Planview AgilePlace Reviews

Predominantly, we are using LeanKit for our agile management. Basically, we are a PMO. We belong to the PMO organization within our company, and we deploy products that are used by our project management team. Typically, we use LeanKit for that purpose.

LeanKit is a SaaS application. They update the version, and everybody gets the same version, as far as I understand. I don't think we are going to be in a prior release and then jump into the new release. 

We have a monthly release cycle. Before using the LeanKit board, we used to use many other tools, and we always would see the crunch on the day we needed to release. Sometimes, our work would extend into overtime. We have also seen some of the features slip through the cracks in the sense that we would miss releasing them. It was, in a way, a bit chaotic. Once we started using LeanKit, we haven't missed a single feature from deployment. We are also able to better manage the capacity so that we're not over-booking ourselves for work where there is no capacity, and that has really helped. For over a year now, we have not missed any deadline.

It helps us not to over-promise. Basically, the motto we all have is "Under-promise, over-deliver." That's what it helps us do. So, we know what we plan to deliver, and we don't crush ourselves by promising beyond our capacity.

We use LeanKit's board and card hierarchies. We have an initiative board, which is basically a high-level board where any new projects that are coming into the pipeline, or basically into the backlog, will move from one lane into the other. This helps the scrum master in looking at how the projects are moving. We also have trial boards, where the stories, the features, and the tasks are managed. For example, if there are a couple of projects that are impacting a particular feature, then we can link those two projects to this feature so that we know which updates are impacting which projects or initiatives. This way, whoever is managing the projects will know the progress of work as well as the impact on those individual projects. So, it removes the risk of doing something that will impact some other project. These boards help us this way, and it is one of the many examples.

It provides a visual ability to look at the deadlines. When we use a card, we always have a scheduled finish date. As the date is approaching, the color of the date icon changes, so it has a visual way to say that we are nearing the finish date, which makes us take a look at it and check whether we can meet the deadline or not. So, as we are near a deadline, the date icon's color changes to yellow, and once we pass that date, it changes to red. When it is in yellow state, we do a deeper review of the card and see whether we are still okay or not, and most of the time, we are okay with those dates. If not, it helps us to replan and see where we go from there. This is absolutely helpful in project delivery. 

The main thing is that we know what's in the current sprint and what we have planned to deliver. We know what those dates are. All the deliverables are in front of our eyes in the form of cards, like a schedule. There are lines, dates, etc. We know who is working on what. We typically have a daily standup meeting in the morning in which we review the cards in the Develop lane. We have multiple processes, and in general, if somebody is working on a feature, we already know what is happening. We do a one-minute review of each card and look at it and say, "Hey. Are we still on target? Is there any issue that is stopping us from working on that feature or functionality?" That's basically what it is. So, we know whether we will make it or not. It basically gives us the flexibility to look at any risk to delivery beforehand, and that way, make adjustments so that we won't miss a delivery.

We use the Card Health feature, and we also use other reporting features on the card. Generally, we do a review on a daily basis where we are with things. We are a small team, and we know what's happening with each card and whether we are going to make it or not. So, we already know what's happening on each card, and typically, only when we are doing our sprint introspection, we go and take a look at the predictability aspects. We sometimes look at the predictability that a particular report is giving during the standup meetings, but usually, we review the Card Health information retrospectively to see whether we can make any improvements in the future so that it is much smoother.

The Card Health feature activity stream affects our project management and delivery, but we have always looked at this after the fact. We usually don't use that on a daily basis. However, we do look at every card every day so we know where it's going. We will get to know if there is any risk in delivering a certain feature. It takes our attention to those cards to say that there is something going on with it, and we need to look at it. It needs a different analysis.

The board analytics helps with the speed and looking at how we are doing. It helps us to see if we can accommodate additional features within the sprint. In case, we have everything on target, we can pull additional cards to work on them, and board analytics helps with this. It also tells us how we are doing and how we are estimating.

LeanKit has reduced our cycle times because as we finish the planned work, we now know if there is more room to do additional work. So, we have the ability to know how we are doing. In this sense, it has easily reduced 50% of cycle time.

Every feature is valuable. LeanKit is a Kanban-based tool where you have a visual interface that you can use to create various cards and to create boards to house those cards. You can create a board for managing project work. You can create a board to do PI planning. It is pretty close to the agile way of doing business.

The Board Layout Editor is excellent in terms of flexibility. They have been improving its usability. Their development is very much agile, so for any feedback that we give them, they let us know if and when they would act on our request for enhancements or change, and then they make those changes. They are responsive.

Within the current features, if they can give some ability to show more icons on the card, it would be helpful. It would help us in showing more data on the cards.

I have been using this solution for close to three years.

In the last three years, I have only seen it once that LeanKit was not available. They had a technical glitch for about 10 to 15 minutes. That was the only time, and it was only for a brief duration. Otherwise, it has been pretty stable. I've not seen any issues with performance either.

It is very much scalable. We started with one board, and over time, we have transformed our work into multiple boards. We have links within each board. So, it is very flexible.

Currently, mostly the project management team uses it. We have about 20 users who are using LeanKit. We have analysts who do the development work, and we also have project managers and program managers who use it. We do plan to increase its usage in the coming years.

I have not used their technical support for an issue. I have only used them when we needed to renew our secure certificate.

We've been using LeanKit for almost three years. In the beginning, we weren't much aware of it, but now, we are very much aware of it. The reason for not using their help is because we know how the application works. New people in our organization have to go through the videos that Planview has provided for LeanKit. We also give peer-to-peer training. So, in general, we all know this application because we've been using it for a while now.

LeanKit conducts a webinar every month. We attend those webinars so we know what the new features are. That webinar also shows how we all can use it. In a way, we are getting trained by attending those webinars.

Before LeanKit, we were using Planview's Enterprise One application, but that application was more for the traditional way of project management, but of late, I feel it is gearing more towards agile. So, we've used that, but mostly, it used to be spreadsheets. We replaced spreadsheets with LeanKit, and the plan is that we're going to integrate Planview LeanKit and Jira. That's the future vision.

It was very straightforward. LeanKit is a SaaS application, so implementation is mostly configuration. There is no on-prem option for LeanKit.

