VersionOne, recognized by agile practitioners as the leader in agile management tools, today announced its Winter 2012 product release.

The new release expands VersionOne capabilities in the areas of strategic planning and agile portfolio management through program-level Kanban boards, Epic-level project visibility and enhanced custom analytics. The new functionality is designed to help organizations better plan, manage and report on cross-project initiatives in sync with their agile portfolio management strategy.

As organizations scale agile to the enterprise, managing and reporting on portfolio status becomes increasingly complex. To address this, VersionOne has added high-level, customizable Epicboards and reports to provide easy visualization and status of agile portfolio initiatives.

Epics themselves have become more powerful with the addition of several enhancements, such as drag-and-drop prioritization, dedicated workflows and a new summary dashboard to help product managers easily understand detailed progress and status. Additionally, a new Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) integration with CA Clarity has been delivered to help organizations integrate agile planning into their overall PPM infrastructure.

Key Highlights:

Improved Agile Portfolio Management High-level Epics can now be easily managed in the same way as Stories on the Storyboard. All levels of project, program and portfolio planning and management—from strategic planning to tactical execution—can be outlined, tracked and reported on, making it easier to visualize and manage strategic cross-project initiatives.   Teams can now plan at multiple levels, from overall strategy and vision through to iteration-level execution with full traceability Customizable Epicboards provide at-a-glance status for the user’s portfolio features Additional reporting options have been added to make analysis fast and easy

Easier Epic Management Epics have become even more valuable with the addition of their own custom fields, ranking and workflow.   Drag-and-drop Epic prioritization helps product managers to plan and communicate priorities for enterprise initiatives Separate workflow for Epics allows product managers to manage high-level features separate from iteration-level Stories New custom fields in Epics provide flexibility to define values that are separate from Story work managed by the team A new Epic summary helps team members to better understand the status, history and work allocation of the Epic

Improved UI for Custom Reporting Maintaining a focus on simplification, Analytics has several custom reporting enhancements:   Reporting Templates make it easy for new users to get started with Analytics A new Chart Selection Gallery simplifies the selection and use of charts “Multi-layer” charts help ScrumMasters create the visuals they need, incorporating multiple data series on the same chart Automatic data previews makes table selection fast and accurate

The latest release also contains updated integrations for VersionOne’s free, openAgile Platform. Agile project data can now be integrated with CA Clarity for PPM, in a new integration, using the Pervasive Data Integration Platform. The CA Clarity integration allows users to automatically synchronize project structure and summary data including begin/end dates and percent complete. A full list of updated integrations is available here.

Supporting Quotes:

John May, Motorola Solutions, Technical Staff

“This release brings new support for coordinating backlogs across wider parts of the business. The visual support for Epic content on the Epicboards is especially powerful. Using the enhanced Epics, higher-level planners can use VersionOne to build a cohesive strategy, then break down and prioritize the work into backlog items for their agile teams. VersionOne preserves these relationships in the scope (Epic) hierarchy, which makes higher-level progress tracking much easier. We’ve been managing these activities outside of VersionOne up until now, and look forward to the product’s new capabilities for improved coordination, visibility and reporting.”

Tom LaMarche, Mentor Graphics Corporation, Scrum Trainer/Coach

“The new VersionOne release has provided Mentor with tools that are aligned with our needs. These advancements optimize our ability to deliver sustainable value across the enterprise. The new Epicboard functionality uses a hierarchical approach to give executives insight into progress on strategic objectives and allows them to drill down into more details when required. Enhancements allow upper management to manage complex product portfolios, while our developers have rich context around the business initiatives for which they’re building product. We expect this visibility to help us quickly deliver value in the face of the dynamic requirements of our customers.”

Robert Holler, VersionOne President and CEO

“Our goal is to give customers a simpler way to plan and track their efforts when scaling agile across the enterprise. VersionOne’s Winter Release provides the functionality and visual tools these organizations need to connect their business strategy with execution. In doing so, our customers are in a better position to align their strategic business objectives with the development organization’s initiatives at the project, program and portfolio levels. ”

About VersionOne

VersionOne is recognized by agile practitioners as the leader in agile project management tools. By simplifying the planning and tracking of agile projects, we help teams deliver better software faster. Since 2002, companies such as Adobe, Boeing, bwin, Intuit, Lilly, Lockheed Martin, Oppenheimer, Qualcomm, Sabre and Siemens have turned to VersionOne. Today more than 50,000 teams around the world use VersionOne. Agile Made Easier @ VersionOne.com.

Additional Resources:

• VersionOne Release Webinars – Register Here
• VersionOne’s suite of agile project and lifecycle management tools helps companies scale agile faster, easier and smarter: http://www.versionone.com/Product/
• Learn more about VersionOne’s Ultimate Edition – a comprehensive agile lifecycle management platform for scaling agile organizations
• Agile Sherpa serves newcomers, practitioners, trainers, consultants, event planners and more: http://agilesherpa.org/

For daily VersionOne and agile news follow us on Google+, Twitter, Facebook and our blogs.

PerkettPR for VersionOne
Crystal Macaulay, 781-871-8860
[email protected]