Not too long ago I wrote an article about the new piplanning app icon. In this article I revealed some piece of background information and insights about why the piplanning app and the dedicated Setup Tool look the way they look.

For all of you who don’t know the piplanning app yet: The piplanning app is a service developed by Rentouch and used by large organizations to perform successful SAFe® PI Plannings with distributed teams. The piplanning app consists of two components. On the one hand, there is the web-based configuration tool, the so-called “Setup Tool”. This is basically for the Release Train Engineer (RTE) to support him in his preparation. He can create and manage the teams participating in PI Planning, configure the different boards with the different sticky types and set up the synchronization with the ALM tool. On the other hand, there is the actual planning application with which the teams work during the PI Planning. This application is available for download for Windows, MacOS and Linux.

The new piplanning app icon and landing page were just the beginning of a series of targeted renewals based on the valuable and appreciated feedback from our active customers.

Feedback

If you know us a little bit you also know our philosophy regarding customer feedback. We really like to invest a lot of time to better understand our customers and actively listen to what they have to say about the use of our tools. This was also the case with the piplanning app Setup Tool. We knew for a long time that many things were not always completely logical and user-friendly. When we started the development of the Setup Tool the priority was to provide the basic functionality and not to win a design award. But we constantly documented all the feedback and ideas submitted by our customers.

Redesign

From exactly this feedback the concept for the new piplanning app Setup Tool was developed. The new Setup Tool provides exactly the same range of functionality as the version before. The main value of the new user interface lies in the rearrangement of the functions and to display them in the right context. This way, users automatically understand what they are configuring and need less external support such as watching videos, reading documentation or scheduling remote configurations with the Rentouch team. (Please do not misunderstand, we are still happy to give demo sessions, these can be scheduled at any time under calendly.com/demo-team). The best way to see the approach of this new concept is by registering and logging in to the Setup Tool for the first time, you will be guided through a very intuitive initial setup. If you don’t feel like dealing with the configuration right from the beginning, you can generate demo content and play around with the planning app to get a first impression of it.

Here some pictures before and after the redesign:

Big difference, right? :-)

Special

I would like to briefly mention a new feature that we implemented together with the redesign. It’s a feature to assist RTEs in informing their teams about the upcoming PI Planning and providing them with all relevant information to download and use the piplanning app. We plan to continue development of more features, which will take the heat off RTEs in their daily work and make their life easier.

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