You buy the licenses, and Planview implements the space for you. They provide template boards that you can use to have a quick start, and then, you can modify them to fit your process, which makes it very simple. They have templates for various methodologies. They have a template for sales; they have a template for DevOps. There are quite a lot of templates. We picked their templates for PI planning, and it was very quick.

One of the main processes for its implementation is that you need to get all the security clearances and establish a single sign-on. Once the paperwork was complete, it took a week. We did have a strategy, and we went through that. So, basically, most of it was securing IT security clearances. Because this is a SaaS application, we needed to ensure that we comply with all the security requirements before we use the application. We had to ensure that we have non-disclosure agreements and business associate agreements with any company we do business with, so we had to get an agreement in place. After that, we bought the licenses that we wanted.

Once that was done, we had meetings with the Planview LeanKit team to set up a single sign-on. We didn't want to use a specific user ID password, so we discussed implementing that and the requirements associated with it. They worked with our IT infrastructure team to get the setup for single sign-on, and they had to do certain integrations with our other internal systems so that we had the ability to add users and manage users. We worked with Planview to get the single sign-on in place and set up all the certificates for a secure connection, and we got access.

We had already done prep work on how we planned to implement the boards and how we planned to do our work, so we started with it. Then over time, we have reformed our boards and the methodologies on implementing as we learn more and more to make our work efficient.

It doesn't require any maintenance. They update the version regularly. Sometimes, we can request to be added to some of the features that they have implemented so that we can do testing or something like that. 

As far as I understand, it is not an expensive application.

We already had Jira in our organization, so we looked at Jira. We decided to go with LeanKit because we were looking for a simple Kanban-based application. Because we had already used Planview's Enterprise One application, we thought we could try LeanKit and see how it works, and we have been with it for three years.

I would highly recommend this solution to others. I would definitely ask others to take a look at the application and evaluate it. We have really benefited from it from the delivery perspective as well as from the perspective of planning the work. It is very simple and intuitive. It doesn't need too much training. Any new person who comes in can pick up the features and start using it very easily.

The LeanKit team has been adding new features, which is another good aspect. They have very recently introduced KPIs, which is where the industry is going. We hear a lot about it. Even our organization is talking about KPIs. LeanKit is very responsive to any feature requests that we provide.

We have Jira in our organization but not in our team. We have only been using LeanKit. We don't use its integration with Jira at all, but we do have plans for that.

I would want to rate it a 10 out of 10, but I won't because there is always room for improvement. So, overall, when compared to all Kanban-based tools, I would rate LeanKit a nine out of 10.

We have several different teams and they all have different boards for tracking, tasks, projects, and then completing work.

I use a board at the department level to track all of the projects that we are working on as a company. At the group level, we have five different technology teams. Each one of those has its own teams. Some of them have three teams, some have one team. I create cards on the department level for projects that we then send down to the individual groups. Those groups then take those cards, create more tasks, and then send those tasks down to the team. The team then breaks those into their daily tasks. I think LeanKit just helps us delegate and send priorities and work down to the different groups and then move things if we need to.

One of the biggest ways LeanKit has improved our work is by giving us visibility into projects and enabling users to leave comments on different projects. In addition, everybody can talk about one project or one task at the same time. When we first started, we had about six different Microsoft project files as well as about four to seven Excel files where we were keeping track of all of our statuses, work, and tests. That's been simplified into one department board and then the individual team boards. 

Now, everything is all on one board that we can track work on. That's just a basic number as far as actual workflow input. I think we've reduced our average project time from about I think three days in general on a project down to one and a half days. We've almost cut our time in half just from switching from our traditional project management to the LeanKit-style Kanban method.

The API has been valuable for me because I can use it to connect to Power BI to create reports downstream.

When we first started using LeanKit, we were using the built-in reports. But since then, I've moved to try to make a bunch of custom reports in Power BI. That has improved communication with our customers because I can point them to a report instead of holding meetings.

LeanKit is amazing when it comes to getting answers about a given card's status. That's one of the biggest takeaways that we've had. The status is right there on the board. Everybody can see it. You just click on it and it gives you everything that you need to know, especially the comments feature because it gives us a timeline of updates. We use that a lot where we write a comment on the card and then we can see and track progress as we move it across the board.

We use the submit feedback button pretty often. I encourage the teams to use that if they see anything that could be improved. But we've been really happy with how fast LeanKit improves.

The biggest improvement would be the API and data connections and making the data more accessible or quicker to access. One of our team members has brought up actual-time tracking on a card as a potential improvement. They had an interest in knowing how long a specific card had been worked on by a specific user or somebody that was assigned to that card. But there's not really a way for them to start and stop a time that they were actually working on it, except for if we created a different lane and they dragged it into the lane and then stopped using it in the lane. They requested that there'd be some sort of timer function on each one of the tasks.

I have been using this solution for two and a half years. 

LeanKit's stability has been good. I think we've only had one time where it wasn't working and we couldn't get connected to it, but it was back up pretty fast. In two and a half years, there was only one time that we couldn't access it.

Scalability has been good for the five teams that are using it now. This year, we're going to try and start implementing it with more and more teams. I think in total, we have about 25 teams just in the building that I work at and the section of Emerson that I work at. We're adding another three teams in the next six months and then possibly another five teams after that. We will see how it goes as we scale past five teams.

I have not had to contact customer support. 

We mostly used Microsoft Project before. We switched from more traditional project management and waterfall methods to the Kanban method. We wanted a virtual option. The pandemic accelerated our switch over to LeanKit.

I thought the initial setup was straightforward. It is a simple board layout. The board layout editor was easy to use. At first, it was a little tricky trying to figure out which order I had to do things in as far as splitting the lanes and then adding the lane and moving them around.

We did a slow transition. We went from our traditional method to making cards as sticky notes and putting them on a whiteboard first and then switched over to LeanKit and the actual tool online app. So that entire process of going from our traditional method to using LeanKit fully was about six months, I think.

We went with a physical whiteboard and sticky notes first and then added in the LeanKit board. From there, we started using retros to talk about how we could use LeanKit better and then added more features in, one by one, as far as categorizing cards and adding connections.

