Here are the steps to start agile project management. This is not a how-to do agile project management article. I want you to think about the process of how to do agile project management. I’m going to presume that if you are reading this you already know what I’m talking about, and just need to get started.
Do you know how to agile project management? Agile project management is a way to successfully manage many different projects throughout an organization. It’s very difficult to run and manage lots of different projects and initiatives because there is so much going on and keeping track of it all can be quite overwhelming. That’s where agile project management comes into play.
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
If you think of software development today, Agile is a direct response to sky-high user expectations.
Users don’t care about documentation, they care about working software. They don’t care about your long-term plan, they want something now. If you’ve released a bug, they expect it to be fixed now–not in a few months–or else they’ll find another option.
We’ve all become very needy consumers, and Agile is a fantastic way to make sure the user’s needs are put front and center whenever you’re developing new software. But how do you put it into practice?
The core components of Agile: Sprints, standups, user stories, and more
Agile as a concept isn’t that hard to grasp. But like any tool or method, Agile has its own quirks and nuances you need to understand if you’re truly going to master it.
Before we dive into the specifics of implementing Agile project management, let’s go over the core components you’ll be using.
User stories
User stories are the backbone of planning out an Agile project. Simply put, a user story is a short, simple feature description told from the perspective of your users.
In most cases, they take the form of:
“As a [type of user] I want [some particular feature] so that [some benefit] is received.”
This format helps you get specific about what needs to be built and why so you can more accurately estimate the time involved to actually make it!
Check out our in-depth Guide to User Story Mapping for more!
Sprints
Sprints are short cycles of development where you work towards a release. A typical sprint should take about 1–4 weeks and needs to finish with some usable piece of software being shipped.
The goal is to keep these sprints the same length throughout the project so it’s easier to plan future work, adjust your goals, and not get bogged down.
There’s a lot that goes into planning and running sprints, which is why we put together this in-depth Sprint Planning guide.
Meetings (stand-ups, planning, retrospectives, etc…)
In Agile, teams self-organize and decide what should be included in sprints. This means that regular meetings are a huge component of keeping your team on track.
The core meetings you should think about are:
- Daily standups (or “scrums”): These are quick daily meetings where everyone talks through what they’re working on. It helps you stay informed and focused on hitting the sprint goals.
- Sprint planning: This is a longer meeting at the start of a sprint where the Agile team decides what work should be included.
- Sprint retrospective: At the end of a sprint, the team comes together to discuss what was completed, what worked, and how you can improve moving forward.
Agile board
Agile projects move quickly and you need a tool to keep you organized.
An Agile board can be as low-tech as a whiteboard with sticky notes showing the current sprint’s user stories and progress. However, there are tons of amazing tools out there that can take your Agile team to the next level.
For example, Planio comes standard with an Agile board that you can use to organize projects and quickly see what the progress is of every task in your current sprint.
Conclusion:
Agile project management is way of doing things in which you take small steps rather than big strokes. It is not something you can download and use on your computer, but it is a mindset you can implement in your business.