Jira Align (formerly AgileCraft) is an enterprise-ready project management solution, now from Atlassian (acquired May 2019).
$27,000
per year
Planview Portfolios
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Planview Portfolios is an end-to-end project portfolio management and enterprise architecture management tool. It includes two components: Portfolio and Resource Management and Capability and Technology Management. The platform is available as a cloud-based or on-premise service.
The Atlassian Jira Align (formerly AgileCraft) tools help keep our scrum teams moving in the right direction. It gives Sr. Executives visibility into the progress of our digital transformation efforts. It provides information to our program manager to create the necessary artifacts to justify continued funding of our initiatives. It also supports the SAFe framework, along with some others. And the Atlassian Jira Align (formerly AgileCraft) tools provide integration to other tools that we use in our portfolio.
Planview Portfolios allows the ability to establish strategic goals, set financial targets, and then associate work so that business areas can easily see current forecasts compared to baselines. Lower-level resource management is handled nicely within Portfolios, allowing Resource Managers to pivot the assignment data quickly to do a variety of analyses. There is room for improvement in the ease of connecting Ideation to Delivery. Companion tools are available but it does not flow smoothly between applications. I would rather have Ideation embedded within Portfolios so that projects can be created/aligned more easily.
Effective Sprint planning : Sprint planning can be done using Planning Poker in AgileCraft by clicking Team > Manage > Other > Estimation Games very effectively for distributed teams.
Team Capacity Allocation Report: After tasks are created at team or program level, the report from AgileCraft cab be pulled and can be verified that no team member is under or over allocated. A report can be generated by navigating to Team > Manage > Assign Tasks.
Effective Requirement trace-ability: To maintain requirements trace-ability follow the steps below:
Upload test cases against the story/requirement. once uploaded test cases will be visible under that story
Execute Test cases in AgileCraft and mark them as Pass/Fail based on the actual outcome
Based on test results, The acceptance criterion's can be marked as “Pass” or “Fail” & if marked failed corresponding defect can be logged & can be attached with the story
So against each story we can easily see whether all test cases been executed or not & which acceptance criterion's are failed & how many defects are in open or close state.
Daily Scrum: In AgileCraft, the option to run a daily stand-up is available from Team > Manage > Daily Standups. Selecting the sprint number opens the daily stand-up meeting window in which each team member's tasks are visible and hours can be burned against them. Conduct Scrum meetings in AgileCraft, and burn each associate hour against the tasks created during the meeting. The burn-down chart can be generated & viewed during the stand-up to check whether the team is on track.
Capture potential opportunities using the Requests Module and analyze and rank these opportunities via lifecycles and promote (dispatch) approved opportunities into Projects. Information captured during the request process automatically get transferred to projects.
Robust schedule management; time reporting; resource management and financial planning and management
Risk and Issue management controlled via robust lifecycles.
Extensive reporting capabilities via SSRS and Power BI Dashboards and delivered to users via tiles in Project and Portfolio views.
The initial ticket creation screen lacks some important features, such as assigning "point values" (a measure of effort needed for the ticket).
The browser needs to be manually refreshed to see new tickets, which can make things confusing when several people in a meeting are simultaneously creating tickets.
The interface on some smaller portions of the software are sometimes difficult to understand.
this is the area I can see Planview Portfolios is very much lagging behind. If you see Atlassian, they are having a robust API information and using that we can securely access the necessary information based on the role. I think a similar kind of approach need to done in Planview Portfolios as well.
User Information and Resource information is separate. Expecting that, during the User creation, when a resource is linked, automatically all the basic fields should be populated with the values, also if a person is having an User account there is no way for that person to know that what User role that he/she is having. Also none of the reports covering that details.
Automation - It's mentioned using the UiPath some of the Automation has been done in the User creation but don't find any necessary document for better understanding.
We have been a Planview customer since 1999 and have seen it grow and mature as a tool. We have looked at other tools and have found that PV continues to meet our needs and is easy for our resources to use. They work to stay up on the project management industry and the direction it is going, keep on on current technology so that we can work more effectively, provide excellent customer support and have great pricing for what they offer. We can purchase only the modules we need versus buying a tool where we would only use a portion of the functionality.
Most of the things are easily manageable except certain things that are hidden and you need to ask teammates who are aware of how they can link attachements in the comment section and so on.
There is a learning curve that needs to be overcome for new and occasional users. Need to clearly training users on how to filter the data with "Portfolio's"
We are long time Planview users and its availability is only limited to our internal SLAs for nightly backups. I have never experienced any unexpected or prolonged software downtime from Planview itself.
Overall support from Jira team is good. It comes at an additional price but it is very efficient. There are no long wait times, you get a dedicated team to look into your issues. The support is available throughout the year and they keep a record of your issues. Overall we are very satisfied with the support they have provided us over the years, it has been very effective for the price that we pay.
Going through proper channels of support is fine for minor to moderate issues. However, lately the critical issues that arise have been frequent and the standard support cases do not always seem to relay just how critical these issues are and we have to utilize our customer rep to help escalate. Fortunate to have that escalation method.
Always have a pre-implementation meeting or conference call with Planview to ensure all are on the same page, disclosure of all and any customization (including reports) and plan for support after implementation of a specified amount of time with the assigned implementation resource. And document everything
Microsoft Azure Devops won't have the major functionality of software management like Jira. The customization provided by Jira is having a cutting edge over any project management tool. Adds-on and Plugins feature in the Jira Tool make it as perfect as desired task management tool for any company. One of the best Agile based Project Management Tools.
Odoo, like this platform, has allowed us to efficiently organize our projects so that they can be prioritized by importance, to know which is the most urgent, in addition, it has also allowed us to assign work in an organized way among our collaborators, and their reports have allowed us to improve.
It has positively impacted our tech teams, allowing them to better organize the tasks and items they are working on and has greatly improved their ability to communicate & review these tasks with other teams.
I believe it negatively impacted other departments as lengthy training was required by many associates to attempt using the tool, only to find out it didn't meet our needs, therefore much time was wasted.
The positive impact is the ability to manage our projects enterprise wide.
Managing and reporting on projects and programs via portfolios makes it easy to identify troubled projects/programs that need immediate attention.
The negative is that pushing too much change too quickly is hard for us. We need to get our users focused on the basics of PM before we can adopt everything else. We need to introduce change to different companies based on their maturity level. Too much change too quickly is not always beneficial. We need to focus on core competencies.