Planview AgilePlace Reviews

We're using LeanKit for our IT teams right now, but we're hoping to utilize it enterprise-wide. We're using it for Kanban boards and methods to help with our lean and Agile workflows.

We have found that some teams get a lot more requests and work and projects than other teams. Those work-in-process, or WIP limits, are really helpful at determining if teams can take on more workload. It also helps us to see if they have roadblocks. If we have a lot of things that get in our way, it's easier to identify because we have everything in one central location on LeanKit.

Regarding a given card's status, LeanKit gives me easier access. I'm able to work more closely with my team to see what's going on with the cards that they're working on. And my manager can check in on the work that I'm doing just by looking at my cards. Everyone has a better picture of what's going on for the entire team. It also helps in project delivery. We can definitely see if our project is on-time or if we burned down too much time and are getting close to the end of the project and don't have everything done that we were supposed to have done.

While I haven't used the Card Health feature as much, when I have done demos of LeanKit to teams that are starting to use it, and I've shown it to them, they have found it really helpful. If a card has been sitting in the same lane for a few weeks, it helps them track things better to see what's going on with that individual card.

The Card Health activity stream helps business analysts and project managers to identify roadblocks, if they haven't been brought to the surface. If they have a card that's unhealthy, they're able to go to that team member and say, "Hey, what's up with this card? This is affecting the project's deadlines." Or they can even see, "Hey, we were able to get that card to the Finished lane a lot quicker than we thought," and they are able to analyze how that affected the project.

LeanKit has also reduced our cycle times. We are able to stay within our two-week sprints for those scrum teams. And for others we still have better continuous delivery; they are pretty healthy too. I would approximate that we have reduced cycle times by 20 percent, and that's just because we haven't been using it that long.

In addition, our project managers, business analysts, and scrum masters are able to use the solution's reports to determine if teams need additional help or if they can take on additional workload.

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.

Being able to determine what the Card Size feature is for, and have it be just one, standard thing instead of it being open to interpretation, would help.

I have also noticed that some people want to be able to make recurring cards. If they have tasks that they do over and over again, they would like to be able to automatically duplicate cards or have them recur. 

Also, being able to track actual time on cards or sprints, instead of using just the planned start and stop date, would also be useful. I would like to see something like JIRA has with actual sprint starts and stops.

I have been using LeanKit for about eight months.

It's a very stable solution.

We have about 200 users of LeanKit in our organization, and that's just our early adopters who have just started using it. We hope to use it enterprise-wide. We have just the Teams level of LeanKit in use at the moment. Each of them would have their own administrator and users within each board.

We do have plans to increase usage. We have about 15,000 employees, but because we are a hospital, we know that not every team, such as some of the nursing teams, will find it useful. But for teams that are more on the business operations side, I think it will be really useful.

I have found their technical support to be helpful. I have opened a few cases with them and they've been very responsive and helpful with all the questions that I've had.

We used JIRA, and I have had a few teams use Trello and Asana as well. We've replaced all of them with LeanKit. We went with LeanKit because we use multiple Planview products. Being able to easily integrate with each Planview product, and not have several different platforms within the organization, means we just have one project management solution.

I'm excited to see all of Planview's products grow too.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. All of Planview's products have been really easy to use, and Planview has a really great forum or place to get training documents. I found that nice and easy to use.

I'm not familiar with the pricing but I think it has been worth what we've paid for so far.

When you're trying to decide on a solution like LeanKit, important things to look out for are reporting, and the customizability or flexibility within the product. Those are really helpful to individual teams.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using this solution is that you can really be creative with your Agile process and make your to-do list seem easier to tackle.

We are currently using LeanKit as a task tracking tool for all of our teams. Since COVID hit, we just wanted to use it to see where our teams are on their work, see where they need help, and also to keep track of how long specific projects are taking. We also use it to make sure our employees are not being overloaded with any work.

We're still early in our organization of actually adopting it. We transitioned to LeanKit from JIRA. We wanted to find a way to cut costs. We realized that we can use both, but since they're both task tracking tools, we wanted to just utilize the one.

Third-party integrations are one of the things that I've heard a lot of users not necessarily happy with. One of the teams is our security team. They use some tools that provide automatic updates and information provided to their tasks and stories in JIRA. But those third-party applications don't work automatically with LeanKit right now. We haven't utilized the APIs at all. I don't know if these other tools have access to the APIs to develop any integration with them. That's something we haven't really done any research into as we're still getting users into it.

The third-party aspect is still the one thing that we liked about JIRA. They have so many third-party extensions and applications along with it and it seems that LeanKit is still gaining ground in that area.

The at-a-glance info, without even having to open the card, provides a lot of information on where a card is at and the basic information of a card. I also like the ability that when you click into the card, you can have so many different options to get all the information you want. You have the comments section, your attachment section, you can add whatever you need to your card to get all the information that you need or you want to send to your users.

