Agile project management principles are becoming increasingly popular in organizations requiring faster delivery of products, services, or software. With the increasing popularity of agile project management activities, processes, and tools, you will be able to save quite a bit of time by just getting down to business with the right set of tools.
Agile project management is a process of managing usable, valuable products from the client’s viewpoint. The team involved in Agile project management treats project as a series of sprints called iterations and validation sessions. These agile project management summaries shall give you a clear idea about what makes this unique and how it can be adapted to various project situations.
Agile project management is an iterative approach to delivering a project throughout its life cycle.
Iterative or agile life cycles are composed of several iterations or incremental steps towards the completion of a project. Iterative approaches are frequently used in software development projects to promote velocity and adaptability since the benefit of iteration is that you can adjust as you go along rather than following a linear path. One of the aims of an agile or iterative approach is to release benefits throughout the process rather than only at the end. At the core, agile projects should exhibit central values and behaviours of trust, flexibility, empowerment and collaboration.
What are the 6 steps in the Agile methodology?
The goal of Agile is to produce shorter development cycles and more frequent product releases than traditional waterfall project management. This shorter time frame enables project teams to react to changes in the client’s needs more effectively.
As we said before, you can use a few different Agile frameworks—Scrum and Kanban are two of the most common. But each Agile methodology will follow the same basic process, which includes:
1. Project planning
Like with any project, before beginning your team should understand the end goal, the value to the organization or client, and how it will be achieved.
You can develop a project scope here, but remember that the purpose of using Agile project management is to be able to address changes and additions to the project easily, so the project scope shouldn’t be seen as unchangeable.
2. Product roadmap creation
A roadmap is a breakdown of the features that will make up the final product. This is a crucial component of the planning stage of Agile, because your team will build these individual features during each sprint.
At this point, you will also develop a product backlog, which is a list of all the features and deliverables that will make up the final product. When you plan sprints later on, your team will pull tasks from this backlog.
3. Release planning
In traditional waterfall project management, there is one implementation date that comes after an entire project has been developed. When using Agile, however, your project uses shorter development cycles (called sprints) with features released at the end of each cycle.
Before kicking off the project, you’ll make a high-level plan for feature releases and at the beginning of each sprint, you’ll revisit and reassess the release plan for that feature.
4. Sprint planning
Before each sprint begins, the stakeholders need to hold a sprint planning meeting to determine what will be accomplished by each person during that sprint, how it will be achieved, and assess the task load. It’s important to share the load evenly among team members so they can accomplish their assigned tasks during the sprint.
You’ll also need to visually document your workflow for team transparency, shared understanding within the team, and identifying and removing bottlenecks.
5. Daily stand-ups
To help your team accomplish their tasks during each sprint and assess whether any changes need to be made, hold short daily stand-up meetings. During these meetings, each team member will briefly talk about what they accomplished the day before and what they will be working on that day.
These daily meetings should be only 15 minutes long. They aren’t meant to be extended problem-solving sessions or a chance to talk about general news items. Some teams will even hold these meetings standing up to keep it brief.
6. Sprint review and retrospective
After the end of each sprint, your team will hold two meetings: first, you will hold a sprint review with the project stakeholders to show them the finished product. This is an important part of keeping open communication with stakeholders. An in-person or video conference meeting allows both groups to build a relationship and discuss product issues that arise.
Second, you will have a sprint retrospective meeting with your stakeholders to discuss what went well during the sprint, what could have been better, whether the task load was too heavy or too light for each member, and what was accomplished during the sprint.
The 4 core principles of running an Agile project
At its core, Agile project management isn’t so much a methodology as a philosophy.
This means that while there are many different ways to implement Agile, they all share a few core beliefs that clearly differentiate them from the Waterfall method:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
This doesn’t mean you should ignore the tools, documentation, and plans you’ve worked so hard to develop. But rather that the core focus of Agile project management should be on people, prototypes, collaboration, and iteration.
While these principles give you a good high-level view into the Agile mindset, they’re still a bit vague. That’s why the original Agile founders also released a list of 12 guiding principles for running an Agile project:
- The highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery
- Welcome changing requirements, even late in development
- Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months
- Stakeholders and developers must collaborate on a daily basis
- Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
- Face-to-face meetings are deemed the most efficient and effective format for project success
- A final working product is the ultimate measure of progress
- Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
- Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility
- Simplicity, maximizing the work not done, is an essential element
- The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams
- At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly
Zoho Sprints
Zoho Sprints is an agile project management tool that aims to provide an iterative and collaborative approach to work. It can be used equally well by seasoned agile practitioners as well as by teams that are starting our their journey of agile transformation.
An intuitive backlog makes it easy to plan and prioritize work items that are in the format of user stories, tasks, and bugs. Scrumban teams can also set WIP limits, sort and view progress in swimlanes, and track sprint summaries on dashboards. Incomplete work items can be moved back to the backlog or moved across other active and upcoming sprints.
The Global View helps in tracking progress across all projects. Each project gets a project dashboard that provides project managers and Scrum masters a birds-eye view of project progress. Actionable insights from velocity charts, burnup and burndown reports, and cumulative flow diagrams help teams iterate their sprint planning.
