Targetprocess reviews

Powerful Software for Agile Organizations, Could Improve in Usability on Higher End Functionality

Opmerkingen: We are using Targetprocess in our daily Agile practice. Our developers and Product Owners are trained in its use, and it is a huge piece of our practice. The software is key to our Agile efforts, and is relatively easy to set-up and use. However, the buyer should be aware that unless you deploy one of the pre-built frameworks, you will be starting with a clean slate, and will have to build your own structures, and this can take a bit of thought and time. I enjoy using the software, and we intend to renew our license for the next year, and will be making efforts to expand the user base. The ability to define different workflows for different teams is very powerful, as is the Request Portal, and other more DevOps type features. Story card aging is another nice feature that we now implement through custom rules.

Pluspunten:

Excellent pricing structure, easy to set up, and implementation/training professional services are first rate. The software is powerful and can handle various different approaches to Agile/Agile Scrum, and comes with pre-built solutions for frameworks like SAFe. Our organization was up and running in little time.

Minpunten:

Some of the more powerful features, such as creation of rules could be more straightforwardly implemented. Some features have a "coding" feel to them that could improve in usability, user-friendliness. The software is sensitive to hierarchical structure of Agile entities, and you have to get this right. The ability to move/transform entities into different levels of the hierarchy could be improved, and sometimes can disconnect entities from the hierarchy, forcing the user to reconnect them manually.

Powerful agile project management tool

Opmerkingen: We started small with one client and project, then slowly added all our clients and projects. Some clients had other requirements and TP was easily able to handle what we needed as we expanded it's usage into sprint planning, daily check in, project planning, releases, automated reporting, etc. What I like best is the confidence it gives me that it will be able to grow with our needs into the future.

Pluspunten:

As our organization continues to grow and have more complex needs, Targetprocess can easily handle whatever our needs are and helps us to grow using standardized methods no matter the project. Also, we have many creative people in the tool and it's user friendly for the non-technical types too.

Minpunten:

It's great power can also be a weakness, as getting it setup and configured requires planning offline, team alignment and understanding before moving the workflow to a digital tool like Targetprocess. Having someone who understands Agile and programming is best to get this setup for you as its so customizable it can be intimidating.

My experience with Targetprocess

Opmerkingen: We are using Targetprocess mostly for Product Backlog management. It helps us to visualize backlogs of different teams inside of one product and create a "big picture". Service organisations are using Kanban practices and it perfectly solves prioritization and backlog management issues.

Pluspunten:

- Flexibility of the tool, customization options - Ability to create any kind of process workflow - Out of the box Kanban metrics - Representation of data on views and boards in any kind of form, for different stakeholders - Visual cards and thier options - Ability to automate process steps with web hooks and metrics

Minpunten:

- Timeline is not useful - Interdependencies management is poor - Reporting engine, options are limited - Customisation of entity view is not possible - Access management options is limited - Lack of capacity/resource management functionality - Lack of Portfolio management (cost management, portfolio roadmaps, strategic dashboard, what if analysis)

Excellent alternative to JIRA

Opmerkingen: We used JIRA for several years and it's good, but the lack of proper integrated hierarchy means organising 10,000+ items is just impossible. Even 3rd party plugins dont help much. The UI is slow and unattractive and after 6 months trying to get JIRA Porfolio to work (a cool idea!) I could never get it to and the response from Atlassian was disappointing overall.
The UI is much, much better in Target Process and

Pluspunten:

* Responsive UI * Adding many stories at once is easy so doesn't interrupt your flow * Incredible customer support responsiveness * Dashboards are 10x better than anything in JIRA * Reports are built in and very well designed, things you have to buy from 3rd parties in JIRA (if you even can)

Minpunten:

* Roadmapping is harder than it looks, some planning features missing means i can't throw away my gantts just yet but it's getting close * Search results have way too much white space, can be hard to find exactly what you're looking for - JIRA was better at this * Difficult to learn the filtering side of things for anything more than basic needs (but their customer support team are amazingly supportive on this, even writing a script for me immediately to address my individual need). Oh, this is meant to be the con section isn't it. ;-) * Workflows aren't quite as customisable as JIRA, such as setting triggers and custom screens

Awesome product for the right cases

Opmerkingen: TP helped us a lot to manage a complex project that had many teams working in parallel in a large product roadmap. My conclusion was that to be worth the investment the teams should take advantage of all the features and metrics that it can generate. Depending on client's project management in some cases it was not possible to use correctly sprints and generate metrics. In those cases we ended migrating to other tool (such as Trello).

