Planview AgilePlace Other Advice

NS
Perfect Execution Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

I think the first time I used it it was a little tricky to figure out how everything worked as far as adding a lane goes, for example, or moving it up and down and splitting it vertically or horizontally. But once I figured it out, it's straightforward.

I use the Card Health feature to go in and see how a card's doing. I don't know if I've used it that much when it comes to planning for deadlines. I use it more to look back on how things are doing and then update our process. So if we see a bottleneck, we will point it out and we will talk about if we need to change anything in the future, I don't know if I've used it much for looking forward though. 

The Card Health activity stream makes it easier to quickly look back and see where we have bottlenecks.

Our cycle times have reduced by 50%. They are now half as long as they used to be.

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MZ
Process Improvement Facilitator-Lean Six Sigma Black Belt at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

The Kanban approach, in general, is to start wherever you are, but that's very intimidating to a lot of people because that doesn't sound very meaningful. So truly, you have to start wherever you are and just go from there. If you keep that in mind, you're going to understand how this is designed to work and all of the opportunities that this enables. So, just start wherever you are. I learned that quickly. We learned through doing.

To the credit of the designers, it's a very intuitive product. I would advise others to experiment. They should start small and with projects that easily fit into this kind of format. They should experiment and continue to learn and incorporate some kind of daily or weekly standups or some kind of plugging in of stakeholders into it to gain experience to follow this through.

I haven't delved into customization because I think the simpler, the better. Simple is usually the best way. I've seen a lot of people who customize LeanKit, but I would caution them to be careful because the more complicated something becomes, the more difficult it is for people to engage with it because they're scared of the tool. So, you got to make the tools simple and easy to use. It is excellent that it is customizable. That's a great design. They are balancing simplicity with the ability to expand it and blow it up in a lot of different ways. My hat's off to them.

I have not used its board and card hierarchies. I'm really dabbling in the beginning, and organizationally, we have not really gotten into that stuff as far as I'm aware of. I learned about metrics, and I really want to get into the metric levels of it, but I have not been able to really figure that out too much yet.

Similarly, I have just dabbled into reporting. We still need to explore that and exploit it. I have also not used the Card Health feature much. I know it exists, and I've dabbled in it and used it a little bit. It is a good feature because that's how you tell what's your flow time. It is very interesting, but I don't understand the operational definitions that are being used to generate this input or this information. I saw this literally the other day. I looked at it on my card because I thought this project was flowing pretty well, but I only got a yellow score. I was wondering why only yellow. If I understood more of the methodology of how it is giving me that score, I would probably use it more. That's no fault of Planview. It is my own fault. We didn't really have a lot of training on this. We did get Planview training, and it was okay. They showed us everything, but you need to practice it.

I can anecdotally say that it has reduced our cycle times, but I cannot say the same scientifically.

I would rate Planview LeanKit a nine out of 10.

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RB
PM Systems Analyst at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

I would highly recommend this solution to others. I would definitely ask others to take a look at the application and evaluate it. We have really benefited from it from the delivery perspective as well as from the perspective of planning the work. It is very simple and intuitive. It doesn't need too much training. Any new person who comes in can pick up the features and start using it very easily.

The LeanKit team has been adding new features, which is another good aspect. They have very recently introduced KPIs, which is where the industry is going. We hear a lot about it. Even our organization is talking about KPIs. LeanKit is very responsive to any feature requests that we provide.

We have Jira in our organization but not in our team. We have only been using LeanKit. We don't use its integration with Jira at all, but we do have plans for that.

I would want to rate it a 10 out of 10, but I won't because there is always room for improvement. So, overall, when compared to all Kanban-based tools, I would rate LeanKit a nine out of 10.

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BP
Director, Solution Strategy & PMO at Verisk Analytics

We're very happy with our decision to use LeanKit for our Portfolio/Program management and we're glad we could spread the word around our company to lead to deeper integration. We look forward to some cool new features.

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CW
Executive Support Team Leader at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

LeanKit's email functionality is nice. I get emails whenever something happens with a particular card so I do not have to constantly go into LeanKit and check on cards for status. That's very helpful. It enables faster scheduling of things or collaboration on items.

LeanKit has reduced our cycle times because we are able to collaborate so much quicker with it. Leveraging LeanKit's email capability has been a plus for me. We can also use it to ping people who may not be paying attention to certain cards. It keeps things moving. LeanKit has been more of an enabler for me to keep me on task or on track with what needs to get done. 

In the board layout editor, there's quite a bit of flexibility in how you can set up your swim lanes, etc.

We have not set any standards on how to use the card hierarchy. I have not used any of the more complex linking functionalities. We usually just create parent cards and link child cards to them. In addition, while the card hierarchy has not improved the speed of my deliveries, it has affected my bandwidth.

