Kanbanery (discontinued) vs. Planview AdaptiveWork

I use Kanbanery for web app projects, customer support, and for my personal tasks. I think it would be perfect for DevOps, too. It might get a little tricky if there were hundreds of developers on one project, but with just ten to twenty people per team it's perfect.

Incentivized

Planview AdaptiveWork is by far the most flexible project management tool we've ever used. The ability to customize and create solutions to fit our needs is beyond capable. We often find ourselves creating new workflows that make automatic actions in parts of a project, or send notifications, or add users, or update statuses... the list of things goes on and on. Essentially the ability to create an IF statement on pretty much EVERYTHING you can do in the system is unparalleled. If you can imagine it, you can achieve it.

Incentivized

• I really like how easy it is for my clients to use Kanbanery. That's the most important thing for me in a project management tool, because I don't want the tool to get in the way of working with clients.
• I can see really quickly what needs to be done, and more importantly, what doesn't need to be done. Having a clear view of all my tasks takes a lot of stress of off me.
• Kanbanery is also good for communication with clients. If I have a task card that represents a component, we can talk about it in comments, or we use the project chat for general stuff. It keeps my email from getting cluttered.

• Highly customizable, can develop organization specific workflows, modules, etc.
• Interface (in most instances) is easy to use. Timesheets, project details, and report modules are fairly easy to navigate and understand.
• Good comms tools like discussions, group pages, automatic reminders and notifications.

Incentivized

• I'd love to see some improvements in the Scrum burn down chart, but it works okay as it is.
• It would be nice if we could adjust the width of the columns. It's fine on most monitors, but on a small screen I have to scroll sideways.

Incentivized

• Yes, Clarizen has time tracking functionality. But in the end, so does much other software, and they do it with a better, less confusing interface which is one of the reasons our organization ended up switching. The platform was crowded and made it confusing for users who only used it to track time (like me).
• Our organization also wanted software that would better house PTO information, in addition to time tracking, and Clarizen's program wasn't efficient enough.
• The point above also goes with expenses. We wanted a more diligent and robust expense report system. For our needs, Clarizen wasn't it.

Incentivized

I give my renewal of this product a 9. It's only because we never know what product may come out next and how other factors in our office political environment may cause impact upon this. If I always had my way, this is what we'd settle on as our de facto project management system.

It is easy to configure, intuitive. The customization process is in some ways better than Salesforce.com. It has a great UI. It does however depend on how it's implemented.

The design of it is generally fine, however the ability to data upload people from a spreadsheet is an obvious miss.

Sometimes it is slow when everyone is entering their time on Fridays or Mondays but other than that we rarely see downtime and maintenance notifications are well in advance.

Reports: Quick to Reasonable

Most Ancillary Pages: Quick to Reasonable
(By "ancillary" I mean lesser used/master data maintenance pages - e.g. People, Customers, Individual Tasks, Milestones, etc.)

Work Plan (with 100 sub items): Reasonable to Slow

It's a good experience overall. Clarizen was useful when needed. It's mostly needed for advice on how to do more sophisticated actions or how to change something that was set up administratively. It's seldom used otherwise. The product consistently works, the documentation is acceptable, and the generally intuitive product is easy enough for most staff to pick up without much issue.

Incentivized

• We worked with a Project Manager on their side. He was very good about developing a project plan to hit our goal. I think we had weekly or twice weekly calls – very steady cadence over 3 month period.
• Their PM skills were great – kept us on task. For the last week, they sent 2 people on site and they did training for power users. After that a couple of them revisited here

Our trainer, Alex, is exceptional and knows the product really well. I swear he must have wrote the product himself! His manner with training is very easy going, gives you homework that is applicable to what you need to learn and stages it correctly for you. It was a pleasure to be trained by him.

I performed the implementation with our Clarizen provide trainer, who knew the product 100% and it went quickly and without a problem. It was a pleasurable process without the problems other software implementation often encounter. Kudos to the Clarizen team for making this a worry free process for their clients because it is worry free.

Kanbanery is the easiest to use with the best visibility. It doesn't have a lot of features I don't need, like Basecamp or LeanKit, but it's much more robust than Trello or Pivotal Tracker. It's just the perfect balance of ease of use and collaboration tools for me. I also like the UI better than the others. It's sleek without a lot of bright colors and rounded corners that make some tools look plastic and unprofessional.

Planview AdaptiveWork was the right size, at the right price point that fit our customization and integration flexibility. It is intuitive to use but allowed us to add complexity as our needs grew

Incentivized

• I feel like we're much more efficient. I spend more time working on tasks now and a lot less time digging through tickets.
• Since we can see when there's a problem in our team really easy with Kanbanery, people get help when they need it sooner. That has to be good for productivity.

Incentivized

• We use the time tracking reports to help identify types of projects for which we're under charging for implementation fees
• We use the notes tracking for assisting with post mortems when projects go off the rails
• We use the tracking of ARR and implementation fees to pull together reports based on go live that let us know how we're tracking towards our yearly goals

Incentivized