Enterprise Agile Planning Tools, EAP (Global Market)

In recent years, a growing number of companies have used Agile to manage development. As the State of Agile 2021 report prepared by Digital.ai showed, in 2021 there was [1] an explosive increase in the implementation of this methodology from 37% in 2020 to 86% in 2021, and in IT - from 26% to 60%, respectively. As Gartner experts noted: "The pandemic required companies to quickly introduce new processes, practices and technologies to support changes in the way products and services are delivered."

The full Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Agile Planning Tools report is available on the Gartner website. Below we offer his brief overview, prepared by Web Control experts in November 2021.

Preparation for a successful Agile transformation begins with the selection of solutions that meet the company's goals. Many well-established development tools support tracking the work of individual Agile teams. However, with the growth of the project and the increase in the number of teams, the difficulty of synchronizing development goals and processes increases, there is a mismatch in the work of the teams. To support large-scale software development, Enterprise Agile Planning class tools are used that allow you to consistently manage a variety of Agile information and processes at the company level, and the related Value Stream Management class.

To help companies navigate this market, Gartner experts prepared the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Agile Planning Tools 2021 report, which analyzed 16 vendors in this market.

Gartner Uses clear criteria to select vendors. To get into the report, vendors had to demonstrate the presence of large customers (500 + licenses) and at least 10 thousand paid users of the solution, the provision of service and training, direct presence in, countries Europe,, and of the Middle East Africa, Northern South America as well as the Asia-Pacific region and compliance with rather stringent functional requirements. As the State of Agile 2021 report showed, SAFe is the main framework for scaled-up Agile, Gartner analysts also recognized the dominance of this framework, including SAFe support in the Portfolio configuration among the mandatory requirements for vendors.

Gartner defines EAP tools as solutions that enable organizations to scale their Agile practices to provide a holistic view of enterprise development. These tools serve as a single center for defining, planning and managing work, providing the following basic metrics:

• metrics of consumer value of the product - metrics of consumer satisfaction and delivery of business results;
• speed metrics - velocity metrics of Scrum commands, lead time and cycle time for Kanban commands;
• organizational metrics - metrics for control of dependencies between commands;
• quality metrics - test coverage metrics and error detection counters during the pre-test phase (defect escape).

As Agile considers the development of development methodologies, EAP tools are an evolution of project management tools and solutions of the Application Development Life Cycle Management (ADLM) class in order to support large-scale development with a focus on business results.

Corporate Agile is a steadily growing and widespread approach today. The drivers for implementing EAP solutions in companies are the need to coordinate the work of numerous Agile teams and get a general picture of the development situation. ON To this end, the products of leading vendors have the following capabilities:

• Regularly track the development of new functionality in relation to specific business results;
• Support for corporate Agile frameworks such as the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
• building product roadmaps;
• transparency of the work flow;
• management of backlogs;
• organization of joint work;
• Manage dependencies between commands
• Planning and forecasting releases;
• provision of data on financial aspects of performed works.

Some vendors offer unique functionality - support for the processes of fulfilling the requirements of regulators, for example, analysis and management of requirements, support for the development of cyber-physical systems.

As last year, the leaders included Atlassian, Broadcom, Digital.ai (CollabNet VersionOne in last year's report), Plainveiw, Targetprocess, to which ServiceNow (Challenger last year) and Gitlab (Visionaries group in the magic quadrant 2020) were added.

Atlassian, well known for its Jira solution for managing development at the level of individual agile teams, in 2019 acquired the finished AgileCraft product, called Jira Align. Jira Align is a fully functional solution with built-in support for corporate Agile frameworks. In October 2020, Atlassian announced the transition of its Jira Software tools to cloud technologies or data centers, which may not be acceptable to everyone. Gartner analysts warn that the Jira Align interface is complex, and new users require mandatory paid training and configuration service.

Broadcom was widely known as a hardware supplier, with the acquisition of Symantec and CA Technologies, the company began to rapidly strengthen its position in the software market. Broadcom offers 2 EAP solutions: Rally and Clarity, aimed at supporting agile at the company level (Rally) and managing and planning the portfolio (Clarity). These two solutions provide the full functionality of Enterprise Agile Planning and even more, from Lean portfolio management to team Agile and DevOps. Gartner analysts warn that Broadcom solutions are focused on large companies and require resources to configure them. Vendor offers a free launch version of Broadcom Rally, supporting up to 50 users, which may be interesting to get acquainted with solutions of this class.

