IBM Engineering Workflow Management Room for Improvement

Suvajit Chakraborty - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Digital Engineering at Harman International

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.

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Suvajit Chakraborty - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Digital Engineering at Harman International

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.

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it_user308109 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Development Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Complex client application and web interface that try to do it all.
  • Plans are built on the browser: They cannot be copied to other media, such as Excel. They cannot be exported.
  • Source control via streams is a bar to acceptance for many developers who have become used to SVN or Git.
  • The number of active users seems to be low. This is reflected in the lack of easy-to-access online resources.
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Buyer's Guide
Enterprise Agile Planning Tools
March 2024
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DS
Vice President Delivery - Enterprise Solutions and Infrastructure Services at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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. 

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QI
Senior System Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The Project Planning component should be improved and it should offer portfolio management with cost and other financial factors like Microsoft Enterprise Project Management does.

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NK
Quality Assurance at Varroc Lighting System

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.
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it_user547389 - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Owner at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

There is a lot of scope for improvement, namely:

  • Loading of content as it is extremely slow.
  • Customizing attributes like story points since it is not available.
  • Page refreshes are erroneous which need to be corrected.
  • An ability to write stories in rich text.
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it_user321231 - PeerSpot reviewer
Marketing and Sales at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Team Planning in RTC

1-  RTC allows to set up parallel or overlapping iterations. It is possible, to assign a user to tasks, which are assigned to different, overlapping iterations.
For 

example, one iteration is for product A and the second one for product B and both products shall be created in the same time range, e.g. the same month.

A developer has to do some work on both products, so maybe several tasks exist, assigned to the specific iterations for both products. If a product manager now opens a plan, that is only based on the iteration of the specific product, the developer is loaded with its total capacity to this plan.

RTC ignores in this case, that there are other tasks in other parallel iterations. This may cause a user to be overbooked. IBM states this in the documentation (it is recommended to create a plan on an iteration, that is on a higher level and includes both product iterations), and warns there to use parallel iterations – but RTC does not warn when this situation occurs, so users may encounter this issue without knowing.


2-  A plan in RTC is created always when a user loads this plan, using the actual status of the work items in the plan. There is no possibility to save a state, e.g. for documentation or to create different versions, like MS Project does. 
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AH
Applications Developer Specialist at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user701424 - PeerSpot reviewer
Delivery Manager / Project Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
  • Source management
  • Widgets
  • Queries
  • Plans presentation
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it_user321231 - PeerSpot reviewer
Marketing and Sales at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
  • SVN integration
  • The ability to change project templates for projects in-progress
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it_user872193 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Product Maintenance at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

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

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it_user204978 - PeerSpot reviewer
SCM Consultant

Permission logic is a big issue as it is very difficult to provide permissions at individual level.

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it_user600750 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

The search functionality for files in branches (streams) is very weak.

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Buyer's Guide
Enterprise Agile Planning Tools
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Broadcom, Microsoft and others in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.