The world of work is constantly changing. Agile work processes in particular are becoming increasingly popular. Even large companies are trying to introduce agile working methods. For many, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is the right solution for their agile teams. However, implementing SAFe with all its features such as providing reports, visualizing dependencies and automated documentation is not always easy in reality. Many companies spend a lot of time and money searching for the right…
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IBM Targetprocess
Score 8.6 out of 10
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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.
During our RFP and demo rating Apptio Targetprocess came out with the highest score by 3% and was the more cost effective of the closer rival. It rated the highest in 4 out of the 8 categories we graded and had one of the most cost effective implementation costs and ranked the …
Agile Hive is used for our value train within a SAFe setup. Every quarter we organize a so-called Product Increment (PI) Planning, where we plan all Features and Enablers in Agile Hive. Based on the priority of the Product Manager all teams plan their Features and Enablers accordingly to the sprints that are determined by the Release Train Engineer and set up in Agile Hive. The teams then create User Stories and estimate them and based on their sprint velocity (defined in Agile Hive) Product Owners can see how many Features and Enablers are realistic in one quarter (Product Increment). Further, dependencies across teams can be defined and made visible in Agile Hive, so that the plan is feasible. Without Agile Hive it would be hard or impossible to plan across several teams within a value train and to manage all dependencies. Additionally, with Agile Hive the plan is more realistic, so what can be achieved within one quarter in product development.
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
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.
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.
It has in general a good usability, but there are some downsides, the big picture view of the entire product increment is too static, so there is no zoom in or zoom out. Mostly throughout planning it is necessary to zoom in to a sprint level and manage the user stories there. Also, the pig picture view has some limitations, because you cannot read the entire user story name (boxes are too small).
Overall Targetprocess's usability is good. the tool is easy to use and has features which most BUs and organizations can use. Additional features like AI integration would help the tool and its overall usability. providing additional dashboards for specific roles and executives within the tool would benefit Targetprocess with its scale
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.
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.
With Jira Software alone it is also possible to plan a SAFe product increment planning, but it would be nearly impossible to see the overall big picture of all product teams involved in a release train. So, the planning on sprint level for one team would be more efficient, but the planning for a whole quarter with all dependencies across teams would be not feasible to present. Therefore, Agile SAFe enables value trains an efficient way to plan a product increment.
I would say TargetProcess is an incredibly wonderful tool. As compare to JIRA Software, it is a fully featured product. It fulfills all my business needs. Tracking efficiency of this application is quite favorable in order to track all the details from a certain project in just a few minutes.
We use the hosted version of Targetprocess and have never run into limitations or degraded performance due to scalability. Excellent performance over 7 years!