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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Rally Software
Score 7.4 out of 10
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Rally Software headquartered in Boulder, Colorado developed the Rally agile software development / ALM platform which was acquired by CA Technologies and rebranded as CA Agile Central. After CA's acquisition by Broadcom the software was once again rebranded as Rally.
Targetprocess was all around the better tool. They do not nickel-and-dime you and you don't have to deal with multiple products that do, or do not, integrate well together. Below are some of Targetprocess' biggest strengths:
Highly customizable; can fit the needs of almost any …
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
Rally is well suited to help outline the specific tasks of a project, create timelines, indicate progress/status of tasks and provide views of team members' workloads. My team used it for our weekly stand up meetings in order to update one another on our progress, and our manager used it as a way to determine who had capacity for additional tasks. It facilitated our transition to a more agile work environment and we used it to implement 2 week "sprints".
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.
There are dashboards that provide friendly and useful metrics at the team, program and portfolio levels which help get an easy and quick visual representation of what's going on.
Story management made easier, It offers a quick way of quickly entering a number of user stories without losing the overview, by just typing the title and selecting a few attributes directly in the overview screen.
Sprint management is seamless in CA Agile Central . It allows you to drag stories from the backlog to the sprints and back again. When a story is dragged into an sprint, it automatically checks the velocity for that sprint and indicates how many more story points can be chipped in. No more manual checking needed by scrum master with respect to allocation and team velocity.
Though CA Agile Central has many inbuilt apps, but it also has an App-SDK that allows you to build free app extensions using JavaScript and HTML. So, as per their needs, teams can customize & build various apps & dashboards.
Dashboard is an awesome feature which allows you to select and drag panels with all kinds of graphical information about the current sprints and releases.
It offers tremendous support for scaled Agile & almost all scaling frameworks are supported specifically tuned to SAFe .
CA Agile Central includes several applications but it also integrates well with Jira, Confluence, Jenkins, Eclipse, Subversion, IBM, HP, Salesforce.com and many other products to allow users to organize projects to their specifications. So you can still use Jira at a team level & CA Agile Central at the program & portfolio level for efficient tracking & management.
The custom tags are very helpful in segregating the user stories based on the project needs. Even though it's a very small feature, it is very effective ( you will realize why specifically if you are using Jira).
CA Central Agile enables agile delivery with ease and provides comprehensive features to track time-boxes, Work In Progress items of the forecast increments.
Backlog management is hassle free since you can either drag and drop your user stories to the desired position on the backlog, or change a setting and manually enter priorities as a number.
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.
User management is pretty basic and could be better. For example more filters and reports and more ability to do mass updates.
The report generator is very, very basic and is not WYSIWYG. It has limited filters to generate reports. Often a Scrum master will need to export data to Excel or a tool like Crystal Reports to get enhanced reporting capability.
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.
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.
Great UI, recent refresh was terrific. Great graphs and metrics, inline editing for updates, and a multitude of views on sprint progress make for a great team collaboration experience. There is also an active community and forums so that if you do need help, it is readily available
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.
The screens render relatively quickly but many actions that you would expect to require a single click require multiple clicks and pop-up windows. The extra windows and clicks make the product feel ponderous.
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.
I've had to use support only one time and my issue was eventually resolved but not because of my ticket--because others complained about the functionality taken away so they brought it back. My ticket was never answered or addressed. So I can't really say much for the support factor for Rally.
It more or less confirmed that we are using it the way they had in mind. We were hoping for a epiphany in terms of how we could use it better.
They also want to be a go to source for agile processes and have an online resource center. It’s not that great but had a couple of nuggets. It hasn’t really helped us too much and we are not too far off from the classical interpretation of agile.
I would recommend training, in particular for organizations that multiple on-going projects. The product seems optimized for larger, more complex teams and getting proper training on how to configure, administer and use the system would be beneficial
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.
Implementation of RALLY services and program satisfaction among various group,... 1) Dev Outcomes: How were our resiliencies, development, learning & practitioners “make them do the work,” but that they ask you to do it “in a way like before. 2) The Ops group: Just wish to make sure any change won't break current production envirements All the stake holders has to be on the same page
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.
It was a close race between Jama, JIRA and Rally. We decided to go for Jama as a requirements management tool and use Rally for Agile projects. The cost was another factor that made us select Rally.
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
it helped organizing many of the processes management use to communicate tasks with engineers, and provided detailed charts on the speed/blockage during any iteration
with time Rally became the main tool we used to track and report tasks/defects in our projects, but frequent service outages made it very hard to continue consider as a reliable solution
too much features is good, but for engineers a few features (User Stories section, iterations, defects, and Kanban boards) are necessary and the rest is just noise
