What advice do you have for others considering Planview AgilePlace?

The Kanban approach, in general, is to start wherever you are, but that's very intimidating to a lot of people because that doesn't sound very meaningful. So truly, you have to start wherever you are and just go from there. If you keep that in mind, you're going to understand how this is designed to work and all of the opportunities that this enables. So, just start wherever you are. I learned that quickly. We learned through doing. To the credit of the designers, it's a very intuitive product. I would advise others to experiment. They should start small and with projects that easily fit into this kind of format. They should experiment and continue to learn and incorporate some kind of daily or weekly standups or some kind of plugging in of stakeholders into it to gain experience to follow this through. I haven't delved into customization because I think the simpler, the better. Simple is usually the best way. I've seen a lot of people who customize LeanKit, but I would caution them to be careful because the more complicated something becomes, the more difficult it is for people to engage with it because they're scared of the tool. So, you got to make the tools simple and easy to use. It is excellent that it is customizable. That's a great design. They are balancing simplicity with the ability to expand it and blow it up in a lot of different ways. My hat's off to them. I have not used its board and card hierarchies. I'm really dabbling in the beginning, and organizationally, we have not really gotten into that stuff as far as I'm aware of. I learned about metrics, and I really want to get into the metric levels of it, but I have not been able to really figure that out too much yet. Similarly, I have just dabbled into reporting. We still need to explore that and exploit it. I have also not used the Card Health feature much. I know it exists, and I've dabbled in it and used it a little bit. It is a good feature because that's how you tell what's your flow time. It is very interesting, but I don't understand the operational definitions that are being used to generate this input or this information. I saw this literally the other day. I looked at it on my card because I thought this project was flowing pretty well, but I only got a yellow score. I was wondering why only yellow. If I understood more of the methodology of how it is giving me that score, I would probably use it more. That's no fault of Planview. It is my own fault. We didn't really have a lot of training on this. We did get Planview training, and it was okay. They showed us everything, but you need to practice it. I can anecdotally say that it has reduced our cycle times, but I cannot say the same scientifically. I would rate Planview LeanKit a nine out of 10.

LeanKit's email functionality is nice. I get emails whenever something happens with a particular card so I do not have to constantly go into LeanKit and check on cards for status. That's very helpful. It enables faster scheduling of things or collaboration on items. LeanKit has reduced our cycle times because we are able to collaborate so much quicker with it. Leveraging LeanKit's email capability has been a plus for me. We can also use it to ping people who may not be paying attention to certain cards. It keeps things moving. LeanKit has been more of an enabler for me to keep me on task or on track with what needs to get done. In the board layout editor, there's quite a bit of flexibility in how you can set up your swim lanes, etc. We have not set any standards on how to use the card hierarchy. I have not used any of the more complex linking functionalities. We usually just create parent cards and link child cards to them. In addition, while the card hierarchy has not improved the speed of my deliveries, it has affected my bandwidth. I would highly encourage others to implement LeanKit. It is a powerful tool and very intuitive. I think it is a great tool.

I think the first time I used it it was a little tricky to figure out how everything worked as far as adding a lane goes, for example, or moving it up and down and splitting it vertically or horizontally. But once I figured it out, it's straightforward. I use the Card Health feature to go in and see how a card's doing. I don't know if I've used it that much when it comes to planning for deadlines. I use it more to look back on how things are doing and then update our process. So if we see a bottleneck, we will point it out and we will talk about if we need to change anything in the future, I don't know if I've used it much for looking forward though. The Card Health activity stream makes it easier to quickly look back and see where we have bottlenecks. Our cycle times have reduced by 50%. They are now half as long as they used to be.

We're very happy with our decision to use LeanKit for our Portfolio/Program management and we're glad we could spread the word around our company to lead to deeper integration. We look forward to some cool new features.

Listen to what the technical folks at Planview are telling you. They are probably right. Don't try to do anything that the tool isn't meant to do in some way. It is definitely a SaaS and nothing that can be customized. It can be configured, but it is what it is. We use all three of Planview products. We use LeanKit, Projectplace and Enterprise One. I was actually prepared to talk about Enterprise One, which I think has more opportunities. LeanKit is so simple and easy; it's just a simple tool. Their Enterprise One tool is a much bigger, older tool that has some more opportunities for improvement. From a reporting perspective, we almost exclusively use its connection to Power BI. We have not exercised the standard reports within the system. However, that could be because we have a little bit of a different use case. Just make sure you have somebody who is dedicated to learning the tool and training people, because that lessens the frustration. The big lesson learnt is utilize the ability to hook up to Power BI. We could just report on it so easily. Design the boards and cards with your endgame in mind. You need to know what you want to get out of it, so you know how to configure it. I am going to rate the solution as a nine (out of 10), because 10 is hard. 10 is perfect.

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.

When you're trying to decide on a solution like LeanKit, important things to look out for are reporting, and the customizability or flexibility within the product. Those are really helpful to individual teams. The biggest lesson I have learned from using this solution is that you can really be creative with your Agile process and make your to-do list seem easier to tackle.

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.