The API has been valuable for me because I can use it to connect to Power BI to create reports downstream.

When we first started using LeanKit, we were using the built-in reports. But since then, I've moved to try to make a bunch of custom reports in Power BI. That has improved communication with our customers because I can point them to a report instead of holding meetings.

LeanKit is amazing when it comes to getting answers about a given card's status. That's one of the biggest takeaways that we've had. The status is right there on the board. Everybody can see it. You just click on it and it gives you everything that you need to know, especially the comments feature because it gives us a timeline of updates. We use that a lot where we write a comment on the card and then we can see and track progress as we move it across the board.

The transparency that it brings is valuable. I like to look at things from all angles, and sometimes, flip chart paper on a wall and sticky notes are better than something on a screen, but the way they've made it accessible from all points for anyone within an organization is great. As a project management guy, sometimes, you have to force people into new environments where they have to see what you're talking about. Any screen is a barrier, and people got to get into the screen. How do you know they do? You don't necessarily know, but you are getting around that barrier with a countermeasure of making it accessible to as many as possible. Everyone can jump in there and see everything. It is fully transparent, and I like that. This is one thing that helps. 

Planview does a great job of making the Kanban process accessible. I firmly and absolutely believe that Kanban is a process. If you can get the organization to go up and make it the way you do business, it is going to just blow productivity out of the water. It would really improve productivity and efficiency and reduce waste and over-processing in the way we do projects. Planview is a Kanban board that helps to enable that.

Every feature is valuable. LeanKit is a Kanban-based tool where you have a visual interface that you can use to create various cards and to create boards to house those cards. You can create a board for managing project work. You can create a board to do PI planning. It is pretty close to the agile way of doing business.

The Board Layout Editor is excellent in terms of flexibility. They have been improving its usability. Their development is very much agile, so for any feedback that we give them, they let us know if and when they would act on our request for enhancements or change, and then they make those changes. They are responsive.

The "Blocking" feature has helped our scrum masters track impediments and share them at the program level to stakeholders with accountability and detail so that they understand and the action items which can be noted easily. 

We use it for our Scrum of Scrum Impediment Executive Action Team Meetings daily because it allows us to view all of our impediments in one place and shows us what exactly is being blocked, (i.e. Program Increment Goal, Sprint Goal or an Epic). 

The dependency features are also very valuable as there are many to track in a given Program Increment; that also allows us to review them during our Big Room Planning. 

The tracking of work has been the most valuable for our company. Holding people accountable for the cards they're assigned and the progress that's being made has been valuable. I know that our development teams have been very interested in it. I'm not familiar with Jira, but I know that they consider LeanKit better. 

• The visual management - the ability to track where things are at any point. 
• We can assign a task out to folks in an easy way. 
• The connection with Power BI for reporting.

Using the tool seems to save time versus trying to do things in a regular manner. It is highly collaborative; everybody can see things in one place. It is a highly functional, but pretty simple tool. That is hard to find: A tool that has a lot of functions, but is also simple.

We use all the boards. We use them because we are trying to track savings. People identify an idea for how to save money, and that goes in one lane. As that idea progresses into actually being implemented into a project or production, then they move that card along the different lanes to show that it went from an idea to something that got implemented in production. That is how we move things along the card. We then hook up Power BI to be able to add up all of that savings across the company.

The Board Layout Editor is pretty flexible. In general, we are pretty happy with it. We are happy that you can upload from Excel, which to get us started, which was super convenient.

You can get the answers that you need about a given card’s status easily. You just know where everything is. If people are updating it and using it, you can see that at a glance because it is a visual tool.

I like that it's very flexible so that we can change some of the fields, the titles and names, and that we can color code it. I really like being able to add different lanes. Every team is different and being able to customize LeanKit helps each team work to the best of its ability.

We use the board and card hierarchies in terms of sprints so that we can see if we have cross-functional teams that are working on the same projects together, especially when projects have dependencies. The parent-child relationship within cards is really nice so that we can see what kind of dependencies there are when we're trying to get projects finished.

I also really like the flexibility of the Board Layout Editor. Being able to customize your board and the layout helps teams feel that they really own what they're doing as far as Kanban goes. For instance, on the Not Started lane, if you add a couple of vertical lanes, things that need approval versus don't need approval, some teams really find value in that, but others don't need that feature. I like that we can manage that on our own.

The most valuable features for us are resource management and financial. Before LeanKit, we were doing project management in Microsoft Project. We were able to plan and schedule in it, but we were not tracking resource allotment or the availability of the resources. We have started to track them now. 

We are able to do this because the reports that go out to stakeholders and the executive leadership team are richer. This helps us prioritize our entire portfolio and decide which projects we can take and which we need to decrease in priority in order to reassign resources to new, priority projects. 

LeanKit helps us a lot not just in terms of planning internally but also with making outside people understand why a project is getting delayed or postponed or is going on hold.   

Because LeanKit is so flexible, our ability to make predictions comes down to educating stakeholders on how the cards work. The card's health feature lets us know whether we need to make adjustments. It gives us an idea if, for example, someone has taken up too many tasks.

People found the ability to set up different lanes and the ability to see where they're within the progress most valuable. They can use different colored cards or sticky notes, and then they can separate out which cards belong to a department or the initiative they're working on. They can filter who's working on it, and I've got good feedback about that.

Board Layout Editor is very flexible and user-friendly. We can create with minimal training. We had staff that was able to go in and easily get going themselves. They've found it really user-friendly.

It makes work visible, so everybody knows where everything is. It uses Kanban, and that makes work visible.

It is pretty easy to find your way through LeanKit.

It supports all of the classes and services associated with the cost of delay, so various types of swim lanes. So, it is very flexible that way.

The reporting and the readability of the boards are the most valuable features. With LeanKit, I can just see a card and have so much information at a glance, as opposed to JIRA, where I actually have to click into all of my tasks and stories to see specific information about it. The usability of it and the readability of it is so much better than what JIRA is. JIRA's reporting is flawed and it doesn't really provide anything that users want unless they export all of the data. Whereas LeanKit has all the data in it that a lot of people need and if it doesn't have it, it has the ability to export said data and add it to a Power BI report. We didn't integrate JIRA and LeanKit at all. We went directly to LeanKit.

We use the board layout editor quite a bit. We have a board administrator for every board and advise them to customize it as they see fit. So far, no one's really done a horizontal lane. It's more like a vertical split on anything to do any customization but as people get more into using their boards, some sort of hierarchy might take place eventually. Now, it's at a point where it's a very basic high-level use. And as users use the boards more, it will be a growing experience because they'll be able to do more with it than what they could with JIRA.

I enjoy the flexibility of the board layout editor. It's nice to be able to make a board look how we want and that's why we have that board and those board administrators. With JIRA, we had an admin for the entire site, as opposed to a board administrator. All the requests went to one person and they had to do it. It was very tight-knit and complicated to customize it. But with LeanKit's board layout editor, it's so much more easy and flexible to get customizations done to make our board look how you want.

We really enjoy the reports that are in LeanKit. The only thing that would improve it, would be the ability to create customized reports. Specifically, we're looking at the customized field that you can add to a card. That information is not able to be reported on. It would be nice if it were in the application itself rather than having to export the data, like the readability of the reports within Planview or within LeanKit. I don't have any numbers. We haven't done an assessment yet on how our teams are utilizing the reporting within LeanKit, and my team doesn't really use the reporting functionality as much as we should. 

LeanKit has reduced our cycle time by a considerable amount.