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Pivotal Tracker is a versatile project management tool that has found a wide range of use cases across various departments and …
Overview
What is Pivotal Tracker?
Pivotal Tracker is a project management program primarily for software developers. It is built from the ground up to facilitate the agile development cycle, and is optimized for structuring projects in sprints, or “stories.” The solution is now owned and supported…
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What is Pivotal Tracker?
Pivotal Tracker is a project management program primarily for software developers. It is built from the ground up to facilitate the agile development cycle, and is optimized for structuring projects in sprints, or “stories.” The solution is now owned and supported by VMware, and is part of the…
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Product Details
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- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Pivotal Tracker?
Pivotal Tracker is an agile project management program primarily for software developers. The software organizes projects into “stories,” the goal being to maintain momentum within and between “sprints” of a project within an agile development style. Pivotal Tracker is built to support the Agile development cycle from the ground up, enabling mid-project analysis and feedback based on current progress and development speeds. It also provides a shared priority system so everyone on a given project has visibility on progress and team members’ statuses. It also includes file sharing, project obstacle visibility, and a REST API for customizable integrations.
Pivotal Tracker Competitors
- Jira Software
- Asana
- Rally Software (formerly CA Agile Central)
Pivotal Tracker Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Pivotal Tracker is a project management program primarily for software developers. It is built from the ground up to facilitate the agile development cycle, and is optimized for structuring projects in sprints, or “stories.”
The solution is now owned and supported by VMware, and is part of the Pivotal / Tanzu product line up.
Jira Software and Asana are common alternatives for Pivotal Tracker.
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 8.
The most common users of Pivotal Tracker are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
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- Recommendations
Pivotal Tracker is a versatile project management tool that has found a wide range of use cases across various departments and organizations. Moffitt's Collaborative Data Services Core, for example, uses Pivotal Tracker to form realistic expectations about work completion based on the team's ongoing performance. Other departments at Moffitt employ this tool for bug tracking and as a shared team-level 'to-do' list. The graphics and technology department utilizes Pivotal Tracker to track their work tasks and ensure that no items are dropped or missed. Moreover, the support service team is exploring the expansion of Pivotal Tracker's usage to track additional client work.
In addition to its adoption within Moffitt, Pivotal Tracker is also utilized by agencies and software development teams to manage various projects. It facilitates the implementation of agile methodologies, such as scrum, and effectively manages backlogs and feature roadmaps. Integration with other applications like Slack, Git, Bugzilla, and Usersnap further enhance its functionality. By utilizing Pivotal Tracker, engineers, product managers, testers, and marketing teams collaborate seamlessly. The tool allows for task prioritization, backlog maintenance, progress tracking, and facilitates file sharing among marketing teams. Overall, Pivotal Tracker serves as an invaluable asset in project management for organizations of diverse sizes and industries.
Intuitive and Easy to Use User Interface: Reviewers have consistently praised Pivotal Tracker's user interface, with many stating that it is intuitive and easy to use. Some users have mentioned that they were able to quickly understand how to navigate the platform and create/manage projects efficiently.
Multi-User Assignment for Collaboration: Users highly value the multi-user assignment feature in Pivotal Tracker, as it allows them to assign tasks to multiple team members simultaneously. This functionality has been commended by reviewers for facilitating collaboration among team members and keeping everyone informed of progress.
Exporting Notes into Readable Excel Format: The history tracking and exporting feature in Pivotal Tracker has received praise from users who appreciate being able to easily export notes into a readable Excel format. This functionality helps streamline documentation submission and makes auditing time more efficient.
In-Story Task Management: Some users have expressed dissatisfaction with the in-story task management capabilities of Pivotal Tracker, stating that it is a weak point. They believe that the functionality could be greatly improved by adding features such as the ability to mention other users in tasks and mark tasks as 'in-progress'.
Lack of Epic Spanning and Parent-Child Story Relationship: Many reviewers have raised concerns about the fact that epics do not span projects in Pivotal Tracker, particularly when scaling agile methodology to multiple teams. This limitation also leads to confusion due to the lack of a concept of a 'parent' story with child stories that have split off from it.
Limited Customization Options for Categorization: Users desire more flexibility in categorizing stories beyond the default sections like backlog, ice box, and my work. They wish for the ability to create custom categories for better organization and classification of their stories.
Users commonly recommend the following for Pivotal Tracker:
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Users should take advantage of the free trial to ensure that it meets the organization's needs before making a purchasing decision. This allows them to fully explore the features and capabilities of the software and determine if it aligns with their project management requirements.
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It is recommended to utilize tools and tutorials provided by Pivotal Tracker to learn the software effectively. The platform offers resources such as user guides and documentation, which help users understand how to navigate the interface, set up projects, assign tasks, and track progress.
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Many users find Pivotal Tracker useful for managing complicated tasks with multiple people involved. The platform offers features that facilitate collaboration and coordination among team members, such as task assignment, progress tracking, and communication channels. This ensures that everyone stays on the same page and contributes effectively to project success.
