IBM Targetprocess vs. Pivotal Tracker

Apptio Targetprocess is well suited to track work and progress of that work. In addition it is easy to tie that work to OKRs. Cost and hours rollup across the work hierarchy works well. Our users like the flexibility of Targetprocess and the ability to develop their own views and reports Scenarios where it is less appropriate is to do executive level reporting and develop reports that can pull in all of our time data since there is a 300k record limit

Incentivized

The UI of the Pivotal tracker is really beautiful and amazing, which looks trivial, but we have it open all the time, so it's nice for us. In Pivotal tracker for me its very Easy to create tasks or stories anytime without facing any problems. Pivotal tracker provides us a ton of features to track the tasks and manage a team and the projects. Pivotal tracker allows for a entire team to be on the same page of the tool in regards to where is the project right now, right status of every task, what is being worked on and by whom.

Incentivized

• Extremely flexible: We are able to setup work for different groups in ways that work best for them.
• Fantastic support group: They are extremely knowledgeable and helpful. I enjoy working with them.
• Automation: Their automation capabilities have saved us a lot of time.
• Customizing screens: We can go into code for the different entities, move fields around or hide them, add tabs or additional sections as needed to make for a streamlined user experience.
• Reporting: Their reporting is flexible and phenomenal. There are so many different ways to pull data and the interface is easy to use.
• Their user guide is well built and extremely helpful.

Incentivized

• It's great for tracking milestones and reporting team velocity per sprint.
• Maintaining a prioritized backlog that is sharable with different members of your team is relatively simple.
• There's a free version of the product for up to 3 collaborators working on 2 projects and the starting price for larger packages is relatively low.

Incentivized

• The UI is bit complex for new users who never used it. i think this can be sorted out by providing the steps to access?
• dashboards with large datasets can cause performance lags or timeouts
• Introduce more flexible, template-based RBAC configurations.

Incentivized

• In-story task management is still a weak point. The ability to @mention users in tasks and mark tasks as 'in-progress' would go a long way.
• Epics do not span projects. This becomes troublesome when scaling Pivotal Tracker's agile methodology to multiple teams.
• Splitting stories is often confusing for team members as there is no concept of a 'parent' story with child stories that have split off of it. There are only two levels: Epic & Story.

Incentivized

Targetprocess is the most flexible application for tracking work among teams that we have found. This power comes from near limitless ability to customize your views on the work tracked in the system, and from the myriad reporting options to draw metrics and stats out of the data there. Custom fields, processes, and mashups all add to this flexibility and appeal.

Incentivized

I love the simplicity, non-configurability, and price/performance of this tool. Hands down my favorite project management tool for agile.

Incentivized

The UI is intuitive and consistent. The complexity of the app means there is a steep learning curve though, but it is well worth putting in the effort to get the most out of the tool. We have some team members who are learning new ways of doing things after 1-2 years of working in Targetprocess.

Incentivized

It works good enough. I didn't have many problems with that. The user interface is a bit confusing though. The team took some time to understand where some configurations were.

Incentivized

Some minor outages are experienced, though these tend to pass within an hour usually and work can continue

Incentivized

Reports are fast loading, considering they can refresh in a second or less and we have 7 years of work tracked in over 40k entities. Pages can load slowly when the views are very busy, but not frustratingly. I am a console user most of my career and generally prefer it over webUI interfaces, but Targetprocess won me over from the beginning and I spend half my day using it now.

Incentivized

TargetProcess' support is one of its strengths. The support team is very responsive and helpful when there is a problem but they're also proactive in providing good release notes and engaging with the community through a voting scheme to influence the priority of new features.

The team also releases new versions frequently with new features but with no knock-ons to currently working features.

Incentivized

We've never had to request support in the 5 years I have been using it. A solid solution! Everything I have had questions about is on the website. New features are in their newsletter with more details on their website. Often I am using the new features within a few minutes of reading the article.

Incentivized

You should take some time to get everyone to agree how the system should be setup before work starts being tracked in Targetprocess, this avoids difficult and disruptive changes to processes or plugins later when everyone relies on it daily.

Incentivized

I would say TargetProcess is an incredibly wonderful tool. As compare to JIRA Software, it is a fully featured product. It fulfills all my business needs. Tracking efficiency of this application is quite favorable
in order to track all the details from a certain project in just a few minutes.

Incentivized

We have had employees in the past look at Drupal, and other open source project management tools to assist in our needs. Unfortunately each solution took too much time to implement, design and configure that we could not stop the work we were doing for clients to complete a full set up of a project tracker. Thankfully Pivotal is a predefined solution with no configuration needed. Simply input your projects, design your Stories with Tasks and begin your tracking.

Incentivized

We use the hosted version of Targetprocess and have never run into limitations or degraded performance due to scalability. Excellent performance over 7 years!

Incentivized

• No direct positive business ROI has caused executive leadership to play down use of the tool
• We are hoping to use this to track progress of OKRs and business strategy, but don't have but in from executives on the value of this yet.

Incentivized

• Time is money with development and a lot of things can fall through the cracks. Having a good system for making sure you're building the most relevant product for customers is really important so it was well worth it for us.
• The process we used worked for us and it helped us streamline our development which reduced a lot of things falling through the cracks and headaches. I'm sure there are other products that can do the same job just as effectively but Pivotal Tracker worked well for us.

Incentivized