I would highly encourage others to implement LeanKit. It is a powerful tool and very intuitive. I think it is a great tool. 

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HP
Manufacturing Manager, Capital COE at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Listen to what the technical folks at Planview are telling you. They are probably right. Don't try to do anything that the tool isn't meant to do in some way. It is definitely a SaaS and nothing that can be customized. It can be configured, but it is what it is.

We use all three of Planview products. We use LeanKit, Projectplace and Enterprise One. I was actually prepared to talk about Enterprise One, which I think has more opportunities. LeanKit is so simple and easy; it's just a simple tool. Their Enterprise One tool is a much bigger, older tool that has some more opportunities for improvement.

From a reporting perspective, we almost exclusively use its connection to Power BI. We have not exercised the standard reports within the system. However, that could be because we have a little bit of a different use case.

Just make sure you have somebody who is dedicated to learning the tool and training people, because that lessens the frustration. 

The big lesson learnt is utilize the ability to hook up to Power BI. We could just report on it so easily. 

Design the boards and cards with your endgame in mind. You need to know what you want to get out of it, so you know how to configure it.

I am going to rate the solution as a nine (out of 10), because 10 is hard. 10 is perfect.

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BN
Applications Analyst at University of Kansas Medical Center

When you're trying to decide on a solution like LeanKit, important things to look out for are reporting, and the customizability or flexibility within the product. Those are really helpful to individual teams.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using this solution is that you can really be creative with your Agile process and make your to-do list seem easier to tackle.

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RS
Business Consultant at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Reporting has been the best part for us. It gives us more information than we could provide earlier. Thanks to these reports, we can easily make our case for why we can or cannot take on a certain project or why we will have to remove the focus from something else to get a particular project done.

We can also create high-level reports for the board, which we do every quarter.

The Board Layout Editor is very flexible. We have been able to change with help from LeanKit, so we find it very flexible.

With the card health activity stream, the project manager becomes more sensitive to the way they have been assigning work to people. At the same time, it also allows them to approach stakeholders more easily and help them understand why some things need to wait and why others would not be delivered as per their expectations.

It has only been six to eight months since we started using it, so I don't know if it has reduced our cycle times, but I'm sure that it will.

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KL
Works with 201-500 employees

The biggest lesson that I've learned from using this solution is that once you are tracking everything, there is a lot more work going on than you think. It's easy to forget that things are going on, or you are going to do this task or that task.

My advice would be that if you're going to use it, you really need to be going in there on a routine basis, and that's probably daily. If you don't go into it tomorrow and you also don't go the next day, then by the time you come back to it, you would be like, "Oh! I was supposed to do that," or, "I forgot about all these other things to do," or, "I've been doing these things, but I haven't been tracking them. Now I have to go add these things up in the last three days." So, you really have to get a routine of using it to get the most out of it.

I don't use its board and card hierarchies, but I know other people have connected cards across different boards. I don't know whether they affect the speed, but it would be less likely for things to fall through the cracks. So, it probably helps in one way because it is always there, and you're always seeing it. So, things don't fall behind.

I haven't used LeanKit's Card Health feature, but I am familiar with it. We are definitely going to explore it in the future. Similarly, we haven't used it for reporting. There might be reporting capabilities, but based on my knowledge, there are not a lot of reporting capabilities. I haven't used it a lot, and I don't think anybody else has. It is relatively new, and we are at a point where we are just getting people to use it.

It has probably not reduced our cycle times. We used other things to manage projects. In some way, it is helpful because things are always there visually, and you can see them in front of you. So, if you're checking it, you're probably much more likely to get things done sooner because they are visually there.

I would rate Planview LeanKit a nine out of 10.

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JC
Agile Delivery Lead at Eliassen

Training documentation was originally provided by my company during the onboarding process. They gave us the links and a user guide. I did not watch any videos. I am an agile coach and trainer, so I teach Kanban. I have administered other systems.

When you think of LeanKit, you think of Kanban. You don't think of anything else. Maybe it is because it has the word has lean in it.

I would rate the product as a 10 out of 10. What it does, it does well. It is fine for Kanban.

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DJ
Application Analyst at a non-profit with 51-200 employees

As an administrator, it's nice that we can have other users manage their boards. Just because the standard has always been JIRA, times change and new applications show up and change is good.

My advice would be to rely on a board administrator. You don't have to do everything yourself and set templates. I think templates will help make the transition a little better. That way other teams can collaborate more efficiently.

I would rate LeanKit an eight out of ten. Once we get the third-party integration and the customizable reporting my grade would raise a little bit.

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Buyer's Guide
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about Planview, Microsoft, Atlassian and others in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.