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Reviews
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March 11, 2020
Pivotal Tracker is a steep learning curve but one of the best Software Development tracking tools out there
Pivotal Tracker is used across the whole organization - maybe minus 2 people - so 8 or so. It helps us track software development work into compartmentalized tickets. Almost every ticket is touched by everyone that uses Pivotal Tracker in some way. I.e. there's a problem we are trying to solve, someone creates a ticket, someone picks up the ticket to start the software development, someone does the software development work, someone checks their work, someone tests their work, someone passes the ticket, someone checks the work of the person who passed the ticket, etc.
- Constant updates - you can always see who touches the project as a whole.
- Clean, concise ticket structure.
- It's not user friendly at first. But very powerful once you understand the tools.
- It's nice that you can customize your lanes (columns).
- I can't speak to this as I serve on the project but don't pay for the product.
Jira is very user friendly. It's ideal for people new to the software development lifecycle and the tracking of the work. They have simply nailed the intuitiveness. Pivotal Tracker might be the better long-term tool because of the flexibility that comes with it. But as mentioned, the learning curve is very steep for Pivotal Tracker.
March 15, 2018
Pivotal Tracker; Simple to use fantastic to see
Currently, Pivotal tracker is being used by my graphics and technology department to track their work tasks on their day to day work. We have been able to successfully monitor and track work to ensure there are no dropped or missed items. Currently, we are looking into expanding to use this software with our support service team to track additional client work. At this moment, the difficulty in expanding this software across our entire business is the fluidity of categorizing stories to look for matches in the system.
- Track Projects; this system allows you to create multiple projects for different large tasks. This is easily labeled and displayed for ease of use and identifying.
- Multi-user assignment; I can assign a task to multiple team members at a time. This works well when they are working together to make a deadline and letting everyone in the team know where they are at.
- History tracking; When it came down to auditing time, the history tracking and exporting has been a fantastic tool. We were able to export our notes into a readable Excel format for documentation submission.
- Categorization of Stories. It would be nice to have the ability to create our own custom categories on top of the backlog, ice box and my work sections.
- Time lines; although we can put in stars for level of difficulty; it would be more beneficial if we can add in due dates, benchmarks and time lines into the system. This would allow us to easily calculate projects and the resource allocation.
- Reports; although we can export and review our history, it would be nice to have the ability to pull reports on progress, % of story completion, and success rate.
- Pivotal Tracker has been a cost-effective solution for what we need. It has allowed our ROI to be greater than if we went with another system.
- Learning curve; with this easy to use tool, it has been a shorter learning curve for new hires to find what they need to accomplish their task.
- Flexibility; we are right now stuck at 4 levels of classification; project; Story, Task, Comments. If we were able to expand on this, we would be able to role this out faster to other departments within our business.
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.
January 17, 2018
Fun Scrum Software
We primarily use Pivotal Tracker (PT) for development of iOS, Android and web applications for our company. We work in regular sprints and each major application uses their own board for epics, icebox, stories and task management. It is maintained by our product lead.
- Tasks are very easy to view and update. Adding descriptions, attachments and notes are very good for difficult tasks.
- Subtasks are especially useful for our engineers as each task can be broken down into smaller steps.
- Assigning and sharing tasks and the approval process is very good as each area QA's their specific task.
- Prioritizing larger initiatives is very simple as they are constantly changing based on customers needs
- I think it could use a bit more customization. It seems to want you to work in a very specific way and that does not work for all teams.
- Approvals are great, but can use more of a QA process that can be implemented if needed.
- Bugs are not counted as points, and sometimes we feel we are not getting a true velocity of our teams performance.
- Certainly kept us much more organized and able to plan our roadmap in a more cohesive manner.
- Much easier seeing what is launching and when as we try to meet customer expectations. Being able to easily pivot with the software was a buying decision for us.
- Reporting to ownership on the status of the dev team and the pace they are producing is very helpful as we look to hire more engineers in the future. It allows us to see our utilization of resources.
We were using JIRA and found it lacking in their UI and some of their services, especially communication. PT communicates much easier with simple links to tasks for execution and QA review.
Basecamp is just really a super note taking and asset depot. I would not consider true software for scrum and agile development.
Basecamp is just really a super note taking and asset depot. I would not consider true software for scrum and agile development.
August 05, 2016
Really flexible but maybe overkill
It was used to track sprint progress in our development department. It seemed to serve its basic purpose for our needs but had some limitations in how we were able to break out our stories and progress.
- It gives you a ton of features to track and manage a team and the projects
- Having native apps for different devices make it much easier to track your project and keep up to date with your team
- Notifications and color coding each task is very helpful when trying to quickly the state of the project tasks
- The board does not seem to have an intuitive flow which can become strange
- The learning curve is a little bit high for some one who does not have a lot of experience with boards like these
- The flexibility can be great if you need it but confusing and cumbersome if you do not need it or have not used it
- It helped manage and communicate tasks effectively to keep the project running smoothly
- Bringing new people up to speed on how to effectively use the tools can be slow
- Trello and CA Agile Central (formerly Rally)
Compared to Rally the tool seems more accessible because or the suite of apps available. It also feels more polished and stable than Rally. It definitely has more tools and features but again it can be overkill for a smaller team or project.