We did not implement through a vendor team. 

Our yearly LeanKit costs are at about $22,000. My advice to others would be to start by watching some of LeanKit's Planview videos. They were useful in learning about how to set up the boards. We made many changes as we went, but if we'd watched some of those intro videos first about best practices, things to do, and the things not to do, we could have skipped a couple of those headaches that we had when we were transitioning from the physical whiteboard to the LeanKit board.

We explored a couple of different options with DevOps, Microsoft Planner, and monday.com. We definitely looked around at different options. Ultimately, LeanKit offered the most flexibility and customization of the actual boards, which we really liked. I think that allows us to make it exactly what we need in terms of the Kanban board and style.

I think the first time I used it it was a little tricky to figure out how everything worked as far as adding a lane goes, for example, or moving it up and down and splitting it vertically or horizontally. But once I figured it out, it's straightforward.

I use the Card Health feature to go in and see how a card's doing. I don't know if I've used it that much when it comes to planning for deadlines. I use it more to look back on how things are doing and then update our process. So if we see a bottleneck, we will point it out and we will talk about if we need to change anything in the future, I don't know if I've used it much for looking forward though. 

The Card Health activity stream makes it easier to quickly look back and see where we have bottlenecks.

Our cycle times have reduced by 50%. They are now half as long as they used to be.

I have two boards where it is a bit of a pilot, one of which was my suggestion to our organization. 

About a year and a half ago, before COVID, Planview LeanKit was given to Process Improvement Facilitators to use as a tool to work on the projects and essentially, as a Kanban board. I have a strong interest in agile project management. I took a class in it and I immediately recognized that this is simply a Kanban board type of process. So, I began using it for my projects. I started to experiment with using it in terms of how I managed the process improvement projects I was working on.

When COVID hit, I began using it for ad hoc projects that were coming out of our incident command structure. I work for a small rural hospital in south-central Wisconsin, which is part of a health system. As a part of the COVID-19 pandemic response, our incident command structure basically had all hands on deck. I was thankful that our PI group was asked to help facilitate some of those projects on an ad hoc basis. I began to realize how Kanban is a really great way of organizing your work, understanding the work breakdown structure, and helping the flow of tasks through till they're done.

After that, I was asked to be redeployed per incident command because of my previous managerial background in an interim role as an assistant manager. Essentially because of the things that happened during COVID, in the place of six people, the leadership structure was me and one other individual to whom I reported. I have worked with this individual before, and I had a working relationship with her. In this kind of desperate situation, I recommended to her that we use this Kanban board process to help manage our work in progress. We can, first of all, identify what all is there, and then we can begin to prioritize. We would be able to work through it very quickly because there are only two people. Even though she had no prior experience in agile project management, she agreed. She is a very open-minded person, so she was willing to experiment.

We started to have huddles. I already had an inventory of the work in progress from some prior requests from that department. I validated this as a work in progress. We prioritized and started to release into the Doing lane for our projects. We would meet twice a week, and we would basically powerhouse through these things as quickly as we could. We then started to hire people, and as we hired people to backfill, we were able to get them on the plan and on the process. They adopted it, including our new operations manager, who's smart and who's our superior. She liked what she saw, and we were able to work that way. I think we tripled our outputs roughly with half the resources. That's my high-level viewpoint. It is not purely objective; it is based on what I know. I wasn't in the clinics before, but from what I could tell, we really were productive. I heard this term today called high-performing team, and in a way, I think I had a brief glimpse of what a high-performing team is like. We got a lot of work done, and we got things stabilized. We were able to even innovate a bit because we had to. Based on what I'm aware of, we had never done anything agile in this clinic structure and more or less in our organization. We were really learning as we were doing. We were experimenting and evolving it, and yet, as a project manager, I was very careful to not push too hard, especially under the circumstances. COVID was emotionally just a disaster for everybody. The last thing you want to do is overload people. What I was trying to do was push very gently. We did not optimize the Kanban process. We could have been more efficient and effective with it, but I was facilitating this for us at just the right level to get the work done and yet not push too hard. That's because there were so many demands that we were under at that time. I think it worked very well, and I got feedback from other people. I became a propagandist for LeanKits because I started telling my fellow managers that this is out there, and this is what we're doing with it, and I highly recommend this product because this is going to make them more effective managers.

In terms of LeanKit's effect on our ability to get the answers that we need about a given card status, my company is not hardcore. I'm the PM, and I watch it. It is great because everything is visible, and they're doing a good job to help show the visibility and every functional aspect of the software.

The transparency that it brings is valuable. I like to look at things from all angles, and sometimes, flip chart paper on a wall and sticky notes are better than something on a screen, but the way they've made it accessible from all points for anyone within an organization is great. As a project management guy, sometimes, you have to force people into new environments where they have to see what you're talking about. Any screen is a barrier, and people got to get into the screen. How do you know they do? You don't necessarily know, but you are getting around that barrier with a countermeasure of making it accessible to as many as possible. Everyone can jump in there and see everything. It is fully transparent, and I like that. This is one thing that helps. 

Planview does a great job of making the Kanban process accessible. I firmly and absolutely believe that Kanban is a process. If you can get the organization to go up and make it the way you do business, it is going to just blow productivity out of the water. It would really improve productivity and efficiency and reduce waste and over-processing in the way we do projects. Planview is a Kanban board that helps to enable that.

In terms of my impression of the flexibility of the Board Layout Editor, overall, my experience is great. I don't know if I'm using it the right way, but there are some things that I would rather customize, and I can't seem to figure out how to customize. I'd like to be able to blow up individual tasks in a card because that's my thing. I like the idea, but there is more work they can do to allow some customization aspects within it.

It may be my lack of knowledge, but I feel that at the level of tasks on a specific card, on a board, there are some barriers to customize the ways those tasks appear. I would advise looking at how they can make that a little more customizable in terms of breaking that little pass card down into sub-things. It is a card within a card, within a card, and so on. Why don't they have the full functionality of every layer? I feel like we run into a barrier where at the micro-level, it no longer behaves exactly like at the macro level. I guess it is like that Pink Floyd album cover with the mirrors. You've got to stop somewhere. It can't be an infinite repeat, and I get it, but I just think it would be useful to allow a little more flexibility there.

