Agile is a model for managing projects in a fast-paced business environment. Due to growing competition in business industry, there is a demand for faster and faster software development. Agile can help you rapid prototyping and increasing product quality at the same time.
Agile project management is very important for any business these days. The challenge with agile project management is that you may not be able to find the right program management tools which are available. There are many tools on the market but picking out the most suitable ones for your business can be a struggle. If you are looking for some help regarding this problem this guide will be able to help you. It will explain what exactly agile project management is and how it works. You will also have an opportunity to read about several useful program management tools that have been created by different companies offering their services to software developers.
Kintone
Kintone is an all-in-one project management platform that allows managers to track, prioritize, and review their team’s tasks for any given project workflow, no matter how complex. This highly-customizable platform gives you the power to create a tailored project management solution using its drag-and-drop interface built for non-coders. Quickly design the workflows you want, then review tasks that move through it in seconds.
Kintone’s customization features include the ability to create automated reminders, filter tasks or project phases by data field or team member to generate custom reports or dashboard views, and automate handoffs between team members for multi-step workflows. You can also view, edit, and update workflows from the platform’s mobile or desktop applications, so oversight doesn’t stop when you leave your desk.
One of the Kintone’s most valuable features is its built-in communication channels. These chat tools allow you to discuss projects with your team directly in the database, meaning your conversations and data stay connected. Open the record, see what was discussed. You can also create “spaces” for conversation organized by topic, team, project, or department. The best part is these spaces stay visible to everyone, so teammates who miss a discussion can come back later and catch up on what’s been said.
Kintone’s project management tool also features integrations including: Slack, Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook, Tableau, Dropbox, Salesforce, Hubspot, and many more through Zapier.
Kintone costs from $24/user/month with a minimum requirement of 5 users. They offer a 30-day free trial and discounted prices for NGOs and educators.
monday.com
monday.com is a flexible tool that provides a structure that can easily be configured to suit teams working to agile and various hybrid methodologies. Because they’ve done away with some of the extra trimmings of typical PM tools, monday.com is a great choice for teams who want a simple, unobstructed focus on the work that needs to be done.
When using this tool, you put tasks on a board, and then you add in the steps you’ll need to take to get it done. It’s vaguely similar to a spreadsheet—but a much nicer-looking one that comes with multiple views (Kanban board, Gantt-style charts, list views) alerts, notifications, assignees, automated processes, and a lot more. Other features include a customizable task board for managing task status, assignee, due date, etc.
You can track your agile projects with monday.com’s project dashboards that collect data from multiple boards to easily see work in progress. You’ll also find easy file sharing and communication features such as mentions, comments, and hashtags.
Overall, this is an adaptable, easy-to-learn tool with a strong emphasis on customer service (the company’s customer support is available 24/7 by phone or email).
monday.com integrations include Slack, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Jira, GitHub, Trello, Dropbox, Typeform, and many more that are accessible via Zapier.
monday.com pricing starts at $17/month for two users.
Pros
- Huge focus on collaboration
- Long list of supported integrations
- Spreadsheet-style pulses for task progress
Cons
- Complex pricing rubric
- Focus goes beyond Agile only
Smartsheet
Smartsheet is an entire online project management suite, but in the suite, they also offer some customizable features for agile teams. You start by setting up a pre-built Kanban sheet template, to which you can import any existing kanban board data from Trello, Microsoft Excel, or Microsoft Project.
Smartsheet helps you organize projects, grids, calendars, dashboards, portals, forms, and more all from a unified control center. They have pre-built Gantt chart templates with customizable fonts and colors, “% Complete” and “Assigned To” columns, and more.
A useful feature of Smartsheet’s Kanban tool is that you can switch between traditional, grid, Gantt, and calendar views, helping you to see tasks in different ways. It offers all the Kanban essentials like attachments, custom fields, and searching for or filtering cards based on different criteria.
Smartsheet offers most of the integrations you’d need in a Kanban tool: integrations include Microsoft and Google apps, as well as development essentials like Jira, and useful business apps like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Box, and Tableau. The platform is extensible through a REST API and webhooks.
Smartsheet costs from $7/user/month, with a minimum of 3 users and a maximum of 25 users. They also offer a 30-day free trial.
Pros
- Easy to pull data from multiple sources
- Great alternative to Excel spreadsheets
- Well-communicated prepared-by-client (PBC) requests
Cons
- Advanced training recommended
- Could use more formatting options for data columns
- Max. number of lines may be insufficient for complex projects
Github Project Management
Your development team is most likely already using Github to host and collaborate on source code. With Github project management, your team can manage, track, and fix issues too.
By linking issues with pull requests and code commits, your team members can track updates in your project without complicating your workflow. And if you associate an issue with a pull request, it will automatically close when the pull request is merged.
Agile features in Github Project Management:
- Board
- Labels
- Issue linking to pull requests
- Setup a custom workflow in minutes
Pricing: Free to $25 per month for 5 users
Pivotal Tracker
Pivotal Tracker is a project planning tool for software development teams. It is built to keep your agile team on track to hit their sprint goals. It’s sprint planning guides you with breaking down and prioritizing projects into manageable, actionable chunks for your team to keep the momentum going.
With a view of your team’s work, Pivotal Tracker ensures everyone in your team has a real-time, single source of truth.
Agile features in Pivotal Tracker:
- Stories
- Estimation
- Backlog
- Iterations
- Velocity chart
Pricing: Free to $250 per month
Wrike
Effective project management is all about making instant changes where needed in order to save up on costs and increase the revenues. Wrike is ideal for centralizing and connecting multiple projects and spiking up your team’s efficiency. It gets a lot of bad rep for its utilitarian interface, but just like with teamweek’s tool, setting up your project tasks will be a walk in the park. Although Wrike is up to date with their releases and enhancements, their mobile versions get a bit of a lag in the process. This might frustrate if you expect to see changes on your mobile devices at the same time as they happen on your desktop.
Forecast.app
Forecast is perfect for agile teams, as it ensures optimal project deliveries through an adaptive work process and workflow automation to save project managers time and maintain visibility on projects, tasks, and milestones.
The platform uses AI to help make estimates, so you can effectively plan for a more accurate view of your sprint capacity and monitor velocity. Everything is in one place so you can reduce the amount of rework and improve efficiency while grooming the backlog, planning the sprint, tracking progress and velocity, and discerning where processes can be improved.
Forecast also integrates with the tools your developers love, such as Azure DevOps, GitHub, GitLab, as well as two-way sync with Jira, so you can collaborate with ease and deliver value faster.
Forecast is currently used in 40+ countries worldwide, by agencies, consulting companies, and enterprises. Paid plans start at $29/user/month. Forecast has a 14-day free trial.
Pros
- Predictive tasks for spreadsheets
- Great UI
- Includes resource management
- Good for RFP processes
Cons
- Additional fee for onboarding/training
- Higher learning curve than some other tools
- Caters more to agencies
Conclusion:
Agile has become a hot topic in project management and development circles. The word “agile” is thrown around a lot at conferences and I see it used to describe different approaches to doing just about anything. When you get down to it, there is more than one definition of what “agile” means, but good agile program management tools will focus on agility in the process itself, the people involved and the product being built. Product managers and software development teams use agile development methods to achieve faster time-to-market and deliver products that better meet their stakeholders needs