During my interactions with various vendors for the SPARK Matrix research report for 2024 on Value Stream Management (VSM), I had the opportunity to engage with Charlie Ponsonby, the Co-Founder and CEO of Plandek. I gained valuable insights into Plandek’s analytics tool which is specifically designed to help software delivery teams enhance their efficiency and productivity. The platform focuses on increasing velocity, predictability, and delivering high-quality software efficiently to accelerate value delivery in a value stream management context.

From the discussion I learned that Plandek’s platform is centered around empowering teams and managers to improve operational efficiency and cultivating a culture of metrics-driven continuous improvement. Plandek seamlessly connects with APIs spanning the entire Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), starting from pre-development design, through coding, Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Deployment (CD), and live management. Plandek primarily extracts data from essential sources like workflow management tools such as Azure DevOps and JIRA. It also gathers metadata from code repositories, extends its integration to encompass testing, DevOps processes, and monitoring, thereby offering a comprehensive view. Plandek features an analytics hierarchy that allows for analysis across various levels: organization, program, project, and team. This enables usage by multiple user types and facilitates pinpointing the root causes of issues.

Plandek's tool functions by extracting data from various toolsets, enhancing that data with intelligence, and presenting it for analysis at three distinct levels: teams, managers, and leadership. Plandek stands out due to its extensive customization options, offering a high level of flexibility to choose from various metrics according to their project requirements.

Plandek gives technology leadership a ‘single pane of glass’ to look across all teams and delivery initiatives.  Leaders can track and drive delivery improvement around a custom set of ‘North Star Metrics’ (which relate to leadership’s key objectives and may include DORA and Flow metrics for example) – and use Plandek’s reporting capabilities to demonstrate to stakeholders’ improvements in delivery efficiency and alignment to key delivery goals.

For managers, Plandek offers Out-of-the-Box and custom dashboards to enable performance self-improvement across teams; reduce delivery risk; and accelerate the delivery of key milestones.

And at team level, Plandek’s SmartView intelligent analytics uses proprietary ML algorithms to analyze teams’ ticket history, in order to identify ‘anomalous’ tickets in real time that are a potential blocker to the successful delivery of sprints and epics.  As such SmartView works like a ‘virtual Scrum Master’ to help teams plan, deliver and forecast sprint and epic delivery.

Plandek views its extensive Customer Success team as a key differentiator - Plandek domain experts help clients to select metrics and drive change using their Xcelerate framework.

Plandek drives swift and tangible business advantages, empowering clients worldwide to expedite their value delivery. They collaborate with top-tier global Private Equity firms, resellers, and consultants to bring value to their clients.

In Conclusion, Plandek's tool suite is specifically designed to streamline software delivery processes, improve reporting and stakeholder trust, and drive productivity and ROI across value streams. Plandek’s tool is crafted to offer teams and managers a deeper insight into the process of software value delivery, along with avenues for enhancement. It empowers the development of personalized dashboards and analytical instruments for all essential stakeholders, ranging from team leaders to the CIOs. Through its focus on customization, real-time insights, and actionable metrics, Plandek aims to be an essential resource for teams aiming to optimize their delivery pipelines.

Author: Sitaparna Roy, Analyst at Quadrant Knowledge Solutions

Sitaparna is a part of Quadrant’s global technology research at Quadrant Knowledge Solutions. She works in Application Development and Cloud Management research domain and is responsible for conducting global strategic market outlook, SPARK Matrix Analysis, and client consulting assignments.