IBM Engineering Workflow Management Reviews

The typical use case for IBM Engineering Workflow Management is to streamline project management and ensure efficient workflow.

The best features of this solution are its task management capabilities and integration options.

IBM Engineering Workflow Management provides excellent flexibility and collaborative tools.

The capability of IBM Engineering Workflow Management in managing end-to-end workflows is quite robust, especially with the built-in change management capabilities.

The customizable dashboards and reporting tools in this solution are very user-friendly and informative.

IBM Engineering Workflow Management can be improved by enhancing its pricing structure, specifically the cost and licensing of this solution.

I have been using this solution for a considerable amount of time.

The technical support from IBM rates an eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward.

My name is Sofia from PeerSpot regarding my experience with IBM Engineering Workflow Management. It is a leading review site.

The solution is very easy to trace. My company name is MicroGenesis TechSoft Private Limited, and my title is Technical Lead.

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On a scale of 1-10, I rate IBM Engineering Workflow Management a 10.

I essentially use IBM Engineering Workflow Management under agile methodologies for the development of stories, use case stories, and test cases with end-to-end traceability.

The tool provides traceability and reporting, which are important for compliance and measuring progress. The reporting part for management is probably the most significant. It provides more efficiencies for our scrum team, ensures everyone is on the same page, and offers leadership insight into progress.

Improved graphics in terms of metrics and connectivity to SharePoint from Microsoft products would be beneficial.

I have used the solution for about three years.

The solution is stable. It's effective.

I haven't received any complaints, so I would probably give the support a rating of eight out of ten.

Positive

IBM Engineering Workflow Management has been the solution of choice for years, predating my time working with the tools. I have no experience with other tools.

The initial setup was straightforward.

A team of two managed the deployment, and the initial deployment took about a couple of days. It's an evolving process.

The return on investment is seen through efficiencies for the scrum team and providing insight into leadership progress.

I have no experience with other tools, I have received feedback that Jira is more basic and not as powerful as EWM.

I would rate the IBM Engineering Workflow Management a seven or an eight. I am leaning closer to seven based on a couple of items I mentioned that I would like to see or know more about, such as improved reporting. 

I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten.

In terms of data, when I started in 2018, the database for IBM ELM was around 200 to 300 weeks. Now, in 2023, it's grown to 15 terabytes. 

The main use cases include RTP, API, and PI planning, sprint planning, data planning, defect fix tracking, and other related activities.

We have a custom process specific to our organization, which we internally developed. Each project has related V&V requirements and RQM testing projects. These projects are version-controlled and GRC-enabled, creating a complex GRC hierarchy and structure.

The most valuable features are traceability and reporting. Our organization heavily depends on reports with traceability, starting from requirements to related work items and then to test cases and their statuses. 

We can track the status of test cases (passed or saved) in a single view. Based on releases and other attributes, we generate various reports and extract metrics from the data.

There is room for improvement in the UI. The UI has to improve a lot compared to the competitive tools, like Atlassian Jira, for example. It's very easy to use. It is easy to manage and easy to use. Anybody can learn it right quickly and start with it. 

But IBM ELM is something where somebody has to have good knowledge, training, and understanding and then only start using it.

But there's a big known knowledge curve for IBM ELM. But once that is there, it's normally; organizations do have their own internal team to basically manage it IBM ELM portfolio, the tool chain.

So if they have internal teams who are doing it for quite some time, not something new, then it is definitely better. But if there's if somebody is starting new, definitely there is a knowledge curve time it can take at least a year or maybe a couple of years before they can start realizing the benefits.

I've been with this company for over five years, but IBM Engineering Workflow Management has been in use for more than that.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. We have encountered issues with stability. We have seen where the entire system kind of goes for a toss when certain people use certain types of queries, which are very costly. Then the system kind of slows down a bit, and we have to monitor it. So, we heavily invest in monitoring tools, like AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and other things, to monitor this system and make sure that it works properly. And if something goes wrong, we get notified early. Many such things are there. 