They have a feature called Instant Coffee. It was in the beta phase. They released it from beta, and now, it is a legit thing. We were in the pilot here. I liked the idea of Instant Coffee, and I like how it is integrated, to some degree, with LeanKit, but I have two big rocks to throw at them on this. The first one is that Instant Coffee does not save your work very well in terms of saving it in formats that you can then go back and edit as Visio would. It leads to the next point, which is, we're not really clear on what they're trying to do with Instant Coffee. I feel that they're trying not to reinvent Visio, Miro, and other software programs out there that do mapping, visual diagrams, etc. Miro is fantastic in that regard. I gather they're not trying to reinvent Miro, but it sure would be nice if it had more aspects of Miro in it, such as being able to draw arrows and write on them on the top. The way I explain Instant Coffee is that I tell people that it is like the equivalent of Atari Pong. It is a binary Atari Pong type of program, and maybe that's what they're going for. What happens is that you have people like me who tend to be creative. I can work within limitations because I can just change my mindset, but not everyone can do that. I just think that their program might be unappealing to some people who see that it doesn't do what they think it should do. 

They could create some kinds of practice modules, test pilot modules, or check-ins after the initial training and score people. They could do some kind of follow-up if they wanted to.

I have been using this solution for about a year.

Overall, the product is stable, but there have been times when I can't seem to get to the card. I have problems with new users not being able to get in, but I don't know what the causality of that is. I don't know if that's on our side or Planview's side.

I think it promotes scale scalability. We haven't really done some of that. There are some interesting problems that we have started to discover about how you scale out and if you do it in a standardized way or not, but I don't know if I'm a good judge. They could maybe offer more templates for that. This is an improvement idea, but I don't know if there are templates that could be offered for how you scale up because what an organization runs into is, "Oh, we loved this thing, and now everyone wants to use it," and all of a sudden, you have a kind of a wild forest, and everyone is using it in different ways. So, what are the boundaries of that country in which the wild forest is, aka the organization? So, that's kind of how you scale up. You keep it organized.

We probably have 20 to 30 users. My understanding is that they are project management professionals and process improvement professionals. Personally, I highly recommend we increase the usage of it, but I don't know what the imminent plans are. 

After our success with our project, I started to share this tool with other people, and some other people have started to use it, but there is a fear of the techie side. There is a fear of the tool. When you're talking about a new way of doing things, sometimes, that goes with this sort of thing. I don't think that it has gained as much traction as I would personally like, but I'm a total believer in it at this point. Now that I've come back to my normal role, I've started to experiment with the agile process with the projects that I'm running. I'm trying to bring it up to the next level, and I'm talking to my coworkers about this. In a 60 seconds or less diagram, I am trying to visually share with someone what agile means. I was explaining to them that Kanban is really the easiest way to do agile, but even within Kanban, there are levels to it. We're only scratching the surface. I told them that there are levels above where your team members really roll up their sleeves and start to pull things off the shelf, instead of you telling them what to pull off the shelf. It really becomes more of a pull system rather than a push system. To evolve to that level, a transformation is required culturally. We are at the very beginning of this trajectory, but it is empowering. I love it. In a way, we did Kanban in lean projects, but to put the whole thing into a very simple Kanban methodology, you have to be all. In healthcare, this is absolutely where we need to go because no one has time for complexity. We have to make it simple. In healthcare, no one knows what agile is, but they can now see it visually. When they see it, they start to engage with it. It is really the way to get people into agile.

I haven't had to deal with them at all.

I think they were using Projectplace and EnterpriseOne. I am not clear about the reason for switching. My understanding, although no one told this to me was that they wanted to somehow plug this into EnterpriseOne, but I don't even see EnterpriseOne because of the situation that we're in. So, that's a hypothesis, and that's how they could manage their resources more effectively as per their strategy.

I wasn't really on the front end, and what I received on the receiving end was pretty smooth. I didn't have a line of sight of how long the deployment took, but if I have to guess, it was done within a few months.

I don't know what their strategy was. I understand that their deployment strategy was to give this out to certain groups of people within their EPMO. I personally recommended they blow this up completely and give it to all managers because I was in this role. I said that it works really well for me as a manager, and I think others would like it too. So, I personally was recommending they really blow this up and give this to everybody.

I believe they have one IT resource that is the gateway to set people up. That's about it. I don't think it is his full-time job.

I can't scientifically say that we have seen an ROI, but I would say for sure anecdotally. I can't quantify it in the circumstances related to my interim deployment, but it really helped us a lot.

I don't believe there are any costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

The Kanban approach, in general, is to start wherever you are, but that's very intimidating to a lot of people because that doesn't sound very meaningful. So truly, you have to start wherever you are and just go from there. If you keep that in mind, you're going to understand how this is designed to work and all of the opportunities that this enables. So, just start wherever you are. I learned that quickly. We learned through doing.

To the credit of the designers, it's a very intuitive product. I would advise others to experiment. They should start small and with projects that easily fit into this kind of format. They should experiment and continue to learn and incorporate some kind of daily or weekly standups or some kind of plugging in of stakeholders into it to gain experience to follow this through.

I haven't delved into customization because I think the simpler, the better. Simple is usually the best way. I've seen a lot of people who customize LeanKit, but I would caution them to be careful because the more complicated something becomes, the more difficult it is for people to engage with it because they're scared of the tool. So, you got to make the tools simple and easy to use. It is excellent that it is customizable. That's a great design. They are balancing simplicity with the ability to expand it and blow it up in a lot of different ways. My hat's off to them.

I have not used its board and card hierarchies. I'm really dabbling in the beginning, and organizationally, we have not really gotten into that stuff as far as I'm aware of. I learned about metrics, and I really want to get into the metric levels of it, but I have not been able to really figure that out too much yet.

