Planview AgilePlace vs. Projector PSA

AgilePlace is a great way for teams, or individuals, to bring visibility to the work in process and in their backlog. The color coding and icon use helps to quickly analyze the type of work or status of the work. The product team is doing a good job at listening to their user's feedback and implementing improvements. Where it falls short is when reporting needs to occur.

We think Projector PSA is a great tool to track and manage people in a professional service environment like management consulting. This system is easy to set up, easy to understand and should easily suit the needs of smaller and medium sized firms. It may be less appropriate for firms that rely very heavily on project management through another system (like MS Project) or firms that rely very heavily on a sales pipeline tracking system. While still very much possible to use, you would (I believe) have to do some re-keying between systems

• Okta Integration: We love using SSO for all our SaaS apps, and as new team members join, they can be automatically joined to the appropriate LeanKit boards.
• Filtering and viewing: Can filter and refine by several fields as well as custom fields. Assigned Users, Tagged, Card Type, Date, etc
• Their analytics and reporting can be helpful for PMs, especially if they have several teams they oversee.

Incentivized

• Time tracking. For a service company that typically bills retainers, it is very important to be able to assign a direct cost to your resources at all levels and analyze your profitability.
• Expense reporting. Projector easily tracks expenses of all types and allows you to categorize them under non-billable projects, client billable projects and/or client development ventures.
• Reporting. Projector has a large list of standard reports right at your fingertips. These reports can be extracted as Excel docs, mdp files and other useful formats. They are intuitive, clear and easy to analyze. For those you need on a standard basis, you can set them up to pull on a recurring basis. It should be noted that all reports are easily customized and Projector's support team is always there to help get you the information you need.

Incentivized

• The formatting of what they call "cards" could be better. They can be clunky if you have a lot of text in just one.
• Needs better support for media, attachments.
• Not the most pretty interface in my opinion, though it works.

Incentivized

• The split between the desktop and web environments was awkward at times.
• While the reporting modules are powerful, creating reports can be complex and required a fairly deep knowledge of the product.
• The appearance and interface of the desktop application appears somewhat dated.

we are happy with the tool and the service and continuos improvement of the tool so there is no need yet to change to another one.

We have been using this tool for a year now and find our use of it continually evolves and broadens. We are also very excited about the overhaul that's under way and feel many of the improvements being put in place will help make us that much more effective and efficient. The Projector team is also very responsive and collaborative in terms of user feedback and improvement suggestions, which helps us know they will work hard to help us get what we need out of the tool.

LeanKit isn't the best designed Kanban system I've seen, but overall it's pretty usable. The boards I've used are pretty complex, so it can be difficult to find things. I found that searching and filtering for specific cards was somewhat of a challenge. Dragging a card from one lane to another is kind of a fun way to get things done though.

Incentivized

Desktop interface feels complex to new users.

Not experienced any outage

Incentivized

In 5 years of use we have never experienced an unscheduled outage.

Larger boards take longer to load

Incentivized

Every time I have reached out to the AgilePlace support team I have received a timely response in addition to professional & personal feedback. Their consultants are knowledgeable and the management team is happy to jump in and help when needed.

Very easy.

Incentivized

Originally, we had evaluated two other tools next to Planview LeanKit: Kanbantool and Kanbanflow. The latter was a close contestant for productive use, as it was also very customizable and a joy to work with and look at. It also had lower user fees and a mobile integration. In the end, we picked Planview LeanKit because of several reasons: Aesthetics: The look was much more clean and professional. Reporting: It was obvious from the start that we could use Planview LeanKit as a tool for improvement. API: We needed to integrate the Kanban into our central systems and Planview LeanKit API was (and still is) a way to do it. Card Headers: This sounds like a simple thing, but the headers above the titles fit our work perfectly and looked perfect, which helped the decision.

Incentivized

We switched to Projector from Open Air. While Open Air was a good tool, we found it wasn't really designed for project management at the level of detail we needed from our PSA and used MS Project and Excel to supplement Open Air. We also struggled with the invoicing side of it, manually combining invoice summaries with custom time and expense reports in Acrobat. Projector however, was designed for project management. We are able to manage projects, track time and expenses, and invoice all out of one system. The project setup can accommodate a wide range of complexity, including milestones, dependencies, etc. Project and resource dashboards also help see the services portfolio and team at a summary level and allows us to zero in on particulars easily and more meaningfully than we were ever able to with Open Air. Invoice templates are also easily customized and we were able to get several set up quickly to meet our needs. Lastly, Open Air required us to purchase and pre-pay licensing for a year, so if we lost staff mid-way through the year, the unused seat was not prorated. Projector licensing is paid monthly based on actual number of active users that month, which makes more sense for a team with fluctuating headcount.

Good use cases for small/large teams

Incentivized

• Our team meetings are more direct and quick to get through thanks to the better visibility of the workload
• Easily being able to move cards between team lanes gives instant visibility to where the responsibility for the next step is needed.

• Even in the small time that I stayed to see Projector PSA reporting I saw ROI projections become more realistic. There was real data to analyze that proved we were spending way too much and charging way too less on some projects.
• Although employees were not used at entering their hours, this single reporting improved operations management and validated employees concerns that more people were needed to manage workload
• Project proposals were more realistic because they were driven by real data.
• Decision making overall for the department became more efficient and effective

Incentivized