Teams get live updates about all project activities with the project feed. The Meetings module lets teams schedule sprint planning, review, and retrospective meetings. All users can log billable and non-billable hours while the global timer can be used to start a timer for any work item. The timesheet reports provide a summary of log hours distributed across parameters like duration, sprint, work item type, and user.
Issues from Jira can be imported using the built-in Jira Import wizard. Software development teams can use built-in integrations with tools like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. There is also a Marketplace that has several pre-built extensions. You can also build and sell extensions as well.
Zoho Sprints offers a free trial for 15 days (no credit card required). Zoho Sprints has one paid plan starting at $12/12 users per month billed annually. Also has a freemium version upto 5 users for 5 projects.
Pros
- Robust customization options
- Easily schedule meetings for sprint reviews and daily stand-ups
- Easily turn feed messages into a work item
Cons
- No cumulative by-project timesheets for a user
- Doesn’t integrate well with other Zoho apps
- No Kanban boards
Nutcache
Nutcache is a project management tool designed to plan, track, and manage all aspects of your project using a sophisticated toolbox of color-coded schedules, task organization queues, and data reporting. Users can organize with Agile or Scrum project management, depending on your preferences.
Use the Gantt chart to plan, track, and visually organize your tasks with easy drag-drop-and-click editing techniques. Nutcache offers tools to prioritize and focus on critical tasks: build custom workflows and attach multiple assignees to a task, break down each phase of your project, make adjustments to reschedule your tasks, and visualize project deadlines.
Integrations include Dynacom Accounting, PayPal, 2Checkout, Stripe, Authorized.Net, QuickBooks Online, Google Sign In, Google Drive, GitHub, Slack, and hundreds of other apps through Zapier.
Nutcache costs from $6/user/month with a “Pro” plan that requires 5 users.
Pros
- Easy to use
- Great time tracking functionality
- Easy to integrate new employees
Cons
- Complicated security levels for employees
- Need more third party integrations
Orangescrum
Orangescrum an agile project and a task management software with open source and a cloud version. Its main selling point is along with the agile features it provides, it also includes time, resource, and invoice management.
Orangescrum enables your team to centralize all your projects and tasks while managing resources. It helps teams to work closely together with its collaboration features such as file sharing.
This makes it a great tool for service companies that have several clients.
Agile features provided by Orangescrum:
- Scrum Board
- Sprints
- Epics
- Tasks management
Pricing: Free to $109 per month. Orangescrum also provides a self-hosted plan that has a one-time payment in the range of $259 to $4,999.
Kanbanize
Kanbanize is an agile tool centred around kanban board. It helps you organize and manage work efficiently by allowing you to see all initiatives at a glance.
One of the best functionalities in Kanbanize is that you break down a card in a kanban board into smaller chunks of cards that can then be automated to go through a series of steps. And if you are a client services company, you’ll love their time tracking functionality that will help you with your agile reports.
Agile features in Kanbanize:
- Kanban Boards
- WIP limits
- Agile reporting
Pricing: Free to $99 per month
Active Collab
Active Collab was devised as a great solution for businesses. With Active Collab you will not have to keep your clients on the sidelines anymore. You can determine what every user can see and access, keep them informed and shared what’s important. It offers project planning, allows to share files, time tracking, expense tracking, brainstorming, discussing important topic and more.
Asana
Asana is the ultimate cloud-based project and task management tool for planning, organizing, and tracking the progress of the tasks. From start to finish, Asana has the feature your team needs ㅡ from Boards to Timelines. For Agile project management, Asana track launches and iterations, simply project and sprint plans, communication with teammates.
If you are handling an Agile team or wondering if Agile can work for you, this article can help you with lots of information to handle projects. You can control your team’s work and achieve the best results.
Ravetree
Ravetree is a full-featured Agile Work Management ® software platform that includes best-in-class Agile project management, resource planning, time and expense tracking, digital asset management, and CRM.
Unlike other Agile project management tools that are built primarily for software teams, Ravetree is built for Agile organizations. This makes it especially well-suited for marketing & advertising, engineering, architecture, management consulting, legal accounting, higher education, non-profits, and government.
The Agile tools are built directly into Ravetree, without the need for 3rd party integrations or add-ons – including the ability to create Kanban and Scrum teams, epics and user stories, plan sprints, and story point sizing. Teams can easily communicate and collaborate, share files, view burndown charts and much more. Organizations that use Ravetree benefit from having a single source of truth from which they can optimize their operations and see the big picture.
One thing that sets Ravetree apart is the highly intuitive interface that allows everyone to easily find information, whether it’s project managers, executives, or team members. Ravetree also has a great support system, which has given them excellent customer support ratings.
Ravetree costs $29/user/month (with annual agreement — $39/user/month if paid month-to-month) and $20/user/month for non-profits.
Pros
- Easily track multiple projects
- Robust budgeting features
- Distinction between billable and non-billable hours
Cons
- Reporting tools are lacking
- No public API
- Home board not customizable
Conclusion:
Agile project management is one of the most powerful tools that can be used for driving innovation and driving effective communication. Agile project management focuses on people over processes and encourages creativity over demeaning control.