Planview AgilePlace vs. Projector PSA

This tool enables the visual management needed in many offshore teams to easily and quickly see the pending work, work in progress and completed work.For teams that work with a waterfall methodology and do not have AGILE internalized, I believe there are other solutions from Planview or other providers.

We think Projector PSA is a great tool to track and manage people in a professional service environment like management consulting. This system is easy to set up, easy to understand and should easily suit the needs of smaller and medium sized firms. It may be less appropriate for firms that rely very heavily on project management through another system (like MS Project) or firms that rely very heavily on a sales pipeline tracking system. While still very much possible to use, you would (I believe) have to do some re-keying between systems

• Visual kanban board that is easy to customize as the team's needs change
• Real time collaboration allowing teams working remotely to stay up to date on current status
• Allows versatility for how a team needs to capture details on the work at hand by utilizing card icons, card types and custom data points
• Card scoring is easy to setup and provides the team the ability to set values to better prioritize their backlog
• Ability to add card automation to take out some of the repetitive manual actions

• Projector is a very well designed tool for project management. It has allowed us to eliminate a number of auxiliary tools for project timelines and WBS for the vast majority of our projects.
• Time and expense entry is intuitive and quick for our staff.
• Our forecasting and resource management capability has improved greatly with Projector and allows us to grow our team efficiently with minimal additional administrative burden.
• Reporting is extremely robust. It does require some time to really get a handle on the full functionality of the reporting tool, but once you do, you can get almost any kind of report you want out of the system!

• Ability to add more than 1 visual cue to the card. We use custom icons and sometimes more than 1 is appropriate but you have to choose which is most important since only 1 can be applied.
• Better visibility to board access from the user administration screens. Currently have to run 1-2 reports to see this information. Would like to be able to click on a user within Configure Users and see what boards they have access to quickly.

• Release management process needs to be improved. Currently no facility is provided to test the impact of new releases in a sand-box. This introduces business risk if there are interfaces into Projector PSA as part of it's use in the business.

we are happy with the tool and the service and continuos improvement of the tool so there is no need yet to change to another one.

We have been using this tool for a year now and find our use of it continually evolves and broadens. We are also very excited about the overhaul that's under way and feel many of the improvements being put in place will help make us that much more effective and efficient. The Projector team is also very responsive and collaborative in terms of user feedback and improvement suggestions, which helps us know they will work hard to help us get what we need out of the tool.

LeanKit isn't the best designed Kanban system I've seen, but overall it's pretty usable. The boards I've used are pretty complex, so it can be difficult to find things. I found that searching and filtering for specific cards was somewhat of a challenge. Dragging a card from one lane to another is kind of a fun way to get things done though.

Incentivized

Desktop interface feels complex to new users.

Not experienced any outage

Incentivized

In 5 years of use we have never experienced an unscheduled outage.

Larger boards take longer to load

Incentivized

Every time I have reached out to the AgilePlace support team I have received a timely response in addition to professional & personal feedback. Their consultants are knowledgeable and the management team is happy to jump in and help when needed.

Very easy.

Incentivized

Originally, we had evaluated two other tools next to Planview LeanKit: Kanbantool and Kanbanflow. The latter was a close contestant for productive use, as it was also very customizable and a joy to work with and look at. It also had lower user fees and a mobile integration. In the end, we picked Planview LeanKit because of several reasons: Aesthetics: The look was much more clean and professional. Reporting: It was obvious from the start that we could use Planview LeanKit as a tool for improvement. API: We needed to integrate the Kanban into our central systems and Planview LeanKit API was (and still is) a way to do it. Card Headers: This sounds like a simple thing, but the headers above the titles fit our work perfectly and looked perfect, which helped the decision.

Incentivized

We did pursue Quick Arrow another tool that was similar. We found that be in inflexible in use. Projector allows a lot of flexibility in setup. Our organization has very specific business processes and we were able to set up Projector to work with those processes. Several other systems we tried were not as flexible in allowing set up to our needs.

Good use cases for small/large teams

Incentivized

• LeanKit has made it easier for new employees to understand other employees' roles in the company by seeing their workload.
• It makes it clear who is responsible for what project so that there is more accountability at our company.
• It helps our project manager schedule new projects in a way that we all can see.

Incentivized

• Even in the small time that I stayed to see Projector PSA reporting I saw ROI projections become more realistic. There was real data to analyze that proved we were spending way too much and charging way too less on some projects.
• Although employees were not used at entering their hours, this single reporting improved operations management and validated employees concerns that more people were needed to manage workload
• Project proposals were more realistic because they were driven by real data.
• Decision making overall for the department became more efficient and effective

Incentivized