Similarly, I have just dabbled into reporting. We still need to explore that and exploit it. I have also not used the Card Health feature much. I know it exists, and I've dabbled in it and used it a little bit. It is a good feature because that's how you tell what's your flow time. It is very interesting, but I don't understand the operational definitions that are being used to generate this input or this information. I saw this literally the other day. I looked at it on my card because I thought this project was flowing pretty well, but I only got a yellow score. I was wondering why only yellow. If I understood more of the methodology of how it is giving me that score, I would probably use it more. That's no fault of Planview. It is my own fault. We didn't really have a lot of training on this. We did get Planview training, and it was okay. They showed us everything, but you need to practice it.

I can anecdotally say that it has reduced our cycle times, but I cannot say the same scientifically.

I would rate Planview LeanKit a nine out of 10.

We use this solution in a pretty standard way for project management. Most importantly, we start with the request phase, which is one of the most important use cases for us. We were missing this ability earlier. Now, across the organization, any department can provide us with an overview or a business case of why they want us to work on a project by putting a request through.

We created request forms with the help of Planview PPM Pro. These help us gather important metrics. Several gauge stages are included in the process. 

There is also an approval process in which we review the request. We have the option to send the request back if we want to ask more questions. 

Once the request is approved, we start working on the use case and creating a project out of it. We start by assigning a project manager at which point the request becomes a project. We can then start populating the project in LeanKit with information from the project charter, which is an overview of the project. We can also create project tasks in LeanKit. 

Next comes the project planning, execution, monitoring, and closure. The last use case in this entire journey is capturing the lessons learned through the PPM Pro platform by delivering those forms to all the stakeholders. We look at both the things we did right and what we need to learn. 

This solution takes us from request to closure. 

Before LeanKit, we had no visibility at all. We were in a closed box with everyone trying to look in saying: "What is the strategic execution office doing? What if I wanted to do a project; would they be able to do it? What's going on with my project?" So, all of these questions were always there but the visibility was missing. This issue has been completely resolved now. It's amazing that everybody is aware of what's happening, what's getting bumped to the front of the queue, and what has been bumped down to the end of it. 

The second way LeanKit has improved our organization is the ability to get stakeholders from other departments to update us on their progress regarding specific tasks that we have been looped in on. That was not happening earlier, but now people come and check out the solution and update us. This is a factor that has helped us succeed. 

LeanKit has also helped us make reports more accessible to the executive leadership. They were previously very stubborn about navigating a solution to see reports. Now, they're actually going in and checking out all the dashboards and reports on the platform. They like that they can see everything in one place and don't have to reach out to us. 

Adoption across stakeholders and visibility have been the biggest success for us with LeanKit. 

At the end of the day, garbage in is garbage out. Because LeanKit is so easy to use and people are putting inputs into the system correctly, it is becoming easier for us to understand the status of a project, resource, budget, or anything else. We are able to get the right information across the board and that is why we are able to make better decisions in terms of what needs to be changed when something happens during a project. 

LeanKit has given us the ability to make decisions on the fly. We do not have to always be coordinating with other project managers and stakeholders.

The most valuable features for us are resource management and financial. Before LeanKit, we were doing project management in Microsoft Project. We were able to plan and schedule in it, but we were not tracking resource allotment or the availability of the resources. We have started to track them now. 

We are able to do this because the reports that go out to stakeholders and the executive leadership team are richer. This helps us prioritize our entire portfolio and decide which projects we can take and which we need to decrease in priority in order to reassign resources to new, priority projects. 

LeanKit helps us a lot not just in terms of planning internally but also with making outside people understand why a project is getting delayed or postponed or is going on hold.   

Because LeanKit is so flexible, our ability to make predictions comes down to educating stakeholders on how the cards work. The card's health feature lets us know whether we need to make adjustments. It gives us an idea if, for example, someone has taken up too many tasks.

Some aspects of the reporting and dashboard could be improved. 

We are a 750-employee company, so we got lucky that our board approved the kind of funding we needed for the solution. But, LeanKit probably needs to reduce its pricing.

They should also focus more on Agile project management features that other solutions like Azure DevOps have. 

We started using this solution a year ago. We opened it up for users outside of our group around six months back. 

The technical support is really good and very prompt. It's quite impressive compared to our experience with other vendors. They respond to emails almost immediately. Also, a specific case will stay with one person usually so we don't have to spend a lot of time explaining the issue over and over with the next person who picks up. 

We previously used a solution called BrightWork. Comparing LeanKit to BrightWork is not appropriate because of two things. Firstly, Brightwork is one-tenth of the price of LeanKit. Second, Brightwork sits on top of SharePoint. It utilizes SharePoint features and converts them into a project and portfolio management solution. It was a good solution but not very intuitive. It also didn't have an online version. 

Deployment took about four months. It was a little complex compared to what we were using before. When you're getting so many features, you want to make sure that you want to use them. So, we took a lot of time to understand the features and how we could use them best. 

Although it was a bit more complex initially, today we are in a position where we do not need to make any changes to Planview. 

We had some workshops, in the beginning, to discuss with Planview what we wanted to implement and how to do that. Those were the discovery workshops and after that, we had a large number of actual sessions over three months.

It was a pretty exhaustive process, but that is the reason why we are so knowledgeable about the system and we can make changes on our own now.

Currently, we have 55 users. There is a project manager, a business analyst, and a business consultant using it, in addition to SMEs from departments including risks and central operations. It is also being used by the VP of strategy, the VPs of sales, and the VP of world, which is the financial services arm of our company. 

These are just the active users, but every department has access to it. 

We worked with Planview and had a dedicated team of three people who were looking at the implementation and configuration part of it. They did all the heavy lifting. I was a part of it as well. I did an early implementation of the solution.

We haven't gotten that far yet. But, we had tremendous pressure on us from the board to move to Agile project management. LeanKit has helped us demonstrate our Agile methodology. 

The price is steep, but I do feel like we got the bang for our buck. We had a strict process and saw the value of what we are getting. We were able to even convince our board by showing them a detailed analysis. 

We looked into Clarizen and Adaptive. 

Reporting has been the best part for us. It gives us more information than we could provide earlier. Thanks to these reports, we can easily make our case for why we can or cannot take on a certain project or why we will have to remove the focus from something else to get a particular project done.

We can also create high-level reports for the board, which we do every quarter.

