Aha! Roadmaps vs. Planview IdeaPlace

• Aha! is the all around product management tool. You need something once you build out a product management role and grow beyond a small scrum team with one or two products. JIRA, Pivotal, and project management tools don't cut it for aligning [engineering] with product initiatives once the backlog starts to scale.
• On the other hand, there are several unfinished features that my peers all admit to having to work around: Capacity Planning, Salesforce Integration, Roadmap Display Flexibility, User Feedback, etc. This year has been all about reporting in terms of feature releases. As Aha! grows, they will fill in these other areas, so stay tuned.

If you have a community with more than 100 active users, and you're looking for ideas around operational improvements that can be acted on in a 6-12 month window, Spigit will work great, and it's one of the best options out there. If you're trying to customize the platform much, you should plan on paying Spigit's service group to do that for you, because it's not easy to do yourself. If you're looking for ideas that will take more than about a year to implement, Spigit is as good as anyone else because that's a really tough thing to do in an innovation community!

Incentivized

• Work breakdown - it allows teams to do initiatives, capabilities features and stories all in the same product release.
• Roadmapping - allows for simple combined visual plan of work breakdown across multiple initiatives.
• Customization - allows different levels of work breakdowns to be available on different projects.
• Integration with Rally and other tools.

Incentivized

• Acknowledges and supports the culture around the problem and market it is trying to serve. Just using the platform won't solve our problem, we need a cultural shift and Spigit has helped support that process.
• Customer service - just overall amazing service. Responses are very quickly turned around, they've gone the extra mile many, many times. They are also very open to platform improvements and take feedback very seriously.
• As the system administrator, I feel their platform incorporates a great balance of templates, out-of-the-box formatting, etc., and customizable content. In a nutshell, we are able to do what we want but we don't have to spend forever to do it. We can use what they have or we can add in our own design.

• Notes - There's not a great place to leave lots of notes or instructions, almost like a Confluence page. Although not required, it would be nice to have this built in.
• Learning curve - As with most new tools, there's a bit of a learning curve to become proficient.

Incentivized

• Versioning of ideas.
• "Building block" comments, highlighted and embedded in the original idea by moderators and authors.
• Italian version.
• Can be improved in the implementation funnel of ideas.
• Interfacing with other platforms e.g. management platforms, gamification platforms, LMS platforms.
• Poor gamification.

Incentivized

If you have the time and resources there really isn't anything you can't get Aha! to do for you in regards to managing workflow and releases. The Prioritization features are top of its class, the dashboards are getting better and better every day and the team all seem to really enjoy using it to manage their workloads.

Incentivized

This rating was given because, Planview is an establish platform used within the organisation for number of years, therefore is a well known platform by the wider business community. Reusing Planview was ease due to user familiarity with the platform, so use of Planview IdeaPlace was logical and reduce the learning curve for users.

Incentivized

When we signed up for Aha!, we were assigned an Aha! team members to help us with training/questions. The meeting was set weekly, and it exponentially helped with our familiarity with Aha! Support is beneficial and has a lot of experience working with product teams.

Incentivized

productboard was used in the organization when I arrived, but after assessing productboard, I felt it was too lightweight for our ambitious product goals. It's also critical, especially in a startup, that we focus our limited capacity on the work that matters most. Aha! far and away had superior capabilities in defining strategy directly in the product and associating all of our work to the strategy. Aha! is a serious product management tool and I found productboard to be more of a simple backlog management tool.

Incentivized

Planview IdeaPlace (IP) stacked up very well against our old product, for example Planview IdeaPlace features and integrations with Microsoft O365 products was major attraction. Our leadership also has a simplification agenda, so the reuse of Planview IdeaPlace for this capability, tick all the right boxes and help use achieved a key CIO objective.

Incentivized

• It has been able to deliver a good overall view of all the items we have going on in ADO.
• We are in the process of transforming from waterfall to agile development and to be able to see an overall picture of the work items is invaluable.

Incentivized

• I've seen ideas that could have come through existing channels but may have faced layers of barriers before getting to the right decision makers bypass all of that bureaucracy and get the level of support needed to proceed. In one case, the value of just one of those ideas created a 27x ROI over the annual expense of running the software and the supporting team. In other words, that one idea justifies the existence of the program for 2 1/2 more decades if there are no other wins.
• Because the program can literally engage every employee, it tends to be the most visible and tangible innovation asset for the masses. Along side (and connected with) other innovation capabilities like internal incubators, R&D labs, design teams, lean programs, etc., it tends to be the tool that delivers on a strategy of total employee engagement for enterprise wide innovation. Employee perception of innovation has improved significantly since the inception of this program.
• The software can be used in other ways beyond innovation ideation to drive corporate values, employee engagement, and employee feedback and insights. In nearly every deployment where I have been involved, we have found ways beyond ideation to engage crowds to generate other value for the business. In each case, this was engagement that could not have been delivered in any other way except for a crowd-sourcing technology like Spigit.