Share your experience using Inflectra SpiraPlan

Predominantly, we used to have something like Clarity in the past to maintain our project portfolio management, our demand management, and agility management. However, we were not too happy with the analytics and the dashboards in the past with the Clarity product, their PPM product. That is when we migrated to ServiceNow. The main use case predominantly concerns demand management, forecasting, and portfolio management. The whole ITBM right now is also known as Strategic Portfolio Management. It's the whole portfolio across the practice as an entire thing managed through that. It's our whole go-to platform for managing merger planning. It is an enterprise agile planning tool.

The most important feature for us is project portfolio management. That helps us manage and track the entire life cycle of a project or a program at an enterprise scale and across business portfolios. That has been the key differentiator which we use from the product. 

To look at the whole demand management perspective, now we are spread across the globe. We might have different demands coming in from the India region, from UK, APAC, US, et cetera. With this, we can figure out how to manage and forecast the whole business demand. That has been another major use case for us from a demand management perspective. 

The resource manager is useful. If we know the demand, we know the business, how do we tie that up with resource ramp-up, ramp-down? It is not just about a few FTEs. This also includes expanding to an ODC, looking at what we can track, and seeing our resource availability and allocation according to skills, geographies, and levels. The whole resource management has been very helpful in visualizing resources. 

There's lots of innovation within the product itself.

A major improvement we would like to see is definitely around agile management. They have improved over the last many years, in all fairness, yet there are many things they can do from an agile and scrum management perspective. 

What is challenging for us is managing the finance. We still depend upon our classic Oracle NetSuite for many of these financial planning and organizing. While many features exist in ServiceNow, it is not far along with what we have in the Oracle world. Predominantly, we have to manually write the scripts and all the custom rules for much of the whole financial annual planning and monthly planning. 

It's not out-of-the-box. There's a lot of customization, so I'll have to buy an expensive product like ServiceNow and then have a tech deck for it. I'll have to keep a big developer team on staff to build these things out. 

One of the things they should definitely change is the number of out-of-the-box options. The native feature that comes with this financial planning is something that needs to change. For example, if I have to see some of these permutations and combinations, like how I see them on a spreadsheet, I should be able to import them. Everybody doesn't log into the portal. I need to figure out: how can I do it manually, upload it, and then have the XLSM take these macros and run? That is the one automation I would definitely like to see.

The finance teams, they're well-versed in using Excel. I cannot go and insist to them that they should start using my folders. I would love to see some compatibility where we could have something like a spreadsheet in Excel and then put it onto ServiceNow and have it reflected. 

I've been dealing with the solution for about five years now.

The product is stable. Once we have all the initial glitches and migration issues resolved, it's fairly stable. The product challenges we face are not from a whole platform perspective. It's only a customization perspective. Therefore, if I have customized more than a particular set of requirements, it takes a bit of time. If it's out of the box, I don't have to customize anything, and I'm ready to go. However, whilst we're customizing, the platform wouldn't be that stable.

ServiceNow, every six months, launches a new release, a major release. What happens is when the new release comes, for me to upgrade and transition to the new one takes a long time due to my heavy customization. 

From an availability perspective, is stable. However, from a service availability, that upgrade cycle is usually much longer whenever we have to upgrade. 

The scalability is straightforward. You can scale up and down. That should not be a problem.

We do a true-up every month. We know how many licenses we are using. We are in total control of the ramp-up and ramp-down. We are good with that.

We have between 50 to 100 people on the solution. 

I would love it if folks used it daily; however, they login in once a month for the monthly and fortnightly reports. The number of diligent users would be about 20 users. They use it for finance, procurement, and all these things.

We also use Jir, which does an interesting job as well.

The business angle is well defined in ServiceNow products. Azure DevOps or other things are moving from a technical to a semi-technical area, where I cannot bring my business or financial teams to log in and get that focus. The biggest differentiator compared to other options is that it's predominantly from a persona approach. I can actually personify my platform for technical teams, semi-technical teams, and business teams. That has been the biggest value differentiator compared to other tools like Atlassian, maybe Clarity, or even Azure DevOps. 

On the flip side, when I go to my technical teams, they would love to, obviously, log in only to an Azure DevOps or Jira option. 

The initial setup was fairly complex.

We thought we could have everything ready in six to eight weeks' time. However, it literally took us almost six months.

In all fairness, there are some things we also realized afterward. We are premium partners. We realized that, while we say out-of-the-box, it is not actually out-of-the-box. If you are staffing an organization from scratch, it is okay. However, we were already using Clarity and, obviously, spreadsheets. One of the issues which we face was a mindset from people who suddenly had to start using it when they already had methods. 

Discounting that fact itself, many of the customizations and all those modules, configurations, parallel runs, and then going live and cutting over took us more than we thought. 