The Board Layout Editor is very flexible. We have been able to change with help from LeanKit, so we find it very flexible.

With the card health activity stream, the project manager becomes more sensitive to the way they have been assigning work to people. At the same time, it also allows them to approach stakeholders more easily and help them understand why some things need to wait and why others would not be delivered as per their expectations.

It has only been six to eight months since we started using it, so I don't know if it has reduced our cycle times, but I'm sure that it will.

There is a group in our company that tracks all of the capital spend in the company. They are using LeanKit to track cash and incentives also. It has also been used for incentive tracking since earlier this year. 

In addition, various teams are using it for the Kanban board functionality, which helps them track work. My team, for example, created a board to share with our customer success manager. It's shared with Planview and we put cards out there when we have questions or when we need a demo. It's also how we track remote office hours. 

There are other groups within the company that are using these boards for various activities. Use cases pop up all the time. We're a very large company.

LeanKit has helped improve our collaboration with our team on the Planview side. It helps keep us connected and when topics come up, they get addressed pretty quickly. Before we started using this board, we were only using email and things were getting buried or weren't just getting the attention they needed as quickly.

The tracking of work has been the most valuable for our company. Holding people accountable for the cards they're assigned and the progress that's being made has been valuable. I know that our development teams have been very interested in it. I'm not familiar with Jira, but I know that they consider LeanKit better. 

There's room for improvement with the Instant Coffee feature. There are other businesses that have been interested in leveraging a virtual whiteboard or sticky note capability and how Instant Coffee was developed has not met the mark.

Our company has been using LeanKit for about two years. My experience has been less than that. It is newer to me. I have been using it for almost a year. 

LeanKit has been stable. I get all the notifications because I'm the service owner so when there are issues and there have been some here and there, but not a lot. I get emails about LeanKit issues maybe once a month. However, they all get resolved pretty quickly.

I would say it's highly scalable. LeanKit can scale across the enterprise easily. Every business could probably find a use case for leveraging LeanKit. 

We currently have about 300 users. We also have some 30,000 knowledge workers. They do not have IT accounts so they are read-only users. 

I have not talked to their tech support, however, Planview's tech support in general has been good. 

Jira is the only comparable tool we used previously, but there is very limited use of it within the company. Only the IT development organization uses it. 

We implemented through Planview. 

We pay for LeanKit on an annual level. The pricing changes but next year it will be $2 million. 

LeanKit's email functionality is nice. I get emails whenever something happens with a particular card so I do not have to constantly go into LeanKit and check on cards for status. That's very helpful. It enables faster scheduling of things or collaboration on items.

LeanKit has reduced our cycle times because we are able to collaborate so much quicker with it. Leveraging LeanKit's email capability has been a plus for me. We can also use it to ping people who may not be paying attention to certain cards. It keeps things moving. LeanKit has been more of an enabler for me to keep me on task or on track with what needs to get done. 

In the board layout editor, there's quite a bit of flexibility in how you can set up your swim lanes, etc.

We have not set any standards on how to use the card hierarchy. I have not used any of the more complex linking functionalities. We usually just create parent cards and link child cards to them. In addition, while the card hierarchy has not improved the speed of my deliveries, it has affected my bandwidth.

I would highly encourage others to implement LeanKit. It is a powerful tool and very intuitive. I think it is a great tool. 

In our organization, a lot of individuals have been using it to plan out their work or keep track. Some people here are using it for things they know are coming but haven't started. They are using it to track the progress of things going on in their department and then be able to see and share it with their staff to give visibility.

We are using its most current version because it is accessed through the web. It is SaaS-based.

The ability to see the progress is important for us because there is so much going on, and it provides a way to have a quick glance to see how busy people are and how much they have going on. From having a whiteboard or sticky notes in their office that only they could see, people now have been able to go to a place where anybody can see it. Moving those things that were traditionally on a physical wall into a shareable place is a big benefit.

It is much easier for a coworker to see and know what people are working on in her department because she can assign them to those cards. So, she can go back and see at a glance, which makes things a lot easier when decisions have to be made about other things that have come to fruition or are going to start eventually.

In terms of its effect on our ability to get the answers that we need about a given card's status, especially when comparing how it was before using LeanKit, we didn't have anything previously. So, it must have been a lot harder to dig for that information. Now, if somebody is working on a project, that person on their own can go and view it versus having to maybe ask their boss what is the status or find some Excel report that was sent in email.

People found the ability to set up different lanes and the ability to see where they're within the progress most valuable. They can use different colored cards or sticky notes, and then they can separate out which cards belong to a department or the initiative they're working on. They can filter who's working on it, and I've got good feedback about that.

Board Layout Editor is very flexible and user-friendly. We can create with minimal training. We had staff that was able to go in and easily get going themselves. They've found it really user-friendly.

It is a pretty good product. It is really hard to think of things that I'd want to be improved. Sometimes, we use it for project management lessons learned. So, we have three columns, such as Could be Improved, Keep Doing, and Works Really Well. It would be helpful if there was a template set up for something like that because we code different cards based on the category. For example, if something belongs to the Could be Improved category, we may have those cards as yellow, but then I have to change the color of them and put a header. It is not as smooth, but it still works fine. To be honest, I don't have a lot of complaints about it.

We've been using it for about four months.

Its stability is good. I haven't run into any issues.

I think it can scale. If you have a bigger team, you just have more users to get in there. There doesn't seem to be any limit in terms of the number of boards you could use. People can create pretty easily and connect with other people. I don't see any issues there.

We have probably 10 people using it, and we definitely plan to use it more often. We want to get to a place where we connect it to PPM Pro. We have PPM Pro as well, and I just need to go through the process. After that, there would be more push to let people know that they can use it and decide if they want to work in PPM Pro or in Projectplace.

I use them all the time for many different things. My experience with them has been really good. I haven't had any issues. I always got the help that I needed and within a good and reasonable amount of time.

We didn't have anything quite like this. We do have Projectplace from Planview as well, which is definitely different. Projectplace can accomplish a lot of the same things, but people tend to feel more comfortable with the whole sticky note presentation type of thing, or they're used to doing that, or they just like the colors. For some people, it definitely went from zero to 100, where they felt that they were doing way more than what they ever expected to do with it.

