DevOps

The Top 10 Enterprise Agile Planning Solutions

Discover the Top Enterprise Agile Planning Solutions designed to streamline and optimize software development processes. Explore features such as collaborative project management, sprint planning, and analytics tools.

The Top 10 Enterprise Agile Planning Solutions include:
  • 1. Asana
  • 2. Atlassian Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP) 
  • 3. Broadcom Rally Software
  • 4. Digital.ai Agility
  • 5. GitLab
  • 6. IBM Apptio Targetprocess
  • 7. Microsoft Azure Boards
  • 8. OpenText ValueEdge Agile
  • 9. Planview
  • 10. ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management

Enterprise agile planning solutions enable organizations to implement agile practices and processes on a broader scale. Since the release of the Agile Manifesto in 2001, many software development teams have adopted frameworks like Scrum and Kanban to help them carry out software development projects using more iterative and collaborative approaches. However, teams following these frameworks are often faced with challenges when scaling up or coordinating multiple teams engaged in interconnected projects. This is where the utility of enterprise agile planning tools becomes apparent. That’s where enterprise agile planning software comes in. 

Enterprise agile planning solutions serve as a centralized hub that empowers development organizations to define, plan, and manage projects seamlessly. By facilitating the adoption of customer-centric and outcome-driven practices at an enterprise level, they also make it easier to adhere to Agile methodologies such as LeSS, Disciplined Agile, and SAFe. 

In this article, we’ll explore the top enterprise agile planning solutions designed to help you streamline workflows, enhance collaboration, and pivot swiftly in response to changing market dynamics. We’ll highlight the key use cases and features of each solution, including project management, roadmap planning, backlog management, progress tracking, and analytics. 

Asana Logo

Asana is a comprehensive platform designed to streamline project management processes and enhance productivity across large organizations. The platform combines strategy planning and execution tools, helping teams to develop efficient workflows, while maintaining confidentiality with its strong setup for security, privacy, and compliance.

One of Asana’s key features is its visual workflow builder. This tool enables teams to organize tasks, ensuring that nothing gets missed and that each project is systematically tracked from conception to completion. It also ensures that all teams schedules are synchronized, making it easier for them to optimize workflows based on how historical projects were run. Asana also allows teams to create and track company-wide objectives that instantly reflect team progression. This enables them to identify potential issues early on, when they’re quicker, easier, and less costly to fix.

In addition to its core project management capabilities, Asana offers in-built security measures and admin controls for reliable large-scale deployments. It also adheres strictly to global laws and standards relating to privacy and security. Finally, Asana integrates seamlessly with numerous other applications, making it easier for organizations to define and monitor tasks across multiple teams, while reducing the need to switch between apps.

Asana Logo
Atlassian Logo

Atlassian Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP) is a comprehensive data and agile planning solution that enables enterprises to gain visibility and improve alignment throughout the software development lifecycle. The Atlassian EAP package comprises three main tools. Jira Align is Atlassian’s flagship EAP tool that provides executive-level reporting and enables leaders to manage, track, and report on all work. Jira Enterprise enables delivery and business teams to work using their familiar tools and automatically tracks their work in line with strategic objectives. Enterprise Insights for Jira Align combines data from Jira Align and third-party tools to provide executive-level dashboards on efficiency and value delivered.

Atlassian EAP offers transparency on investments, timelines, obstacles, and operational efficiency. By improving workflow visibility, it removes hidden dependencies and realigning teams’ focus on planning, prioritization, and roadmapping. This helps improve time to market. Additionally, by analyzing data from diverse sources, Atlassian EAP deletes data silos that may affect strategic business decisions and stakeholder communications.

In addition to ensuring all work aligns to the corporate strategy and providing visibility at every level, Atlassian EAP enables teams to keep working in their chosen tools, helping improve productivity. Overall, we recommend Atlassian EAP for development organizations that want to improve efficiency, optimize workflows, and ensure timely delivery in line with strategic goals.

Atlassian Logo
Broadcom Logo

Broadcom’s Rally Software is an enterprise agile planning tool that provides a single source of truth when it comes to project management, equipping teams with the data and leadership they need to adapt to changing markets.