Digital.ai was formed as a result of the merger of 5 market leaders in its field CollabNet VersionOne, XebiaLabs, Experitest, Numerify and Arxan Technologies. As a result, a company has appeared that offers a single platform solution for end-to-end development management, which fully supports the frameworks of scaled Agile, such as SAFe, LeSS and DAD. Among the advantages of Digital.ai, experts emphasize the built-in integration with many tools DevOps and the outstanding opportunities to draw up a product roadmap, track programs and portfolio, as well as visions of the flow of value creation. Analysts warn that the powerful functionality of the solution requires significant efforts when implementing and configuring, but its platform nature allows you to implement only the functionality that the company needs at this stage, and this makes it possible to significantly save resources.

In 2020, Gartner praised the decision of the Belarusian company Targetprocess, recognizing it as the leader of the magic quadrant EAP 2020, which attracted the attention of international investors, and in February 2021 it was acquired by the American company Apptio.

In this year's report, experts from the analytical agency highlighted the capabilities of Targetprocess in building product roadmaps, OKR support, integrated integration with other tools and platforms, support for SAFe, Scrum of Scrums, Disciplined Agile, LeSS, Nexus, Spotify and hybrid scaling frameworks. Targetprocess is losing to the rest of the report leaders in predicting releases and epics, and this brand is not yet very widely known internationally.

ServiceNow is known primarily for its solution for managing IT processes. The IT Business Management (ITBM) solution is based on the Now Platform platform, which is a great advantage for current ServiceNow users, but can be an occasion for reflection for companies that have invested in other tools and platforms. According to Gartner, ITBM provides a wide range of functionality, including idea management, road maps, project and program portfolio management, as well as a complete picture of the flow of value creation, but Scrum, Kanban and forecasting support is at the middle level. In addition, a number of users noted difficulties with the initial configuration of the solution, understanding the interface and using the solution.

Planview leads the EAP market with two products: Planview Enterprise One and Planview LeanKit. Gartner experts consider the advantages of a comprehensive solution to be good planning capabilities at the program and portfolio level and SAFe support, it is noted that this vendor is suitable for companies with different levels of agile competence. It should be borne in mind that Planview diversifies its product portfolio through mergers and acquisitions; potential buyers should evaluate their software landscape to ensure that there is no duplication and redundancy in Planview implementation.

The solution GitLab developed with the participation of the community of users and developers. GitLab offers good support for product portfolio management organizations. The company demonstrates a good understanding of the market and invests in its platform approach to combine several tools into a value stream. Gartner warns that SAFe support in this vendor's solution is very limited. In addition, GitLab offers extensive project management functionality, which can lead to redundancy of tools in the organization.

The Gartner Magic Quadrants are designed to allow companies to get a big picture of the market and information about the most interesting solutions, compare their expectations from the product and the product class as a whole and current offers. Squaring leaders is an indicator of high recognition by both independent experts and consumers. However, solutions that are not included in this number may in some cases be more appropriate to the needs of the company. Favro's niche solution, for example, enjoys special success in the video game industry, and IBM Engineering Workflow Management, squared "Challenger," is aimed at organizations that create cyber-physical products or operate in regulated industries. Micro Focus and Siemens are also aimed at managing the development of cyber-physical systems. The Inflectra solution from the square of niche players in its functionality gravitates more towards project management and is also focused on regulated industries that require tracking product creation from requirements formation to testing, such as healthcare, energy, financial services. TCS, an Indian company in the Tata Group, offers a cloud solution that is well balanced in terms of price and functionality, with a free trial period.

The Gartner report analyzes vendors and solutions from the point of view of using the product in the ideal conditions, when both training, support, and guarantees provided by the vendor are available. In real conditions, when choosing a solution, you need to take into account the degree of localization of its support, both technical and methodological. Enterprise Agile Planning is a relatively young class of solutions, closely related to concepts such as Lean, SAFe, LeSS, Value Stream Management or Value Stream Management. The implementation of such a tool requires a change in the approach to development management. In such conditions, it makes sense to choose a product, focusing not only on its functionality, but also on the presence of a distributor on the Russian market and on its examination.

The full report is available here.