The configuration of the product takes time. What happens is, while ServiceNow claims everything is out-of-the-box and everything can be easily achieved, many times, for some customizations, we had to raise a ticket with the actual ISVs, or the vendors and then add that. And we have an in-house ServiceNow team. We are not beginners.

We know ServiceNow pretty well. In spite of that, if you have to refer to ServiceNow, it means it's still not that user-friendly compared to others. They're in that space, they're evolving. However, it's more from the configuration perspective where you run into issues. I'd rate the initial setup at a or 2.5 to three out of five. It's not easy. There's a moderate amount of difficulty. 

The ROI is quite high as I can have my team members all on one portal. 

With this product, I have a unified integrated view across geography, across teams, and that helps. That itself allows them to collaborate together. Apart from that, from an ROI perspective, some of our planning and forecasting have been much more streamlined. If you look at ROI from that perspective, it's high.

I'd rate the ROI at a four out of five. It's quite good. 

Since we are a managed service provider, we buy it annually. 

While we might charge back to the business and charge back to our end. We also have some business people, consumers, and customers. For them, we do it monthly. From our direct contracting perspective with ServiceNow, it's an annual fee.

The cost of the solution should not be more than $50,000 annually. 

We use the high-end version; we don't use a standard version. We have many other integration hubs and other things, so it's a bundled product.

From a dollar-to-dollar comparison, they're expensive. They're actually more expensive than, probably, Clarity. They're actually more expensive than whatever you have from a portfolio management option from Atlassian. However, if I look at the whole ROI, it is reasonable. That said, of course, we would love it if the price was reduced.

I'd rate the solution four out of five in terms of value for money.

In ServiceNow, since we are an MSP and a premium partner with ServiceNow, we pretty much cater almost to the entire suite, or at least the entire ITX. That's IT Service Management, IT Operations Management, IT Asset Management, IT Business Management, and then more or less the governance risk and compliance aspects.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We build CI/CD pipelines. It's the Azure DevOps phase. Everything is in one place, like version control. CI/CD Pipelines, Release Pipelines. Everything is in there. 

So we have everything in one place basically. We use it as a complete end product.

The first thing is that everything is in one place. Azure DevOps integrates Secrets management, release pipelines, and build pipelines. 

The CI/CD pipeline setup is more user-friendly. You can manage various stages, and there are over 400+ plugins available for each stage. It's more user-friendly overall, which simplifies setting up pipelines and managing the workflows.

There is room for improvement on the UI side, especially with merge requests. If we compare Azure DevOps to GitLab when it comes to branches and PRs (pull requests), GitLab has a better interface.

Regarding CI/CD pipelines, Azure DevOps is improving. They're adding new plugins and making overall upgrades. For instance, they used to have only one type of pipeline, but now they have YAML-based release pipelines. Build pipelines are still under development, I believe, but their roadmap is in good shape.

They're also integrating IAM enablement directly into the UI. So, if you want to use the Azure portal to produce roles or make similar changes, you can now do that within Azure DevOps. It's a positive development. Overall, the roadmap for Azure DevOps is very strong.

I have been using it for six years. 

The stability is improving and looks very promising. Moreover, it's free. Initially, a subscription was required, but now Azure DevOps is provided for free if you are using the Microsoft Azure cloud and have that option enabled. 

So, it's a very stable product.

It's agent-based. You must manually configure a pool of agents to run all your pipelines and deployments anytime. There have been some disturbances with the agent pools, but they are improving. 

Initially, there were many issues with agent pool stability, but now, as you increase and update your agent pool, it becomes more robust. There isn't automatic scalability; you must ensure the agent pools are properly configured initially.

Myentire organization uses it because many projects under this organization use Azure DevOps. There are more than a thousand end users. 

The customer service and support are pretty good. There is a bunch of documentation out there. 

It is not to complicated to use. If there is something required, the support is accessible. 

I used Kitlabs, GitLab, GitOps, Jenkins, and Central Station, among others.

We looked at the features, and for one, Azure DevOps integrates all development and operations for continuous deployment in one place, which none of the other products offer in the market.

For Git, we needed repositories. 

The initial setup is of medium complexity compared to others. It's not too complex, nor is it too easy. It's a medium setup, and it includes all the key features. You can create departments, projects, and programs—everything is taken care of with Azure DevOps. 

It's like ServiceNow for continuous improvements and deployments in the DevOps world. Every project and support request I handle for clients has its challenges, but Azure DevOps manages these effectively.

Deploying code to your endpoint is a one-person job. You can configure your system, integrate your CI/CD pipeline, and set up authentication on your own. 

However, at an organizational level, where roles need managing and permissions must be assigned—for example, some can only handle releases while others manage builds—you need a robust access control system. 

In such cases, you would need two to three administrators to handle everything.

People involved in the process would be Azure DevOps admins, who control everything related to permissions and Azure DevOps operations, such as setting up pipelines, running deployments, etcetera. While our application teams handle some tasks, issues like access problems or agent failures are taken care of by the admins.

I would recommend using it.  Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.