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.
N/A
Planview AgilePlace
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
AgilePlace is a project management solution built around flexibility, data-driven analytics, and workflow automation. The software was acquired by Planview in December 2017 to expand that company's capabilities.
We selected Pivotal Tracker because of its simple, elegant workflow. This is the ideal; it's where we want to be. So we continue to improve, and as we get better, we get more out of the software.
The other software products we evaluated were too complex, and we found that …
Our organization actually does not exclusively use Pivotal. We also have teams on solutions like Trello and LeanKit. It's all preference, those who buy into all the agile features that pivotal provides, love it. Those who do not need all the overhead, simply use a different …
Our company uses LeanKit, Pivotal Tracker, and Trello. It all depends on what team you're on. There's even a team that just does KanBan on a whiteboard. In the end, I would tank LeanKit above Pivotal Tracker, but below Trello. The differences are relatively subtle between Trello…
Being from QA I prefer SpiraTest and QC for the fact my team can do all our work in one program and it is linked. But the tech department as a whole prefers Leankit as it is the tool of choice based on ease of use and overall performance.
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.
This tool enables the visual management needed in many offshore teams to easily and quickly see the pending work, work in progress and completed work.For teams that work with a waterfall methodology and do not have AGILE internalized, I believe there are other solutions from Planview or other providers.
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.
Ability to add more than 1 visual cue to the card. We use custom icons and sometimes more than 1 is appropriate but you have to choose which is most important since only 1 can be applied.
Better visibility to board access from the user administration screens. Currently have to run 1-2 reports to see this information. Would like to be able to click on a user within Configure Users and see what boards they have access to quickly.
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.
LeanKit isn't the best designed Kanban system I've seen, but overall it's pretty usable. The boards I've used are pretty complex, so it can be difficult to find things. I found that searching and filtering for specific cards was somewhat of a challenge. Dragging a card from one lane to another is kind of a fun way to get things done though.
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.
Every time I have reached out to the AgilePlace support team I have received a timely response in addition to professional & personal feedback. Their consultants are knowledgeable and the management team is happy to jump in and help when needed.
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.
Originally, we had evaluated two other tools next to Planview LeanKit: Kanbantool and Kanbanflow. The latter was a close contestant for productive use, as it was also very customizable and a joy to work with and look at. It also had lower user fees and a mobile integration. In the end, we picked Planview LeanKit because of several reasons: Aesthetics: The look was much more clean and professional. Reporting: It was obvious from the start that we could use Planview LeanKit as a tool for improvement. API: We needed to integrate the Kanban into our central systems and Planview LeanKit API was (and still is) a way to do it. Card Headers: This sounds like a simple thing, but the headers above the titles fit our work perfectly and looked perfect, which helped the decision.
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.