Top 7 Scrum Project Management Tools
Scrum software development promotes flexible development and teams working towards a common goal. But, when there’s more than one pair of hands working on something, it can often be difficult to keep track of everyone and everything.
Furthermore, Scrum only works when everyone knows what they’re meant to be doing. If a key team member is left out of the loop it can hinder the project.
So to make life easier, peep our list of the best Scrum project management tools below that will help to keep your team efficient!
Scrum Project Management Tools
Within Scrum, teams use tickets to keep track of what needs to be done. Including all of the information about a task, tickets ensure that team members won’t have to run around asking questions and will just be able to complete the job at hand.
The following Scrum management tools are built for this purpose.
Jira
Jira is the go to project management tool if you have a large or medium team. With a clean, attractive interface, Jira is good for project management and issue/bug tracking alike. One benefit to the Scrum way of doing things is that teams can quickly assemble and solve problems and Jira aids that.
Going from requested features to code reviews to implementation, Jira helps everybody involved stay up to date on what’s going on. It also provides a simple way for team members to provide feedback, making sure that everything is in good shape to be implemented at the end of a sprint.
AgileZen
AgileZen is more suited to small teams. While its uses as a Scrum project management tool are hindered by its old-fashioned design, AgileZen certainly does the trick.
Using ‘To Do’ lists to help you organize, AgileZen also lets you label the tasks. From ‘small’ to ‘high’ to ‘trivial’, team members can easily see how big a task is depending on the given story points. They offer a Fibonacci-like scale to help you estimate your tickets.
Under Scrum’s sprint and backlog system, knowing the importance of each task is vital. As AgileZen lets you do that, it makes it ideal for Scrum development teams.
Trello
Perfect for personal use, Trello uses boards, cards and lists to manage things.
In Trello the boards represent a project and then these contain lists, which are usually separated between ‘To Do’, ‘Done’ and ‘Ideas’ depending on how you like to work.
Then, each list features one or more cards with tasks written on them. Not only this but Trello has due dates, members and labels which is handy for managing teams of more than one, or projects with lots of tasks involved.
It’s also free to use, which is an added bonus and the Android and iPhone apps work great.
Communication Tools
Now that you’ve found a way for teams to stay on top of their tasks, you need to find a way for them to communicate effectively. Whether that involves communicating amongst themselves or communicating with clients about new features, it’s all vital if you want a project to go smoothly.
The following project management tools are brilliant for professionals and are good alternatives when your average group chat just doesn’t cut it.
HipChat
With Jira integration, HipChat is undoubtedly the number one professional alternative to traditional IM.
Working in a group-centric format, HipChat can be used to inform people of overall project updates or smaller group notices.
HipChat’s chat rooms are also searchable, there’s image sharing, file uploading and SMS messaging for one-on-one conversations.
Slack
A product management tool with a Facebook style layout, Slack is useful for smaller updates on what people are doing. It offers one-on-one messaging, private groups, persistent chat rooms, direct messaging as well as group chats organized by topic.
Slack’s most interesting feature though, is that it integrates with Twitter, Dropbox, Trello and various other services. All of your messages and files can be kept in one place so that you can access everything you need in a couple of clicks.
Skype
Skype is the essential product management tool that every team should have.
While it’s a must-have because of how many people use it, Skype also has lots of other practical uses. Sometimes a text chat with a client just can’t convey or explain what it is that they want, so a Skype call might be better.
Clients appreciate the extra communication of a video chat. At EL Passion we invite our clients to come and visit us to meet their project’s team but when this isn’t possible, Skype is a wonderful alternative.
Google Hangouts
A powerful alternative to Skype, Google Hangouts also lets businesses have video chats. But more than that, it makes it easier for teams to collaborate.
Video chats are handy to discuss potential ideas but when you want to show your ideas to other people, Hangouts lets you use screen sharing to do so. This can even be used to broadcast PowerPoint presentations to employees who can’t watch them in person; helping to get everyone on board with a project.
You can also have group video calls with the whole team, something that is recently available in Skype but limited to a smaller number of participants.
Because Google Hangouts can be broadcast to the public, it can be also used to reach out to potential customers.