The scalability is good. However, with the exception of the reporting server, all other applications are scalable. The reporting server is currently using a flat-file system based on Apache Java, which is causing performance issues. IBM is coming up with a 7.0.3 version that will provide the ability to predict and create indexes for reports in Oracle. 

Right now, it is using Apache Java-based, like, flat price system-based database. Pretty huge. We hope that this will improve the scalability of the reporting server.

We have around 5,000 to 6,000 engineers using this solution. 

The initial setup itself is not that challenging. But, the upgrades can be quite time-consuming. 

Since we started using this solution, we have had two major upgrades. These upgrades can take a significant amount of time and often introduce major issues. 

As a strong partner of IBM, we report these issues to them so that they can identify and fix the underlying problems. The data-sharing experience varies from customer to customer due to differences in data size. 

For smaller data sets, the process is relatively easier. However, for larger data sets like ours, the process becomes more complex and can lead to slowness, performance issues, and other unforeseen challenges. We closely report these issues to IBM, and their development team provides fixes or patches to improve the overall tool.

Our in-house team deployed the solution, but there are sometimes consultants for onboarding and specific plug-in or customization development. However, integrations are all handled in-house. 

The deployment steps are properly defined on the IBM website Jazz.net. We follow those end to end, but then, specific to our case, there are certain scenarios that we have to modify and create, like a cutover plan with exact instructions for it and everything. And then only we have to follow it. So, we'll test it in a non-production environment and then move to the production environment.

It is an on-premises solution. Due to the nature of our data, the cost of a cloud solution would be prohibitive for any organization.

We have a team of ten people for the deployment and maintenance of the solution. The team has managers, admins, engineers, and developers. 

Customers need to pay for a license to use this product. It is not a free tool. We use a token-based licensing model, which is specific to IBM. 

We have about 7,800 tokens, and including maintenance and other fees, we pay IBM about $1.2 million USD per year. The cost per token is around $115-$120.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. I would recommend it. 

My specific advice is for people in the automotive, aerospace, defense, or healthcare industries, where auditing is crucial. For example, in healthcare, where the FDA is involved, their audits are very strict, and they require a tool like IBM ELM that provides end-to-end traceability of changes. This traceability allows you to track what changes were made, why they were made, and how they impacted the requirements. 

This is essential for industries where functional safety or certifications are critical. I would recommend this product for these use cases.

If you are working on a small project or managing a small internal team, I would not recommend using IBM ELM. It would be too much overhead for such projects.

It is used for source control, defect tracking, and project management.

It was an all-in-one solution for source code, integrated source control, defect tracking, and project planning. Useful for getting started with all the needed tools for software development in 2010.

It's becoming less relevant for us, as we move to cloud-based and more contemporary cloud-based SCM systems such as GitHub. As new JDKs have been released over the years, tooling support in new releases lags behind. Also, Maven SCM 2.0.0 has deprecated the provider "maven-scm-provider-jazz". So there is some wonder about the future of the product. It may be perfect for big companies that are more formal and need process/audit/documentation/access control.  

I have been using IBM Engineering Workflow Management for eight years.

We had no stability issues.

It lacks broader adoption in the marketplace with integrations to other tools.

There’s a heavy reliance on a specific forum for support, but the usability of that forum isn’t great. For my needs, it was adequate, but there isn’t a large community of supporters actively contributing to it.  Of course, formal support from IBM is available, and that's been okay; no complaints.

Positive

This product might be ideal for a large organization looking for a turnkey, tightly integrated system with strong audit and control features. However, given the current options for more flexibility, the cost may not be justifiable for a smaller startup.

We originally opted for this as a self-hosted solution. The product is highly rated due to its maturity. However, it might not be suitable if you're seeking something more agile, especially for Git-based developers who need flexibility on a limited budget.

It is highly rated in terms of quality and stability, but overall, I rate the solution as four out of ten for our needs today.

