Agile project management has been decidedly popular in recent years. There are a lot of companies running agile project management free, and a lot of developers, managers, and companies have been trying to find the best agile project management tools. But with the growth of agile project management as a concept, it has become challenging to figure out what is truly ‘agile’ and what is not.
Agile project management is the practice of managing projects in an efficient manner that allows for continuous improvement of timekeeping methodologies, iterative development, and rapid adaptation to change. Apart from the general definition, there are some essential agile project management tools that are needed for effective agile project management.
Agile Project Management Methodology
Agile project management is a structured, adaptive and iterative approach to business planning and managing work processes. It suggests simultaneous activities that don’t have any dependencies and can be done in parallel providing two significant benefits over the traditional approaches:
- You can quickly detect and fix unexpected issues
- You can introduce changes at any stage of the project. Other work processes will change dynamically
Best for: projects that require a responsive and fast-paced approach and involve teams that boast strong communication and collaboration skills.
The Scrum Framework
With Scrum, your team works in fixed-length intervals called Sprints that include sprint planning stage, sprint review and daily standup meetings. It also has the following three clearly defined roles:
- Product Owner usually refers to a customer or other stakeholder who takes part in all development stages conveying the global vision and providing feedback.
- Scrum Master is the person responsible only for managing the project process, removing obstacles and coaching their team through meetings or other venues.
- Scrum Team is a team with developed collaboration skills following a common goal.
The official Agile Manifesto, created in 2001, highlights four key values of the methodology:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
Best for: collaborative teams working on complex projects with changing requirements.
Kanban
Kanban is an Agile approach that visualizes work, limits work in progress and helps to quickly move work from the “Doing” to the “Done” status. Work items are organized on Kanban boards where they flow from one development stage to another. The best part about Kanban boards is that you can customize the number and the names of the stages to make them fit your industry and project workflow needs.
Unlike Scrum, Kanban approach doesn’t prescribe any deadlines or set other fixed time frames. There’s also no Kanban master to manage the processes – the entire team is responsible for the work delivery.
Best for: collaborative teams that have lots of incoming requests varying in priority and size.
Extreme Programming
Extreme programming (XP) is one of the Agile methodologies created for software development projects that advocates frequent “releases” in short development cycles, intended to improve team productivity and quality of the software. The core of XP consists of five values, four development processes: coding, testing, listening, and designing – and multiple software development practices that can be either done in conjunction or in isolation.
Best for: small teams developing engineering projects with dynamically changing requirements.
Adaptive Project Framework
Adaptive Project Framework (APF) grew from the idea that most IT projects can’t be managed using traditional PM methods. APF is an iterative, client-focused and adaptive project planning designed to help project managers respond to unexpected changes.
APF includes the following five stages:
- Project scope – requires meaningful client involvement to establish the project’s goals, objectives, success criteria, risks, assumptions, obstacles and requirements.
- Cycle plan – a high-planning stage where project managers establish tasks, their order, schedule, dependencies and resource requirements.
- Cycle build – team commences its work while manager adjusts the work scope, records change requests and ideas for improvement.
- Client checkpoint – project team and their client review the results before starting the next APF cycle.
- Post-version review – project manager determines whether the business outcome was achieved, identifies improvements and collects best practices.
Best for: projects where “the goals are clearly known, but the solutions are not.”
Tools:
ClickUp
ClickUp is a cloud-based project management app made for all types and sizes of business. It offers every tool and feature to manage projects for clients, assign tasks and collaborate with the team in a visible way.
With ClickUp, working on agile methodologies becomes easier and flexible. Thanks to its high customization capabilities and ease of use!
It might be a fresh tool for project managers but is quite intuitive with its design and functionalities. You can make any type of adjustments to the workspace with the available themes, colors, and drag and drop features in a few clicks.
Its main purpose is to increase employee productivity to a certain degree. Whether you’re a small business or an emerging brand, ClickUp can live up to your expectations.
Features
- Its customizability lets agile development teams create Scrum/Kanban dashboards and use them to manage sprints, bug tracking, and view the progress of the product.
- With workflow automation, it allows developers to automate the sprint system, reduce the mundane tasks and efficiently allocate the resources.
- Easy for developers to integrate with tools like Github, Bitbucket as well as sync with the communication apps such as Zoom, Slack, etc.
- ClickUp offers a wide array of features that are available only in paid plans of other tools. Therefore, it reduces the dependencies from using add-on or other task management software.
Pricing
Jira
Atlassian’s Jira is undoubtedly one of the most used project management software in the IT industry. For the last two decades, Jira has been the top priority for issue tracking solutions.
And with the advent of agile methodologies, Jira has extended its functionalities beyond development teams such as HR operations, marketing, legalities, sales, etc.
HR managers can use Jira to improve their internal workflows and ease the hiring process. Sales personnel can keep track of the customer’s journey and bring effective selling strategies. Marketing teams can use it to bridge the gap between the teams, identify high-value projects and work coherently.
Features
- Jira’s core components are bug tracking and issue management that help developers to locate the bugs and address them accordingly.
- Agile reporting helps to get real-time insights on a team’s performance with the help of sprint reports, burndown charts, version reports, cumulative flow diagrams, etc.
- Intuitive drag and drop feature to reorder the components on the backlog, for example, bugs, user stories, etc.
- Rich integration feature to boost the software’s functionality with the availability of over 3000 third-party apps.
Pricing
Teamwork
Teamwork was previously known as Digital Crew that was customized web development and intranet service provider. But with the advent of team collaboration systems in the market, it expanded to agile development. And right from the beginning, it focused on offering adaptable project management solutions, especially for small groups.
Its key offerings include in-built messaging, version control, file sharing, time tracking, task management, and project budgeting. It also features capacity management that keeps track of the resources required to cater to the business needs in a cost-effective manner.
Teamwork’s intuitive UI makes it a good fit for small businesses just like how Jira’s UI fits well for large companies.
With the Kanban board, teams can plan and build products without forcing a process on anyone. Rather, it helps you create multiple boards within the project for different teams such that you can track the workflow in every team.
The best part is the bird’s-eye view that efficiently helps you use a time-tracking system to see how much time team members spent on the project.
Teamwork is undoubtedly the best affordable agile tool especially for a very small team and even if you’re a freelancer.
Features
- Teamwork’s dashboard design is concise and much less confusing. It uses simple terminologies for each feature.
- A clean UI that facilitates shorter paths for actions around tasks.
- You can have all your tasks and subtasks in a single project view where you can drag and drop items with ease and hide those that don’t matter.
- The time tracking feature helps the small team to deal with a large number of projects.
- Triggers let you automate the workflow such as in the case of assigning tasks to each developer or generating subtasks once the main task is done.
Pricing
Conclusion:
With the rise of the agile approach to project management, software development has become more dynamic. This has led to an increase of agile project management tools and techniques which are used for planning, collaboration, monitoring progress, tracking status of work-in-progress, etc.