Agile product management now has a road map; that’s according to VersionOne, which added product road-mapping to today’s VersionOne Ultimate Edition suite as part of its Summer 2010 quarterly release, offered at no charge to the company’s customers.
The VersionOne agile project management software is designed to simplify project planning; centralize requirements, defect and test management; and automate reporting.
The company also added a project workspace to both the Enterprise Edition and Ultimate Edition of the project management software. Enterprise Edition is for experienced shops with multiple projects, locations and teams. Ultimate Edition is for organizations scaling agile; it has the same features as Enterprise, plus regression test management, customer idea management, and custom reporting and analytics.
Ultimate Edition’s product road-mapping feature lets users visually layout a company’s strategic plans for a project, whether it be high-level road maps focusing on long-term goals, or low-level road maps for nearer-term goals, explained Mark Crowe, the company’s director of product management.
Users can click and move items throughout the road map, change colors based on project status and publish the most recent road-map reports for stakeholders, users and team members to see, Crowe said. “This capability helps extend project visibility upstream.”
The new project workspace capability lets users configure and design a project workspace using the Ultimate and Enterprise suites. “The project workspace capability corresponds to the needs of different areas,” Crowe said.
For example, an agile team may not need the same things as marketing users, he added, and stakeholders and management can also move easily from workspace to workspace to see results and reports, and to move project features.
Both the Ultimate and Enterprise suites now integrate with Salesforce’s customer service product, Service Cloud 2. “The integration allows defects to be generated in VersionOne and pulled back to Salesforce once work is complete,” Crowe said.