Rally Software utilizes an outcome-oriented approach to manage development work, this enables organizations to effectively connect everyday tasks with meaningful business outcomes. The software serves as a single platform for teams to plan, prioritize, and track work on a synchronized basis. To achieve this, it visualizes work in the form of lists, boards, or timeline views, enabling users to understand how their day-to-day tasks align with broader business goals. Rally Software also measures flow for continuous improvement, providing agile metrics that allow the tracking of the team’s efficiency and predictability. Teams can use these metrics to reduce waste and achieve smooth flow, thereby increasing delivered value. The software also helps organizations understand their capacity based on forecast metrics that balance risk and predictability. Additionally, Rally Software offers a feature called Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), which is a goal-setting framework that aligns the organization and teams toward the same milestones.

Rally Software allows the creation of custom dashboards for tracking essential metrics. Through these detailed reports, it offers a comprehensive roll-up of progress, dependencies, alignment, and plan health, as well as providing visibility into potential bottlenecks. Overall, we recommend Broadcom’s Rally Software as a strong enterprise agile planning solution for organizations looking to optimize their workflows and ensure that all teams are working in alignment with the company’s strategic vision.

Broadcom Logo
Digital.ai Logo

Digital.ai Agility is an enterprise agile planning solution that enables agile scalability across all organizational levels, helping businesses to deliver projects more quickly and efficiently.

Digital.ai Agility allows businesses to stay on top of emerging customer trends, while maximizing input across various areas, including portfolio, program development, and delivery. Businesses can integrate agile practices according to their unique portfolio management strategies (such as SAFe), while allowing team-level agile autonomy with support for frameworks like Scrum or Kanban. Digital.ai Agility also aligns business objectives with technical execution, helps adapt to customer trends, and offers whiteboard-based collaboration for program increment planning. The platform also facilitates end-user collaboration, with real-time requirements capture and prioritization of ideas and features.

Finally, Digital.ai Agility helps ensure predictability and reduce risk by continuously tracking features, epics, and stories, from planning to deployment. By uniting Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) data, businesses can identify risk areas, balance capacity, and predict software delivery. This offers a way to gain deeper insights into sprints, and resource management, which helps businesses to consistently meet their commitments to stakeholders.

Digital.ai Logo
GitLab Logo

GitLab is a unified DevSecOps platform powered by artificial intelligence. The platform optimizes the entire software development process from building, testing, and securing, to deploying code. With the aim of facilitating collaboration between technical and non-technical team members, GitLab features an Enterprise Agile Planning add-on for GitLab Ultimate users.

The Enterprise Agile Planning add-on includes planning workflows, value stream analytics to measure software delivery impact, and executive dashboards for improved organization-wide visibility. As part of GitLab’s wider unified platform, it provides a comprehensive view of project status, which is useful in tracking progress and making informed decisions. In addition to its planning capabilities, GitLab emphasizes compliance by integrating automated checks and enforcement into software development. This integration of approval rules, compliance pipelines, and deployment approvals makes the compliance process more efficient, transparent, and less prone to errors.

GitLab’s Enterprise Agile Planning add-on helps improve cross-team collaboration between developers and non-technical team members without the organizations having to purchase full GitLab licenses for non-technical users; they simply purchase additional Agile Planning seats. Overall, we recommend GitLab as a robust DevSecOps solution with strong enterprise agile planning capabilities for organizations that want to bring non-technical team members into the software development process.

GitLab Logo
Apptio Logo

IBM Apptio Targetprocess is an enterprise-grade agile planning solution that’s delivered as-a-Service. The platform provides extensive visibility into operations, helping to align teams with strategic objectives and promote business agility. It does this by removing operational blind spots and providing an all-encompassing view of work, resource assignments, and budgets.

IBM Apptio Targetprocess has a flexible architecture that allows it to adapt to your operating model, rather than requiring your model to adapt to it. The software comes with pre-configured reports and dashboards to guarantee a fast implementation and speed up the time to value. One of IBM Apptio Targetprocess’s key features is that it pairs financial management with agile product delivery. The platform’s integrated portfolio transforms the role of CFOs and Financial Planners from spending monitors to investment advisory figures within product teams and business planning. This results in a more holistic financial approach to agile transformation and enables businesses to pivot quickly in response to change.

Overall, we recommend IBM Apptio Targetprocess as a flexible, customizable agile planning solution for organizations that need more support in deciding which projects to invest in, and where to allocate their spending.

Apptio Logo
Microsoft Logo

Microsoft Azure Boards is a productivity and project management tool that helps your team track work through Kanban boards, backlogs, team dashboards, and custom reporting features. It allows for easy sprint planning and work item tracking, providing a comprehensive and traceable platform for projects of all sizes.

