Dear Sirs:
I just wanted to write this to let you know how much we appreciate the work you
have done on your flagship product, TargetProcess. We have been a user of TP since
the early 1.x versions and have consistently been impressed with both the product's
capabilities and the responsiveness of your overall organization to our needs and
feedback.
When my company originally went looking for an agile-development-style project management
tool, we quickly narrowed the candidates down to two camps: those tools that were
very heavy-handed and superimposed significant forced structure on the process and
those that were just too light-weight to be of any value at all. TargetProcess surprised
us by capably straddling the line between a flexible, light-weight tool the one-hand
and enough of a structure to provide useful management feedback on the other. For
our organization, looking for a tool flexible enough to allow us to manage all of
our very different types of projects but powerful enough to actually add value to
our project methodology, TargetProcess hit the sweet-spot for us quite well.
In the intervening year or more since our adoption of TargetProcess, we have seen
the software mature and contiune to grow quite quickly both in re: usability and
in re: capabilities. We have seen the complete backend rewrite to leverage NHibernate
in the datalayer; we have seen the USEFUL introduction of AJAX-style controls in
the UI to actually improve the usability of the application instead of just adding
useless eye-candy to the browser; we have seen the introduction of test cases, the
addition of support for pair-programming in assigning mutiple developers to a single
task, and the introduction of the customizable 'dashboard' concept to give each
user a snapshot view of their pending work. We are eager to see where TP goes next
in adding value to the application, but we are confident that it will be in a direction
that continues to add both useful tools to our development and testing staff as
well as business value to our project managers and project leads.
We had two initial concerns when first evaluating TargetProcess and thus far both
have proven complete non-issues. The first was the relative size of the company
behind the product; would a smaller organization be able to provide us a high enough
level of support for what we envisioned would be a critical tool in our workflow?
The second was the relative feature-set of the product; how likley was the company
to continue to add value to the product over time, making our investment in the
yearly support contract worth more than just a single annual bug-fix release?
The first concern re: the level of support has proven to us that a smaller company
that remains customer-focused is more than able to respond to our needs in a timely
fashion. When we report a bug in the product, we receive confirmation within an
hour or two at most and a fix is usually released within 24 hours that addresses
our issue. When we did the migration from the 1.x product to the 2.x product and
the originally-provided database migration tool failed to adequately migrate aspects
of the 1.x system that we considered critical to our continued use of the product,
TargetProcess released a reworked migration tool within only a few days that completely
addressed our issue. For anyone concerned about the company's ability to respond
adequately to legitimate needs for support, I say you can put those concerns to
rest.
The second concern re: the committment to extend the product over time has also
proven exactly the reverse. Our company uses several tools that have an annual support
component and often the question of 'what do we get for our support dollars' comes
up. With most products, the best we can hope for is perhaps a single maintenance
release in that year. With TargetProcess, their release cycle has been extrement
agressive, leading to new features, added capabilities, and steady improvements
to their product at quite regular and very frequent intervals throughout the year(s).
We routinely receive excellent additional business value from the new features that
they add to the product over time. In the same time that several other agile management
tool vendors have released perhaps only a single upgrade, TargetProcess has released
four. This style of shorter-duration, more-frequent, incremental release fits nicely
with the agile development style and demonstrates to me that the company has not
only decided to develop a tool that supports an agile approach, but also that they
are committed to performing their own work within this same framework and style.
In short, our relationship with TargetProcess over time has been a great experience
for us, completely validating our choice to move forward to implement their product.
The software continues to evolve and add value to our process, they continue to
be extremely responsive to our needs, and we continue to look forward to the next
releases in justifiable expectation that the next feature will also add considerable
business value to our ability to manage our projects in a manner that ensures our
company's continued success.
Stephen A. Bohlen
Senior Project Manager/Software Architect Software Development Group.Microdesk, Inc.