Targetprocess from Apptio, an IBM Company, 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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Confluence
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Confluence is a collaboration and content sharing platform used primarily by customers who are already using Atlassian's Jira project tracking product. The product appeals particularly to IT users.
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 …
Apptio Targetprocess has more features and is more flexible for our users and its easier to develop automation rules and metrics than Atlassian JIRA Alige or Planview AgilePlan.
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
It has a comment option on the page, where you can tag other teammates tagging them. it sends the mail notification. Comment at the page end is pretty good for referring to other stakeholders and future references of the topic on the page. Creating the highlights of the discussions, and meeting held points with highlighted tagging. Easy shortcuts such as to add a date just type "//". The interface is cool and has easy shortcuts for quick page making.
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.
Navigation. Similar to other Atlassian products, users have complained that aspects of Confluence are difficult to learn right away[.]
An issue that users can face when using Confluence is attempting to edit a document while someone else is editing. Although users can access the document and save it, they are unable to see the changes happening in [real-time] that other users are implementing until they refresh their page. Some users have also noted that this can result in loss of edits.
Another drawback of using Confluence is its specific organizational structure. All information is stored within one page or project, although the page is able to be broken up into sections, some users do not prefer this style. Users can use the ‘page tree’ on each page to organize the different elements of each project.
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.
I am confident that Atlassian can come with additional and innovative macros and functions to add value to Confluence. In 6 months, Atlassian transformed a good collaborative tools into a more comprehensive system that can help manage projects and processes, as well as "talk" with other Atlassian products like Jira. We are in fact learning more about Jira to evaluate a possible fit to complement our tool box.
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.
Confluence can - and in my personal opinion, it will - be a bit hard to use in the first moment. Atlassian is a great company and is eager to help you with any question you have, though. The interface seems to be a bit clumsy at first but the customization options are enough to make it easier and simpler. In general, Confluence is easy to use when you understand what each section does, but this can take a while.
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.
Pages load very quickly, which makes it useful for quickly obtaining information. The search functionality is also very quick and is able to parse through all of the documents to provide the most relevant results for the query. Other information based software gets bogged down, but so far Atlassian Confluence maintains its performance.
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.
This rating is specifically for Atlassian's self-help documentation on their website. Often times, it is not robust enough to cover a complex usage of one of their features. Frequently, you can find an answer on the web, but not from Atlassian. Instead, it is usually at a power user group elsewhere on the net.
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 used to use Google Drive to store all of our documentation, but it is disconnected from our every day working environment and it was easy to lose documents and become disorganized within the broad drive environment. [Atlassian] Confluence has kept us more organized and its tight coupling with Jira has made documents more accessible and more likely to be kept up to date.
We use the hosted version of Targetprocess and have never run into limitations or degraded performance due to scalability. Excellent performance over 7 years!
Lower administrative burden on product teams. The "team" nature of resource manager saves a significant amount of admin time for our Product teams when managing resources and their alignment
Lean processes for labor management. Simplifying time entry to very few tasks, and enabling time entry at a team level streamlines the representation of work and cuts back on wasted time churning through admin activities
We've gone from folders and folders of Word documents and PDFs into a single system with a search feature to bring all of our data together and trackable
While onboarding took a bit longer for the company (to switch from a Word document centric mindset - to a web-based one), overall the company has embraced the features and power of Confluence within the working stack
However, as costs continue to climb for the Atlassian product, we are forced to continue our evaluation of the product - with replacing it a remote possibility if it begins to outprice its usefulness to us.
