Agile Project Management: The Needs, How to Plan & Keeping a Track
We know that Agile Project Management is not just a fancy word in terms of the information technology industry. When we talk about agile project management, it gives us an interactive way to deliver a project throughout the project’s lifecycle!
From small startups to big organizations work with Agile Project management concepts. Even at Adrixus Tech Studios, we have adopted the agile methodology to manage and give the best quality products to our clients and their consumers.
There are some basic principles in agile methodologies. Let’s understand them first:
Collaboration — including your team with customer communications while sharing project updates and taking tasks
Integration — planning and executing tasks simultaneously
Iteration — taking small steps at a time instead of running long complex tasks
Feedback loop — keep getting feedback from all the stakeholders on the go
Agile project management encourages team members across the board to engage together. While engagement also helps to build a continuous feedback loop and provides a scope of improvement while working on the project rather than getting a huge mountain of feedback at the time of project deployment.
Here are the needs, how to plan and keep a track of your agile development process:
The needs
Be ready to adopt new things
Adopting agile methodology would require to adopt a lot of new tools and technologies. And, adopting new technologies and tools are not a fast process. Concerning an organization’s size and ability to learn new technologies, a company may take from weeks to months to adopt a new change in their project management.
While an organization adopts agile methodologies, they would make things more visible on the table. For example, the backlog of previous tasks in the project, sprints to be taken, scrum meetings and user stories; everything gets covered under it and thus adoption would help to improve the process for everyone.
Communication is the key
We know that communication can solve all the problems. From startups to huge organizations, communication within the team and even with the clients plays an important role.
Lack of participation in tasks, improving quality of work or fining a solution together will make the things worse. Even if you are working with remote teams or remote project managers, you have to make sure from day one, that all the team members are comfortable in the communication channels and the way of communication.
From asking questions related to the roles and responsibilities of each team member to getting clients requirements clear, the managers should make sure that everything is communicated in a crystal clear manner from top to bottom.
Risk management
Compared to waterfall methodology, Agile can become a bit risky! But, when it comes to keeping the client in the loop and everyone becomes a part in the update cycle, no surprise factor will arise in the agile management. While working in the waterfall method, you get the feedback at the end of each session of the project development cycles.
Where the agile methodology makes sure that the development team gets the feedback continuously after every iteration/sprint in the project. Which might make the development cycle a bit long in the initial time, but that will make sure that the project gets finished with maximum quality.
Get everyone on the same page
To complete any project, one must make sure that everyone is on the same page. From the adoption of the new process in the team to getting a quality project delivered to the client, all the team members need to understand what is happening around them.
For all the concerned stakeholders, a common board with task bifurcation and access to a common document where all the technical items and processes are mentioned is quite important. Keep a practice of keeping MOM ready for your team, that includes all the information, plans and expectations for each and every call and tasks. A group of people within the same project would destroy the concept of agile management and the output quality will suffer the most.
Document EVERYTHING
Documentation is not only important to solve the issues with the project owner and the development team. It also makes sure that the project becomes scalable and sustainable in the long run.
When a team is working on a particular project, they might adopt a standard of coding for it. The next phase of scaling and development team might not identify what was done previously on the project. That might need proper documentation and even the ongoing development team need proper hourly calculations to meet the client demands and more.
So, document everything before any catastrophe happens.
How to plan the adoption
Adoption of Agile methodology might come at a cost. Managers would need to make sure that they break tasks into small chunks. In layman terms, short and repeatable phases of typically 7–30 days length projects tasks are broken down. Which is called sprint, and each sprint would result in drafts, MVP or a full-fledged version of the final project.
But, instead of working on all the items together, in the agile process, the team can get their divided tasks and better understandings.
For a simple project like building a basic content filled website, basic tasks will be to develop the site structure, add content in terms of images and texts and do quality analysis. On the opposite side of the waterfall methodology, where a site will be made live first and then the feedbacks will be taken to make updates; in agile project management, development, content and quality tasks will be broken into individual task and feedbacks will be taken at each sprint.
Thus, agile will make sure that output comes with top-notch quality.
Keeping a track
While adopting agile project management, organizations need to take a lot of care and patience.
All the requirements you adopted, you have to track individual scaling and effectiveness of them as well.
User stories, collaboration management, agile analysis and handling task management all are the part tracking systems’ and individual effectiveness.
For agile management, the key focus is not always given to how small or a big task is. Managers always need to decide what they are looking forward to achieving in the particular sprint and track their plan in that direction only. On the other hand, there should be a high-level long-term goal defined for team improvement as well to grow in a positive direction.
This iterative process lets you collect and react to feedback as you work on the project. This would make the process more efficient and quick.