Pluspunten:

Tons of good features Very flexible and powerful

Minpunten:

Expensive for companies in Brazil As we are a consulting company, there wasn't a good (and cheap) way to add clients to the projects with the ability to add comments to cards without purchasing a license. In some cases there were more than 10 people involved in the project that would have very small interactions. It would not make sense to purchase licenses for everyone.

A strong Agile and multiproject companion tool

Opmerkingen: We have introduced Targetprocess during 2017 year since we have started to really implement an Agile approach to our development process. We are also active JIRA users and from the beginning we discovered a much more clean approach with TP, and a much more powerful reporting tools.

Pluspunten:

We have found it very clean and simple in the day by day usage, it has powerful reporting functions that helps to keep track of your progression and global performance between multiple projects

Minpunten:

We are missing some functionalities, like the skills matrix tool in order to have a clear view of allocated peoples vs. skills required on a project basis. Some aspect of the UI can be improved and much polished to be more clean, but we know that its a matter of time.

Target Process is one of the strongest project management tools available

Opmerkingen: If we were going to start a business today or if I had 1-2 months for setup and on boarding, I would strongly consider Target Process to run the project management just because of the large number of options for structuring the workflow and reporting metrics. I would compare it most to Jira classic projects, but more user friendly.

Pluspunten:

At first glance, you can do anything you want with Target Process. It is geared to set up workflows and views the way you want them to perfectly fit your business structure. The more time our team spent in Target Process, the more we realized how it is extremely customizable. Of all of the Project Management tools I have viewed (which is a lot) I have never seen one that would allow you to created as many variations of a project view and related reports as Target Process.

Minpunten:

With all of the customization possible, it is very daunting to get it set up and running. The only reason we did not stick with it long-term is because we had a hard deadline to change project management software, and could not onboard everyone fast enough. Other than that, the only things "missing" are things like bulk edit or moving tasks to a different project. Very minor things.

Target process

Opmerkingen: I like that is easy to use and that you do not need to be a genius to use it

Pluspunten:

That it helps run the business better and faster and they update the software better then the other software programs

Minpunten:

I think it makes the other software programs look bad because they are not as good as the targetprocess

with Target Process for the long haul

Opmerkingen: Several of the team are remote workers, so it's great that it's cloud-hosted and accessible from anywhere. We've been able to customise it to add the fields we need, and - following a hint from customer support - we also use it to manage our retrospectives. It's also straightforward to interface from PowerShell, and we've used the API to integrate with our on-prem TFS system. The TFS side has brought challenges - but that's a topic for my TFS review! Once I encountered Target Process, it has been my Agile tool of choice, ahead of JIRA. In my first company, it was a little mysterious, and that was because we hadn't actually been properly SCRUM trained. Worse, we were trying to extract non-Agile information from it. That's not the tool's fault - but to get the best from Target Process, you do need to understand SCRUM (or Kanban, which it also supports). Once I got my SCRUM Master certification, the light bulb went on for Target Process too, and I realised the power it had.

Pluspunten:

The boards are just so intuitive - using a board to estimate user stories, for example, by dragging stories of similar complexity to the same story-point column. Being able to quickly throw together a board to view stories or tasks, on a grid with whatever-you-want as the two axes makes it really easy to understand how your work is partitioned.

Minpunten:

The licensing model makes it hard to share info with non-users. You can generate (and export) lots of reports, but I'd really like to see a read-only licence that lets occasional visitors look around.

Better than all the rest

Opmerkingen: Targetprocess re-invents the workflow board, sort of like combining Trello and full-featured issue trackers and project management systems. The way it lets you create different view to slice the data and drag&drop between grids to change properites of the cards is amazing. We can customize the app to fit our workflow in a way that is not possible with most other tools. This is much better than having to customize your workflow to fit the app.

