll eventually be integrating it with PRM as we use the Enterprise One suite of applications as well. We already have users in PRM and that's one of our next steps is to integrate PRM and LeanKit.

Currently there about 50 users but I know we're probably going to be setting up 700 at least. We hope to by next summer.

The technical support was good. They responded pretty quickly and they were able to fix both our production and our sandbox environments quickly.

The setup of LeanKit was really easy. It was transferring all of our boards from JIRA to LeanKit. The process was pretty seamless. We didn't have any issues for both teams who actually wanted to transfer their boards. A lot of teams wanted to start fresh, so we only had a few that we actually had to import, but I think the process was pretty easily explained within LeanKit. It made the process really easy.

We're technically not finished deploying. We've only deployed to the people who have been a part of JIRA and that wasn't in our entire organization. It was only a small portion of us. One of the reasons we are transitioning to LeanKit is because we want to roll this out organization-wide and we are actually getting ready here shortly to begin that process.

When we first adopted LeanKit, we rolled out to about two teams. My team, as the administrator on it, we wanted to make sure the administrator had their team sitting there and were getting through the initial implementation. In doing that, we were able to keep better track of what users might want. We would sit down with each director and build templates out for each director and their teams below. That way, each director could have their own template and say, "Hey, you guys use this template for your implementation." We felt like that made it so with other teams under that director had to go to the other boards. They weren't lost or confused when they were viewing the board. They could say, "Oh, this lane is for this. I know that because my board uses that." 

There were about 20 people for the initial deployment. My team consists of application analysts and then we also had a BI team.

Currently, we only have two administrators but we're going to be rolling out to the entire organization, which could end up needing at least five administrators down the line.

I like the FLEX licensing. It's nice to have one FLEX licensing plan for all their applications and we just need to pay that upkeep. I think it's great.

We didn't evaluate other solutions because we were already in PRM and we wanted to use an application that would seamlessly integrate with PRM. We also had FLEX licensing already and we felt like we had a license for it, why let them go to waste?

As an administrator, it's nice that we can have other users manage their boards. Just because the standard has always been JIRA, times change and new applications show up and change is good.

My advice would be to rely on a board administrator. You don't have to do everything yourself and set templates. I think templates will help make the transition a little better. That way other teams can collaborate more efficiently.

I would rate LeanKit an eight out of ten. Once we get the third-party integration and the customizable reporting my grade would raise a little bit.