Agile Hive - SAFe in Jira vs. Pivotal Tracker

Daily activity management by using various kind of boards is very helpful to start the day with. Also, Backlog management is very good so it helps to keep track on the prioritized items. This can be used for all kind of Scrum activities by the Scrum master even for the Story management too. Also, it provides the required hierarchy levels, artifacts, boards, and workflows as an application in Jira. There is nothing to be shared as less appropriate while using SAFe.

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

• Team's progress.
• Risk Management.
• Visual representations - Dashboards.

Incentivized

• Pivotal Tracker helps our team visualize our projects in the form of stories (virtual cards) moving through our workflow. This encourages us to break down projects into manageable chunks and have important conversations about deliverables and scope.
• The forced-prioritization allows our team to have a shared understanding about what is most important and make collective decisions about what our team will work on next.
• By dividing future iterations by our team's velocity, Pivotal Tracker accurately predicts when we will complete future work.

Incentivized

• it is not possible to plan if teams have different sprint length
• zoom into one sprint and then also zoom out to have big picture
• names of user stories are not good to read because of static big picture

Incentivized

• Used to have a newsfeed-type feature with all the updates from the previous day. They removed it. I liked getting a snapchat of what changed from before.
• When signing up for email alerts, can be inundated with emails for every change to the status of a story.
• Communication on stories through the comment section can be a little difficult, and not very organized.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

It has in general a good usability, but there are some downsides, the big picture view of the entire product increment is too static, so there is no zoom in or zoom out. Mostly throughout planning it is necessary to zoom in to a sprint level and manage the user stories there. Also, the pig picture view has some limitations, because you cannot read the entire user story name (boxes are too small).

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

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

With Jira Software alone it is also possible to plan a SAFe product increment planning, but it would be nearly impossible to see the overall big picture of all product teams involved in a release train. So, the planning on sprint level for one team would be more efficient, but the planning for a whole quarter with all dependencies across teams would be not feasible to present. Therefore, Agile SAFe enables value trains an efficient way to plan a product increment.

Incentivized

Pivotal Tracker, Asana and Trello all have free versions making them ideal for smaller companies to try out. All of them blast Kannan boards and issue tracking capabilities. While Trello and Asana are great products in themselves, Pivotal Tracker edges them out with its wealth of features including trackability of epics, burndowns, better reporting, and analytics. JIRA, on the other hand, is way more customizable, has more reporting capabilities and more features than Pivotal Tracker but is more expensive too. At the end of the day, it comes down to what you're looking for in an agile project management tool as well as how much you're willing to pay for it.

Incentivized

• More transparency.
• Better product decisions.
• Saving time and resources.
• Less critical dependencies.

• Pivotal Tracker has been a cost-effective solution for what we need. It has allowed our ROI to be greater than if we went with another system.
• Learning curve; with this easy to use tool, it has been a shorter learning curve for new hires to find what they need to accomplish their task.
• Flexibility; we are right now stuck at 4 levels of classification; project; Story, Task, Comments. If we were able to expand on this, we would be able to role this out faster to other departments within our business.

Incentivized