Pluspunten:

+ Easy to use + Incredible customization available + Rich, feature-packed filtering query language

Minpunten:

What I dislike the most is that the experience isn't consistent - some data types can be created, renamed and tweaked extensively, while some others are set in stone and baked into the system. I would rather have that it was very scaled down, and that you could create your own data types for cards, instead of having a few baked-in types (Epic, Feature, UserStory, Request, Bug etc). And the cards are tied to metadata such as Release, Project, User, Role, Effort etc - these cannot be modified and you cannot use them as you will. - Cannot rename card types or create more, delete unused types etc - You have to choose between points or hours as Effort metric - but they don't work the same! Some features are not available when you choose points instead of hours. I'd rather it was only a label choosing "p" instead of "h". - Multiple stuff like the above - some stuff is build-in and cant be changed and it can be very confusing. - API is a mess. Everything can be modified in every request, instead of having separate requests for midifying different objects. For instance: you add a comment to a bug, you have to include the user (as an object, not just an id) that authored the comment. However, if you accidentally input the wrong name for the user (but the correct ID), it will actually *change the name* of that user. WTF? - Query language is very useful, but has some subtle bugs and inconsistencies.

Visual Software Management that really works

Opmerkingen: We were a MS Project Pro shop for several years in our internal IT support organization . . . and were leveraging various features of MS Project Pro in phases. While there were "good things" about the product, it just turned out to be "too cumbersome" and "time-consuming" to get data in . . . in order to get anything out in a timely fashion.
When the decision was made to find something else, we would end up selecting "Targetprocess" - a true visual software management application. There were several key things that got us excited from the start: ease-of-use, quick implementation, ability to import content from external apps, conceptual simplicity, ability to customize various types of views to support our Agile teams (Kanban and Scrum), ability to tweak workflows for various entity types (e.g. Projects, Epics, Features, User Stories, etc.)
In many ways, Targetprocess reminds me of my toy box when my brother and I were growing up. We would reach in and be surprised by the toy we would bring out to play with . . . and like our toy box, Targetprocess will surprise you in what you'll find when reaching in . . . to locate / leverage various features and functionalities that constantly surprises you.
Besides the extensive flexibility of Targetprocess, the company has developed a decent set of user guides and training videos. I would recommend viewing the training videos, first, in order to get a first-hand look-and-feel of the capabilities of the product. And realize, you are just scratching the surface, when viewing them. The videos only begin to "hint at" what you can do with this visual software management tool.
Give it a test drive today . . . as Targetprocess offers a free access license to see for yourself!

Pluspunten:

Besides the flexibility and robustness of the features and functionalities found in the product, Targetprocess has a great support group found when using their "Live Chat". Their Live Chat personnel who respond to our inquiries and issues are extremely responsive and knowledgeable. And the same can be said for their Targetprocess Support team. Many times when we have discovered an issue or had a technical question, their Support team have provide abridged videos and write-ups that demonstrate the how-to's for resolving or leveraging the functionality of the tool.

Minpunten:

What is Targetprocess' strengths is also its' weakness -- its' extensive flexibility / functionality . . . which is overcome over time by using the tool. Sometimes, you are not certain which approach to use when creating a board / view / list, or wanting to use a report, or creating a dashboard, or exporting the content out as a CSV file for Excel manipulation. But as we have worked with the tool, our various departments have developed SME's (aka Subject Matter Experts) to work with their end-users of the product. This has helped significantly for us, and we have monthly TP user community session to discuss-and-share how various groups are using the tool, and providing each other with tips-n-tricks.

Visibility and customization

Opmerkingen: We have one team with scarce number of developers but we have a lot of projects and tickets. Our main problem was filtering and prioritizing the tickets so that we don't have to go through the list of not important tickets too often. TargetProcess enables that and also provides the views to see all the tickets of many projects on one board and also enables filtering out or inactivating a project. Secondly, Kanban boards are of great importance for us. Thanks to them we can easily change a property of a ticket or relocate a user story between features. That is an irreplaceable help when you have a lot of tickets. Thirdly, we know it too well that tickets times estimates are prone to mistakes and thus team sprints time boundaries change. In TargetProcess it is very easy to edit a team sprint start and end time, no need to tediously go through all the tickets of a team sprint.

Pluspunten:

The best things in TargetProcess are visibility and customization. TargetProcess provides many examples of tickets views for planning, being up to date with daily tasks or for retrospective purposes. There are different levels to look at tickets: you can easily prioritize all the tickets on a backlog and you can plan each ticket separately. We needed customization, because our workflow is always a work in progress. TargetProcess enables customization of both: views and tickets. Besides that, the UI is very intuitive. Tickets can be written with Markdown.

Minpunten:

At first I missed retrospection views, but then reports were introduced and now you can e.g. make a chart of how many tickets were closed each month. The only thing that bothers me now is the time needed to first open the TargetProcess in a new tab in a web browser. Apart from that, I see nothing to dislike.

Absolutely essential agile tools!