Microsoft Azure Boards provides a holistic view of your project’s development state, from ideation to release. It ensures alignment within your team by linking all code changes directly to work items. As a Scrum-ready tool, it offers in-built Scrum boards and planning tools to facilitate sprints, stand-ups, and planning meetings. One of Microsoft Azure Boards’ key functionalities is its robust analytics and dashboard widgets, which provide insights into the health and status of your project. The dashboards are customizable, allowing you to craft tailored views of your data and monitor progress throughout your project’s lifecycle.

Microsoft Azure Boards values adaptability, providing out-of-the-box workflows that can be customized to fit your team’s needs. It also integrates with popular communication tools, including Microsoft Teams and Slack, to boost your team’s productivity. For teams currently using GitHub, Azure Boards also offers an integration feature to link commits and PRs to work items, helping teams keep track of even the most complex projects.

Microsoft Logo
Opentext Logo

OpenText ValueEdge is a comprehensive DevOps and value stream management solution designed for IT and software development organizations. This cloud-based, AI-driven platform enables organizations to track and manage value delivery throughout digital product lifecycles. Within the platform, the ValueEdge Agile module helps agile and DevOps teams to handle work tasks, identify defects, manage backlogs and operational pipelines, and track sprints. It promotes efficient delivery with industry-standard frameworks and helps achieve full traceability across diverse, decentralized teams.

The ValueEdge platform lets users optimize and manage value streams for ideal software delivery from a single, user-friendly interface. It’s designed to highlight areas of wastage and adapt to changes without impeding delivery progression. ValueEdge supports many Agile frameworks and methodologies, including Scrum and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), integrating agile capabilities with pre-existing tools and products.

By offering real-time result visualization and data manipulation capabilities, ValueEdge enables teams to make better-informed strategic decisions. ValueEdge also offers a broad spectrum of testing capabilities, including model-based testing, access to physical mobile devices and emulators, and test run optimization.

The cloud-based design of ValueEdge offers flexibility, security, rapid deployment, and scalability, addressing the needs of the most demanding software teams. With over 100 purpose-built application integrations, it is suited to work seamlessly with an organization’s existing open-source or commercial software development toolchains. Because of this, we recommend ValueEdge as a reliable player in the enterprise agile planning space.

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Planview Logo

Planview is an enterprise agile planning solution designed to help organizations improve time-to-market, optimize team productivity, and align investments with strategic priorities. This comprehensive platform helps improve delivery speed and predictability, create a collaborative environment, streamline workflows, and simplify the planning and funding process.

Planview’s dynamic capabilities enable organizations to shift funding models from projects to persistent products or value streams, and implement lean budgeting, scenario planning, and capacity planning. The platform promotes strategic alignment through objectives and key results, interactive roadmaps, lean business cases, digital product insights dashboard, backlog management, and card scoring. It also promotes team delivery through features like real-time virtual whiteboard experience, planning series, and work in progress (WIP) limits. Planview also prioritizes financial management with tools to keep track of portfolio costs, benefits, and budget. It aids in forecasting future financial requirements, provides automatic calculation of financial metrics like ROI, and supports agile costing and capitalization.

In addition to its collaboration and planning capabilities, Planview is equipped with robust portfolio dashboards with lean and agile metrics for performance analytics. It ensures its users can structure and monitor objectives to achieve desired outcomes at every level. This results in a robust connection between strategic planning, resource allocation, and delivery.

Planview Logo
ServiceNow Logo

ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management, previously known as ITBM, is a cloud-based platform that enables businesses to align their work management with their business strategies. It helps to speed up value delivery across the organization and ensure projects are delivered in line with overall business objectives.

The ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management platform substitutes data silos with a unified platform that unifies data and workflows to provide holistic visibility across the enterprise. This facilitates faster decision-making and goal realization. ServiceNow applies intelligent automation to this unified data source, using machine learning and AI to enhance and streamline workflows. The platform also offers strategic planning, demand management, project portfolio management, and scenario planning tools. It also offers an intelligent chatbot, which helps streamline issue resolution by resolving common issues and answering queries instantly.

On top of its portfolio management capabilities, ServiceNow emphasizes data security and regulatory compliance to help keep sensitive business data safe. It offers resources to help fortify security postures within an organization and tools and processes rooted within the platform designed for improved data safety.

ServiceNow Logo
The Top 10 Enterprise Agile Planning Solutions