It was straightforward. It was a piece of cake. It was pretty much knowing how to log in. I may have watched a video. There are good board templates that you can look at to get an idea of how it works. After that, you just need to set up other people. The funny thing is a lot of people were like, "One more thing. I don't have time for this. I don't want to go to one more place." When they started using it, they were like, "Oh, this is so much better." They didn't have anything like this.

We didn't really need any implementation strategy because, for the most part, we were really at the point where we just said, "Hey, there is this tool. If you want to use it, feel free." We haven't really pushed it and said, "Okay, everybody has to use this, and we're going to use it to manage this project." However, anytime we've set somebody up, it has been really easy to get somebody started, and people, in general, are pretty excited about it.

We didn't need any integrator or any staff from Planview to help us with its deployment. It was that simple. There were sufficient videos to watch if we had any questions or needed any help.

In terms of maintenance, it doesn't really require a lot. I'm the admin, and basically, all I really had to do was do a little bit of training for people. The only other thing was just to set them up as users. It is pretty simple and low maintenance, for sure.

The way our licensing is structured makes us more likely to stay or not want to go and look at other options. The overall value proposition with Planview is good. The more remote we've had to work, having these things that anybody can access is important.

I don't know what it would be on its own. It was basically included with what we were already paying or using. So, it was a no-brainer. It wasn't like we had to sell the company on making a purchase or anything like that. There weren't any costs that came in after implementing it.

We didn't evaluate other options because the way our license was structured for our other software allowed us to use this as well. So, it was like, "Oh, we now have access to this. Cool."

The biggest lesson that I've learned from using this solution is that once you are tracking everything, there is a lot more work going on than you think. It's easy to forget that things are going on, or you are going to do this task or that task.

My advice would be that if you're going to use it, you really need to be going in there on a routine basis, and that's probably daily. If you don't go into it tomorrow and you also don't go the next day, then by the time you come back to it, you would be like, "Oh! I was supposed to do that," or, "I forgot about all these other things to do," or, "I've been doing these things, but I haven't been tracking them. Now I have to go add these things up in the last three days." So, you really have to get a routine of using it to get the most out of it.

I don't use its board and card hierarchies, but I know other people have connected cards across different boards. I don't know whether they affect the speed, but it would be less likely for things to fall through the cracks. So, it probably helps in one way because it is always there, and you're always seeing it. So, things don't fall behind.

I haven't used LeanKit's Card Health feature, but I am familiar with it. We are definitely going to explore it in the future. Similarly, we haven't used it for reporting. There might be reporting capabilities, but based on my knowledge, there are not a lot of reporting capabilities. I haven't used it a lot, and I don't think anybody else has. It is relatively new, and we are at a point where we are just getting people to use it.

It has probably not reduced our cycle times. We used other things to manage projects. In some way, it is helpful because things are always there visually, and you can see them in front of you. So, if you're checking it, you're probably much more likely to get things done sooner because they are visually there.

I would rate Planview LeanKit a nine out of 10.

With Leankit, our PMO has a single solution and Program Increment Board to integrate teams and projects and align priorities across the entire program - which consists of 22 Scrum teams. 

It allows us to track our PI goals, sprint goals, dependencies, and impediments across all of the teams creating extreme visibility and predictability for product owners, stakeholders and the teams. With integration into JIRA and the team boards, it allows us to have one single source of truth while not overwhelming the teams with the added responsibility of manually updating their epics, stories, and/or tasks. 

Leankit has made it much easier for us to visualize our progress across our entire portfolio, which consists of 22 Scrum Teams. 

It is now our single source of truth, given the integration with JIRA and near real-time updates. It has made such an impact on the way that our business unit manages programs that we plan to leverage the virtual Kanban boards to enable remote and in-person Big Room Planning sessions. 

It provides visibility and predictability across all of the teams in each PI. It also has been a great roadmapping tool for our product owners.  

The "Blocking" feature has helped our scrum masters track impediments and share them at the program level to stakeholders with accountability and detail so that they understand and the action items which can be noted easily. 

We use it for our Scrum of Scrum Impediment Executive Action Team Meetings daily because it allows us to view all of our impediments in one place and shows us what exactly is being blocked, (i.e. Program Increment Goal, Sprint Goal or an Epic). 

The dependency features are also very valuable as there are many to track in a given Program Increment; that also allows us to review them during our Big Room Planning. 

Our overall impression of Leankit has been very positive, however, our experience with the JIRA integration into our Leankit boards was much harder than we anticipated and that could be improved by simplifying it somehow. They could use some sort of drag and drop approach if possible. 

The requirements to create these integrations are very complex and time-consuming both on our end and the Planview/Tasktop end. Once the integration is set up, the user experience is great, however, the setup itself is difficult. 

I've used the solution for a little over a year.

The solution appears to be handling our setup perfectly. We rarely have issues.

The solution appears to be handling our 22 Scrum Teams, the JIRA integration, and our use across the program. 

So far, we have had a very good experience with customer service and tech support. 

We tried to use JIRA Portfolio, however, it did not meet our needs. Therefore we started looking for alternative solutions. 

The initial setup was fine, however, as I mentioned before, the JIRA integration was a bit complex and time-consuming. 

We implemented through our own EPM Tools Group as well as with a Tasktop representative. 

This has yet to be determined. 

We shared our experience with other PMOs within our company and it led to an Enterprise Agreement. The price was right and the setup was fairly easy. 

We also looked at JIRA Align. 

We're very happy with our decision to use LeanKit for our Portfolio/Program management and we're glad we could spread the word around our company to lead to deeper integration. We look forward to some cool new features.

We have a unique use case. Normally, people use LeanKit to track agile development in IT. However, we use the product to track our savings on capital projects.

Because we track our daily work there, things don't get lost or forgotten. It is a high level to-do list that your whole team can see in one place, watch how things are progressing, and give updates on. We are tracking our work, then we will use the tags in there, to say, "For these cards, we need to go talk to our community of practice on. Then, for these cards, we need to go talk to Planview on." So, we track all our work in one case. The filters are very handy, which makes it efficient. It is right there in front of your face.