Opmerkingen: TargetProcess has become an essential part of our agile development process. It's very flexible and has also proven itself valuable managing work in other areas of the business (Biz Dev, Marketing, etc...).

Pluspunten:

Their visual flexible boards allow our team to easily see views of our development progress in whatever way we need. This is one of the few products that gets prioritized backlog views right. TargetProcess has become a critical piece of our software development lifecycle.

Minpunten:

It would be nice to see entry-level pricing for small companies. For Start-ups, every little bit helps!

Very useful for IT project management

Opmerkingen: We used to receive our customer requests throught TP, then either answer them directly or create bugs, user stories, tasks, etc. accordingly. This worked well when we only had a few customers, but when we strated to really grow, it became unmanageable. We then transfered our customer support to Freshdesk and decided to keep TP for the dev team and that's just been a bliss. We now have all the bugs, new features developement, etc. entered in TP, they they are separated into release plans so I can see how and when a bug will be fixed and let the customer know.

Pluspunten:

How powerful it is. I'd say it's not the most visually appealing and user friendly software out there, but the amount of things you can do is just incredible. It's also incredibly customizable.

Minpunten:

It's not necessarily the best for custom support. I know there is a feature that lets you get requests from clients and follow up on those requests, but it's really lacking any depth in my opinion. This is really a great software for software developpers, but I wouldn't say it's ideal for the support team.

Review

Opmerkingen: Overall good experience.
Primary use is create high level Feature/Story view for client and internal project manager. Also, use the task board to go through stand up each day with teams.

Pluspunten:

1. Features & Stories list view 2. Consistency a. Done is always visible in Grey b. Green + button to add stories, tasks etc 3. Customization of boards and views 4. Reports 5. Clean UI 6. Information found in the burn down chart details 7. Timesheet view for our teams

Minpunten:

1. Sometime performance is slow 2. Wish I could add points, tasks, hours to Bugs. Workaround - we make everything a user story and put the word "BUG:" at the beginning of the story/task and set it up to automatically turn red. 3. Sometimes can get lost trying to create a report/board etc and it does not feel intuitive

Useability has improved significantly and the SAAS solution works well.

Opmerkingen: Used heavily for all projects across the organization, not just IT.

Pluspunten:

Works very well for the actual creation and collaboration work around users stories in an agile project environment. The cloud/SAAS prodcut

Minpunten:

Tracking and reporting at a project level is still very weak. The ability to easily roll things up to a project level is still very difficult and the internal reporting abilities is still lacking. Even the most basic information has to be extracted to Excel or another reporting tool. Would help to have some basic end-user reporting functionality.

Very customizable - need to learn how to use it.

Opmerkingen: I'm overall happy with TP, but I constantly need to convince people why its good or better than the alternatives.
I think it doesn't always help you create a smooth process as a team, since you can do everything.

Pluspunten:

Highly customizable - you can set up everything as you want it. There's almost nothing you can't do.

Minpunten:

It takes a while to get to learn all the capabilities of TP. I'm the company's expert and each new person who needs to learn it still takes time to learn it.

Best Scrum tool we've come across

Opmerkingen: The beauty of TargetProcess is in its flexibility. When we started using TP we tweaked it all kinds to track our workflow the way we wanted. Over time our process has moved a bit more true to "pure" scrum and many of those customizations have gone away. We still have tweaks here and there to track extra info or to track things just how we like, but in general the tool is right on the money.

Pluspunten:

The beauty of TargetProcess is in its flexibility. When we started using TP we tweaked it all kinds to track our workflow the way we wanted. Over time our process has moved a bit more true to "pure" scrum and many of those customizations have gone away. We still have tweaks here and there to track extra info or to track things just how we like, but in general the tool is right on the money.

Minpunten:

Some of the default calculations aren't what we'd prefer. For example: the sum total of points in a feature only includes stories, not bugs. We've worked around that though.

It hits the Goldilocks zone

Opmerkingen: A great fit for a small business running Agile Scrum. Setting up new users is a snap and there's almost no need to train, so we don't waste time getting people up to speed. It just fades into the background of our day-to-day work tempo.

Pluspunten:

Easy to use - 2D drag-and-drop for cards in Iteration Plan mode is intuitive and straightforward. Quick to create new cards, assign them to features & releases & sprints, etc. Plenty of ability to customize for smaller organizations, no need to slog through lots of mandatory fields, steps, etc.

Minpunten:

UI is sometimes touchy, especially on a small screen. Dragging a card to a new state, paging forward & back through iterations. I wish you could define defaults for things like the Project field when creating a new card - right now it defaults to alphabetical order.

