Cherwell Software was a full suite of service management tools competing with BMC Remedy, ServiceNow, and IBM SmartCloud. It was acquired by Ivanti, and has reached EOL.
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Rally Software
Score7.8 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.
Well suited in an IT environment where you have limited staff. It can be managed by one administrator. Reliability of the SaaS environment has been excellent. Flexibility in developing automated workflows to open, manage, and close Incidents. Change Management due to ability to modify OOB to meet the needs of our staff. Contract Management allowing us to be notified when a contract or license is up for renewal and setting reminders. Integrations are not easy to create and manage.
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Rally Software is well suited for large Agile or scrum teams who do sprints and it helps managing sprints and backlogs. It is well suited for organizations who want visibility into work being done and progress. Suitable for tracking is user stories, defects and release planning. Works well with CI CD too. It would not be suitable for small teams or startups. For teams that don't use agile. Teams who want lightweight tools like Jira. Companies with a limited budget.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Cherwell's email handling automation works flawlessly. The only time that I have ever needed to reset the automation service that drives it is when my own server that houses the small connecting agent has some kind of problem and disconnects us from our hosted Cherwell instance. It just works. Emails to a certain address always result in a new ticket or update to an existing ticket.
Cherwell is literally 100% customization in so many ways that it would be pointless to try to enumerate them. There is a very sizable list of already-created customizations (called "mApps") that you can download and apply to your instance. If you don't like them you can roll them back in seconds. But you can add and configure entire modules using one of these pre-defined, completely free, add-on packages. It's so easy to add features this way that I check the list of available mApps every month or so just to see what functionality I can add.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Cherwell is still the best tool for the job in the market. Even though Ivanti bought them and are trying to convince everyone to move over to Neurons for ITSM, they have stated Cherwell will remain supported indefinitely and have a roadmap for future Cherwell development. Unfortunately, ISM is not as flexible as Cherwell (and the UX is atrocious), hence why many people are sticking with Cherwell (and why many Cherwell customers never purchased ISM originally)
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I enjoy the layout and configuration of our Cherwell Service Management instance. It did take me a bit to get used to, as with any new ticketing system, but now that I understand the system more, I thoroughly enjoy it! There are just so many options and the UI is very intuitive.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The browser client is mostly acceptable in terms of performance, but still lacks parity with the rich client. The rich client is not very performant at all. It's built on old architecture and relies heavily on a fast internet connection, good caching and database indexing. There are several unwritten rules with form design (and form arrangement) which most users are not aware of, but can severely impact performance in the rich client. This is where the flexibility of Cherwell can come back to bite you if you step outside the boundaries of these unwritten rules
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
We generally have a good time with Cherwell support, however, there are the few niche cases where I have to explain how Cherwell works to the customer support agent on the other end. A little more product education for tier 1 support could go a long way in helping expedite support requests from SaaS customers.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I didn't partake in the in-person training, but it was available. I preferred the online method instead, which was a great experience. It was nice to have someone available to bounce questions off of and demonstrate how certain functions worked.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The training was great! We got together to review the system, its UI, and how to perform basic functions. Then there was plenty of time to ask questions and test out the system while there was someone available to assist.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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
Implementation is a breeze. Each time I've implemented it, we had an outsourced vendor overseeing it & assisting where needed. However, Cherwell OOTB is ready to go, and configuring it for LDAP/SAML, etc. for authentication and user-imports is really straight forward. The infrastructure needed for Cherwell is extremely simple too - and installing the server & database takes no more than 20 mins
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Much more customizable than other products, especially when ran in a self-hosted environment. Cherwell [Service Management] allows for greater flexibility of custom development and integrations to allow for automating tasks that traditional ITSM apps are not well suited for. Cherwell [Service Management] gives you the freedom to develop your own objects with minimal licensing costs.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Rally and Asana have comparable features and are both valuable project management tools, but Asana's user interface is well-organized and highly intuitive. It's easy to add tasks and collaborators, edit due dates, indicate progress on tasks, close out projects, etc. However, Rally's interface is somewhat cluttered and difficult to navigate. My team ended up choosing Asana over Rally due to these concerns.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We have never had any major show-stopper issues with Cherwell itself - more so with the infrastructure it sits on. Moving from in-house cloud (on Cherwell's side), to AWS then to Azure has caused multiple problems over the years (some still on-going), however the product has remained fairly stable
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
As mentioned, they were always great to work with (minus the project management side). My only feedback would be to push back on requirements that don't make sense
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
As with any standard ticketing system, it helped decrease the time before first contact with clients.
Our department was always concerned with keeping a low budget, and it was cheaper than most.
My supervisor could easily tell how many resources were being put into each employee, so we had more visibility of our team's capabilities at a given time if we needed to take on something complex.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