We are going to use the solution again for another corporate-wide tracking process that we need to do, because it went well and we got good feedback. We need to track something else across the corporation, so we were like, "Hey, you know what? Why don't we just do it the same way? That worked really well."

• The visual management - the ability to track where things are at any point. 
• We can assign a task out to folks in an easy way. 
• The connection with Power BI for reporting.

Using the tool seems to save time versus trying to do things in a regular manner. It is highly collaborative; everybody can see things in one place. It is a highly functional, but pretty simple tool. That is hard to find: A tool that has a lot of functions, but is also simple.

We use all the boards. We use them because we are trying to track savings. People identify an idea for how to save money, and that goes in one lane. As that idea progresses into actually being implemented into a project or production, then they move that card along the different lanes to show that it went from an idea to something that got implemented in production. That is how we move things along the card. We then hook up Power BI to be able to add up all of that savings across the company.

The Board Layout Editor is pretty flexible. In general, we are pretty happy with it. We are happy that you can upload from Excel, which to get us started, which was super convenient.

You can get the answers that you need about a given card’s status easily. You just know where everything is. If people are updating it and using it, you can see that at a glance because it is a visual tool.

The integration with the Enterprise One product is probably an area for improvement. It's not really broken. It's just that it is such a handy tool and a great way to visually manage things. There is a very limited hookup/integration between Enterprise One, which is the master Planview tool, and LeanKit. While they are looking at this on their roadmap, it definitely needs to happen. There is a lot of opportunity there. 

Planview is buying companies. So, they get these tools, then it just takes some time to figure out the best way to integrate them with each other. That is probably one of the largest opportunities.

I would also like it if they integrated it with being able to do a timeline, like a better schedule by using the tool.

I have been using LeanKit for about nine months.

We haven't had any problems with stability. We are a global company, and I haven't heard anyone complain from Asia or Europe. It is probably the most you can ask for.

You definitely need a strong administrator. We have two or three people who know how to do it. They probably only spend 10 percent of their time on it, which is 25 percent of an FTE for the entire company. If the solution gets bigger, then it might take a lot more administration, e.g., if you needed to deactivate boards. The solution is pretty new, so we haven't done any of that archiving maintenance that we have to do yet.

It is maintained as part of a center of excellence that we have for projects, where we have a processor systems team. In other people's companies, this is close to a PMO.

I am a little nervous that it could get busy easily, e.g., the number of boards. So, you need to have a good administrator to make sure that your boards just don't get totally out of control, with thousands of them. Then, I don't know what performance would be like. So far, performance has been fine. However, I can see if the solution caught on for the whole company, and everybody wanted a LeanKit board to manage their department and their task, then it might get crazy in there.

We probably have 300 people using it. Since we are focused on savings in projects, our users are mostly project engineers and financial people. Globally, it is mostly focused on engineers, project managers, and controllers.

We meet with our Planview representative once a week. If we have any questions, we just ask her, then she gets us the help that we need, which is just little stuff. We have a good account rep. I don't know if everybody's experience is just like ours because we have a super good account rep.

The support is very good. We have had no issues with them. If we have an issue, then they fix it. If we have a question, then they answer it. If we want an enhancement, we can generally figure out where that is:

• Are they going to do it? 
• Are they not going to do it? 
• The general timing. 

The one thing I found interesting about Planview, as a company, is they don't commit to something they can't do, which can be very frustrating because that means you may never get a date. They won't tell you that this will be done by this date, unless they are sure it will be done by that date. It can be frustrating, because you are like, "Well, when?" However, they will not commit to a date unless they know it. There are pluses and minuses to that.

We had a McKinsey tool. We switched to LeanKit because the McKinsey tool was too expensive and complex.

We have definitely had good feedback that people like this tool more than the last one.

The initial setup was really easy and cheap. It was so inexpensive.

Our deployment took three months, soup to nuts. We implemented across the whole entire company in three months for our capital savings purpose, which included training. It was pretty easy to train too, because it is a simple tool.

Planview has a good iterative development process. They bring in experts. They have them sit with you, take your requirements, and set up the boards to meet those requirements. One of the things that they do better than any other supplier that I have worked with, and I have worked with a ton, is their whole process of understanding their product and giving you a person who knows their product. They don't have a ton of outside partners. When you get someone, they really know their product and can easily transfer what you are trying to do into a product configuration in a very short period of time. I have been pretty impressed.

What they do is they make you have somebody sit with their person configuring. They teach you how to fish. They don't let you get away with just letting them do it. If you don't have somebody in your organization who will sit with them and learn how to do it at the same time, it doesn't really work.

If I had to guess, people are spending 25 percent less time tracking their savings than they were before. It is simpler and easier to use, so we can get done what we need to get done with a little less administration/bureaucracy.

In general, Planview's cost structure is reasonable. You get quite a lot of functionality for the license cost that you get.

We evaluated only SharePoint a little bit. We sort of figured out in our heads that this solution was going to work. We also already owned it because we already had Planview Enterprise One. We knew that we had the licensing for LeanKit, so it became an easy decision because of their flex licensing model. Then, all of a sudden, your licensing is going to work for all these other tools.

Listen to what the technical folks at Planview are telling you. They are probably right. Don't try to do anything that the tool isn't meant to do in some way. It is definitely a SaaS and nothing that can be customized. It can be configured, but it is what it is.

We use all three of Planview products. We use LeanKit, Projectplace and Enterprise One. I was actually prepared to talk about Enterprise One, which I think has more opportunities. LeanKit is so simple and easy; it's just a simple tool. Their Enterprise One tool is a much bigger, older tool that has some more opportunities for improvement.

From a reporting perspective, we almost exclusively use its connection to Power BI. We have not exercised the standard reports within the system. However, that could be because we have a little bit of a different use case.

Just make sure you have somebody who is dedicated to learning the tool and training people, because that lessens the frustration. 

The big lesson learnt is utilize the ability to hook up to Power BI. We could just report on it so easily. 

Design the boards and cards with your endgame in mind. You need to know what you want to get out of it, so you know how to configure it.

I am going to rate the solution as a nine (out of 10), because 10 is hard. 10 is perfect.

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'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.