My team specifically uses our board for all of our Remedy tickets that come in. We had a card for every ticket that we get, and we're able to add the link to that specific ticket there. If I'm out of office, for example, and someone else needs to work a ticket or someone is being contacted to work on a ticket, I don't have to sign on it. Someone else can easily access that ticket because I put the link in there. It's nice. It has a lot of great functionality in there.

We use a tool called BMC Remedy that our organization can submit tickets via.

My team is not currently using the card health feature. We haven't done an assessment to see where teams are at and what they've used and how they've used it. I think we'll be setting something up here soon to get that information.

I think its insights into card status have helped to increase project delivery time. Being able to see how long projects are taking and their due dates helps us keep on our toes a little bit. Utilizing the board and our daily standups are really helpful. We didn't use to have that functionality. We did with JIRA, but the readability on it was not the best. So having LeanKit helped us have a clearer picture of where we're at for everybody.

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.

The ability to report on customizable fields and third-party extensions needs improvement. I'd like to see more of those being able to be used. I don't know how that works for Planview, but just getting a little bit more added there would be nice.

I have been using LeanKit for four months. 

We haven't had any stability problems. We actually just ran into our first hiccup today but that was just because our SSO refreshed yesterday and we didn't have the key yet, so we needed to forward that along. It was resolved pretty quickly.

Scalability has performed pretty well. It will be able to handle all of our users, and I think once we train up our other administrators, we shouldn't have any problem with handling that. It should be pretty stable. We'll eventually be integrating it with PRM as we use the Enterprise One suite of applications as well. We already have users in PRM and that's one of our next steps is to integrate PRM and LeanKit.

Currently there about 50 users but I know we're probably going to be setting up 700 at least. We hope to by next summer.

The technical support was good. They responded pretty quickly and they were able to fix both our production and our sandbox environments quickly.

The setup of LeanKit was really easy. It was transferring all of our boards from JIRA to LeanKit. The process was pretty seamless. We didn't have any issues for both teams who actually wanted to transfer their boards. A lot of teams wanted to start fresh, so we only had a few that we actually had to import, but I think the process was pretty easily explained within LeanKit. It made the process really easy.

We're technically not finished deploying. We've only deployed to the people who have been a part of JIRA and that wasn't in our entire organization. It was only a small portion of us. One of the reasons we are transitioning to LeanKit is because we want to roll this out organization-wide and we are actually getting ready here shortly to begin that process.

When we first adopted LeanKit, we rolled out to about two teams. My team, as the administrator on it, we wanted to make sure the administrator had their team sitting there and were getting through the initial implementation. In doing that, we were able to keep better track of what users might want. We would sit down with each director and build templates out for each director and their teams below. That way, each director could have their own template and say, "Hey, you guys use this template for your implementation." We felt like that made it so with other teams under that director had to go to the other boards. They weren't lost or confused when they were viewing the board. They could say, "Oh, this lane is for this. I know that because my board uses that." 

There were about 20 people for the initial deployment. My team consists of application analysts and then we also had a BI team.

Currently, we only have two administrators but we're going to be rolling out to the entire organization, which could end up needing at least five administrators down the line.

I like the FLEX licensing. It's nice to have one FLEX licensing plan for all their applications and we just need to pay that upkeep. I think it's great.

We didn't evaluate other solutions because we were already in PRM and we wanted to use an application that would seamlessly integrate with PRM. We also had FLEX licensing already and we felt like we had a license for it, why let them go to waste?

As an administrator, it's nice that we can have other users manage their boards. Just because the standard has always been JIRA, times change and new applications show up and change is good.

My advice would be to rely on a board administrator. You don't have to do everything yourself and set templates. I think templates will help make the transition a little better. That way other teams can collaborate more efficiently.

I would rate LeanKit an eight out of ten. Once we get the third-party integration and the customizable reporting my grade would raise a little bit.

We do it to make work visible on one board in the area of sales and transformations on another.

I am just a user. I do not administrate it nor do I manage it. I do not set anything up for it. I am just opening up cards.

Our clients use LeanKit heavily. I have seen it at Walmart, for example.

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.

I do not know what it can do in the area of scrum. Maybe it has that functionality. I have never tried to set it up. You think of LeanKit from the perspective of Kanban. I don't know if there is a template for scrum, a scaled agile framework, or any of those scaling frameworks. 

The stability seems good.

I have seen it used by a lot of people at the same time concurrently.

Our company is small, but Walmart has a large number of users in Bentonville, Arkansas.

I haven't contacted technical support because the product is stable, and I am not an administrator.

I have seen AgileCraft, which is now JiraAlign. I have also seen JIRA. Those other products are more centered around scrum and scaling, which are completely different types of products, but that is what they are sold as. JIRA is sold as doing scrum, but doing Kanban also. Whereas, LeanKit is Kanban.

Training documentation was originally provided by my company during the onboarding process. They gave us the links and a user guide. I did not watch any videos. I am an agile coach and trainer, so I teach Kanban. I have administered other systems.

When you think of LeanKit, you think of Kanban. You don't think of anything else. Maybe it is because it has the word has lean in it.

I would rate the product as a 10 out of 10. What it does, it does well. It is fine for Kanban.