IBM Engineering Workflow Management Reviews

We are customers of IBM and I'm the manager of digital engineering.

There is a value in certain things like traceability, from high level requirements to low level requirements, to a test case, to a test plan, to a work item, to a change request, which is very essential to have for any OEM trying to not just create data, but also enable tracing. All those things are valuable. It's helpful that the traceability reporting is inbuilt and includes all your requirements, management and test management. There are also  certain integrations with code repositories, to a level where you can trace back and see who actually tested it, whether it was a pass or fail, the length of the test and steps behind it. Anyone coming in will automatically know that something has changed.

Unfortunately, the solution is very heavily vendor dependent. It requires a strong partnership with IBM, and you rely on them for fixes or access to certain things. There are new fixes all the time and each new fix can bring in a new functionality. The development aspect is not well aligned. There's a requirement tool, a testing tool, a project management tool, a reporting tool. They are separate but all work on one platform although they don't function that way. It can take some time to figure out where the responsibility for a problem lies. They need one team rather than inefficient multiple teams. Another issue is that the solution is not yet supported on Docker.

I've been using this solution for over 10 years. 

In general, it's stable and you won't have many issues. The issue is that it's always customized, the solution is built for that. Workflows, plugins, extensions are created. This can sometimes create performance issues. 

It's scalable but you can't really containerize it, like a newer solution would support.

The technical support is very good and provides value to the solution. It also requires a backend application management team for upgrades, and on the front end, a team to work with users and create processes, templates and workflows. 

The initial setup is not that complex, the documentation gives you all the help you need. User adoption is a problem because it's not as intuitive as JIRA and it requires proper training, to understand where things are aligned. Especially in the RTC part of the CLM, or maybe RQM part. There are sometimes bottlenecks. 

This is not a cheap solution but it does include the standard support that IBM offers through their portal, and the support is good. IBM has multiple licensing models, and there is a floating license model, where you buy a fixed number of licenses and you pay for them no matter what. Then there's a flexible, token-based license, where you have, let's say,100 tokens, and based on your usage, these tokens will be distributed amongst users and you can scale up as necessary. 

I think there are probably better and more nimble solutions available on the market. If a company is starting from scratch, it doesn't really need such a heavy solution. If you're in the automobile, healthcare, aerospace industries and the like, where you have a lot of legacy data, and your requirements are crucial and you might be audited, then you do need to have a system which offers safe certification and a few other things. It should support agile templates and a few other things. 

I rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

We are mainly using it for project planning, resource engagement, load distribution, and work allocation. Work distribution among team members and accountability for completion with a clearer picture. This represents the outcome clearly, along with measures to be taken, if any.

It has improved our organization up to an extent, but it certainly has a lot of areas for improvement related to resource management. Teams need clearer pictures of resource availability in charts and dashboards along with plans. Additionally, the non-availability of a "contributor list" both in plan views and JRS restricts the usability which would have played a greater role for our teams.

• Plan views
• Reporting (JRS)
• A clear picture of engagement
• Resource orientation
• Chartered views

Plans clearly represent the team's availability with load balance, if any. Reporting in certain formats along with live data is certainly helpful to present to higher management without the need to generate them repeatedly.

A lot of room for improvement:

• Report generation (.xls, .pdf) from filters.
• "Contributor list" and "enumeration list" in plans and reporting.
• Extending JavaScript support.
• Team availability calendar on dashboard and plans.
  
• Automatic subscription of users to dedicated types of work items, but not all of them.
• Plan modifications from widgets to dashboards, if the option is displayed.
  

More than five years.

The application is highly stable, though the environment stability depends on the architecture used for deployment. Considerations should be given during architecture design, review, and planning sessions.

The solution is highly scalable.

I have worked with Rational Synergy and Rational Change in the system development domain. It certainly has all the added advantages over its predecessors.

Setup is straightforward. However, there are too many possible permutations and combinations, though it allows for good flexibility.

Setup will include simple application deployment, database, application server, and LDAP configuration.

Implementation was the vendor team in collaboration with an in-house team. It was quite a learning experience, although the process was smooth. It needed considerable thought for deployment, and consideration for scalability and performance, similar to any other solution.

It's an expensive investment to make, so the decision should be driven on individual requirements.

Licensing: The solution cost is high and should be brought down to increase competition.

We evaluated PTC Integrity and TFS.

Overall, it is a good solution. It is flexible and adaptable.

Consider reviews before investing a fortune on it.

We use Workflow to manage all our agile project management; all our development is managed through this solution whether it's the stories, the hydration, the tasks, the defects. I'm the vice president of the company and we are customers of Workflow. 

Overall, Workflow allows us to manage our stories, sprints, hydration and releases. It's good for that. 

One of the downfalls of this product is that we are not able to customize it for our specific requirements. I'm not sure whether that's an issue with the product or with the company's implementation. 

I've been using this solution for five years. 

The solution is stable but sometimes very slow. It takes a long time to run reports and a lot of time is wasted.

The scalability is not great, a lot of our reports just do not run because there's too much data. We have around 50 users in our section with various roles including delivery manager, developers, quality control, scrum masters, they all use Workflow.

We don't deal with customer support, we have an internal team that manages any problems. I'm not sure if they contact IBM or have their own expertise but they resolve any problems for us. 

From my experience, Jira is a better solution than Workflow because it's more flexible. 

I rate this solution four out of 10.