The basis of our entire infrastructure

Opmerkingen: It's a blank canvas at first, with a few processes and workflows ready to go. It took a dude at our company really considering our own process and customizing the workflow to fit that, and we were off and rolling. Swimlanes with the ability to drag items in and out, up and down. Tasks on stories with their own swimlanes. Communication and notification options that are easy to contol. TP is the hub of everything. You want it done? Create a request. That's the way we do business and work, thanks to TargetProcess. Bear in mind, it doesn't just happen automatically--you need an organizationally-minded individual or two to get the vision, learn the platform, and make it happen, but we've made this the hub of every operation at our company.

Pluspunten:

Extreme flexibility, with a solution for every workflow in a software development environment

Minpunten:

Tough to set up initially, without a sharp couple of folks to own it, learn it, and get it going in the org.

Amazing tracking tool for bigger projects

Pluspunten:

This tool is by far one of the kind and you can keep all your project documentation: starting from requirements to the qa test run results and metrics.

Minpunten:

It can be a little bit complicated to work with it at first, but then you'll get a hang of it

Great piece of software

Opmerkingen: We tested a number of different project management systems (Trello, Basecamp, Jira software among others) before finally finding Target Process. Target Process had all of the features and the flexability we missed in the others. Its really simple to use for i.e. the developers who needs to focus on other things, and the PM can go as deep into the details as wanted. The only pms that has not had any complaints from any role (other systems have been great for ie the project manager and not the developer and vice versa). We have been using it for almost a year and we have never looked back. Really recommend it.

Pluspunten:

Simple to use, logical, easy to get a quick overview or to drill down in to the details. Its really flexibel - lots of pre-defined templates to start from (Scrum, Kanban, Test etc) but you can set it up exactly how you what to suit your needs. Also great support if you need help.

Minpunten:

Miss a connection to dropbox and the UI could be better (one pm had an issue using it because it didn't look cool - true story). Also in "in-system communication" system is not as good as i.e. Trello, especially with the app. (But we use a web-hook to connect it to Slack which is really cool :-) )

Powerful and ease of use together

Opmerkingen: Targetprocess helps everyday all of our developer teams, scrum masters, product owners and stakeholders to organize the refinment, planning and daily track of all of their work with a ease of use and a nice and usable interface.

Pluspunten:

Ease of use when you want to create a new board, also the boards configuration is very powerful, with lots of possibilites of filtering and visualization tips. Despite this, if you have any doubt or question you can contact with their support team by on-line chat, every time I contacted they have solved my doubts.

Minpunten:

Lack of information and/or manuals about DSL language to edit or build new reports. In our case the notification system don't work properly and seems to send messages to people who do not have to receive them.

My Targetprocess

Opmerkingen: A bit of a threshold to get over in the start (hence only three stars for "Ease of Use"), but once that threshold is passed it is a really helpful and efficient tool. Very versatile and adaptable, which makes it easy to fit to your own business needs.
The SW has been a lifesaver when it comes to planning our internal and external releases. I've haven't been in contact with Customer Support, nor do I have any idea of the price for the system - therefore I cannot really answer the last two points...

Pluspunten:

Nice interface in general, easy to use. Intuitive way of assigning work for certain releases.

Minpunten:

Filter functionality is good, but a bit "messy" and not very user-friendly. There is no really good way (that I have found) to highlight milestones and User Stories/Features/Epics in the time plan.

A useful tool with excellent customer support

Opmerkingen: We collect feedback (Suggestions, problems and desires) from all of our employees in all departments. In the past, many topics have perished due to the mass of feedback. It was also not always clear on what issues should now be working.
Now our meetings are very structured due TargetProcess and the staff know what they are supposed to work and work much faster.

Pluspunten:

The best thing is that I can develop my own processes in the tool. I can translate the needs and requirements of my clients exactly. Thus, I can build a IT supporting project management adapted to the company. Sometimes I do not get ahead when programming my user-specific requirements. But the customer support is really fantastic. There is a contact person of TargetProcess has contacted me. This person has processed my problems always directly. Either he can solve the problem directly or he has informed the competent developers about it and the challenge was eliminated in the shortest possible time.

Minpunten:

I find it a pity that the tool is not yet available in German. I personally have no problem with it, but many executive employees who do not speak English are working with this tool. This has already cost some nerves among employees. But it is positive that the employees also learn a bit of English.