I use the solution mainly as a task tracker, capturing workflows of different functional groups and creating different reports and metrics for them.

The most valuable features of the solution are highly customizable reports and visibility for all the higher management.

If you have multiple projects on one server, the tool becomes very slow, and some reports take longer to load. We have already created some cases with IBM, and they are looking into it.

We encountered some server issues with the tool. Sometimes, the issue was from the IT side, but most of the time, it was from the tool side.

I rate the solution’s stability a five out of ten.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten for scalability.

The solution's technical support is good. Our IT team creates cases with the technical support team, and we see a good response from them.

Neutral

My organization was using Jira, but we switched to IBM Engineering Workflow Management for issue-tracking and task-tracking features. Also, you cannot create customized reports in Jira like we can do in IBM Engineering Workflow Management.

Jira is mainly used for issue tracking. IBM Engineering Workflow Management has many things to offer. It can be used as a source management tool. It's highly customizable, and you can create different work items, such as tasks or any kind of change request. You can create whatever you want or whatever is required for your organization.

The solution helped increase our productivity by 30%. We could track everything easily, and many other features made life easy for the engineers.

I've heard IBM Engineering Workflow Management is more expensive than other tools.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten.

We are not using the solution's traceability feature yet in my current organization. However, we used it in my previous organization, and it was really good and valuable for the functional groups.

IBM Engineering Workflow Management worked as a task tracker for us. We had everything tracked in the form of Excel sheets or PowerPoint presentations. When we started using this tool, we transferred all the information from Excel sheets, which was highly trackable. The data is visible to everyone, and there is no chance of losing it because everything is stored in the database.

Since this tool has a learning curve, its adoption was a little difficult when we started using it. We had to invest more in the training material and train people on this tool. So, there was a learning curve and operation cost involved with the solution.

I would recommend this product to other organizations. However, they need to consider the solution's learning curve, setup, and license expenses.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

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. 

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 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 primarily use the solution to help us implement Scrum.

All of the features work together to provide a powerful holistic solution - from the dashboard all the way through to security. 

We are currently using version four, but we looked at versions five and six and they are getting better and better. They're making planning easier. In version six they have something called a Quick Planner which would be nice to have in our version. In fact, if many of the features they have in five and six could be offered in four as well, that would be beneficial to us.

Some administrative tasks are difficult to perform. These could be simplified. For example:   setup sprint/iteration period - start and end. It may be simple to have a button to End Sprint / Start new Sprint and the application handle setup and definition. Another example in user holiday's handling to have one click to apply general holiday that applies to all team members.

The solution is stable. The level of performance you get out of it makes the workflow smooth.

We only have about 20 users; I can't really judge the solution's ability to scale. We do plan to increase usage in the future.

Technical support is good. We are now dealing with the local vendor here in Jordan. They are responsive and they have the skills and knowledge to help us to solve issues. Usually, we do try to solve issues internally, but sometimes we need local support. 

We didn't previously use another solution.

For us, the initial setup was a bit difficult. We had to learn the setup by practicing. An expert may have been able to lessen the difficulty and the time needed to set up the solution. The first time we did the setup we didn't have a good understanding of Scrum and the terminology used in the Scrum process, and the corresponding terms. Once we understood everything the process became simple.

We handled the implementation ourselves.

We see the solution as cost-effective. You get what you pay for.

We are using the on-premises deployment model.

I would advise others considering using the solution to have expertise in the solution from the beginning. Have someone who understands the tool and can help you utilize its features and you'll get an ROI right from the start.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

Execution of the Agile software development methodology.

It gave us the platform to implement Agile methodology immediately.

Agile templates give us a standard methodology for every Agile project. Also, the ability to create our own object types and linkages to features/epics allows us to enhance the verification of feature readiness.

Upgrades, even minor versions, seem too labour intensive, especially with the enhanced objects, which is why the Jazz platform should be so good.