Likelihood to Recommend BQE CORE is well suited for a firm trying to get a better understanding of their project performance as a whole as well as better manage time and project resources. It is not the greatest for client management through a project or through invoicing, but it is do-able within the system.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Invoice Collections within Billing is a great tool because of the ability to take notes and track contact. Invoices are professional looking and easy for our clients to understand the overall progress within each phase of their project. Dashboards are the best tool EVER! The Contact List feature within Clients setup is the perfect way to track multiple project managers within a large company that also has multiple contracts with us. Read full review It's great for tracking milestones and reporting team velocity per sprint. Maintaining a prioritized backlog that is sharable with different members of your team is relatively simple. There's a free version of the product for up to 3 collaborators working on 2 projects and the starting price for larger packages is relatively low. Read full review Cons Customizable Reporting Linking Project to Payment all together Assigning contacts to particular roles - such as Invoicing, Contracts, etc. Accounting Functionality - they are basically a project management accounting software, so in my opinion, they could learn some things from other accounting software such as QuickBooks etc. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have been using Core for a few years now, and honestly started to look at other software systems to see what was out there. What we chose was a nightmare for migration so we never left Core. Now we have added invoicing and payments from Core instead of double entry with QBO. Still only a few cycles in but looks like it will be up to speed soon and working smoothly.
Read full review I love the simplicity, non-configurability, and price/performance of this tool. Hands down my favorite project management tool for agile.
Read full review Usability The foundation is awesome, like I have said before, however the house being built on it, the educational resources being provided to us (more of sales pitches that don't work), and flexible workflow opportunities, is making us look elsewhere for how much we will be spending on per user. It's crazy to think how flexible they are not when it comes to user settings. Lack of integration with other sources is awful.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability I can only remember a couple of times in 4 years that Core has been unavailable.
Read full review Performance This is one area that does need some improvement. It can be slow at time, so we had our IT look at it from our side and we had no issues, so it has to be some slowness on their side.
Read full review Support Rating As a new employee and CORE user, I talk to support on a weekly basis. I have never had to wait for more than 3 min to get connect with a support rep, and all my questions have been answered. The support representatives are polite and eager to help no matter how simple your question is.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Online Training Make sure you have someone training you that fits your style of learning.
Read full review Implementation Rating It does take some time to understand the options and to find the best invoice template.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Deltek Vision is far more advanced, more encompassing and offers more flexibility with what you want to do. However, it's also quite difficult to use, whereas BQE CORE is intuitive and user friendly. The trade off is worth it in some arenas but overall it's not suited for a larger fast paced company. Great for smaller companies.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Scalability This software works on a small and large scale.
Read full review Return on Investment Quick setup of new tasks under a parent project, with immediate hourly billing to it. Monitoring of details of non-chargeable efforts in appropriate detail Validation of hourly cost, billing cost, benefit cost, profitability by person and role Company tracking of write-off's included in corporate and project reporting, no data is "lost" Can track excessive work time as +PTO in lieu of pay for use as future vacation Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots