3 Agile Project Management Templates to Maximize Team Workflows
Unlock your team’s maximum productivity with one of these three conceptual agile project management templates.
You’ve undoubtedly heard of Agile by now as the startup-based move-fast-and-break-stuff ethos has trickled its way into the largest of institutions. Digital transformations orient around the need for speed and maximizing productivity. On the ground level, Agile’s goal is to reduce friction in the lifecycle of a task, thus facilitating the end goal that these daily and weekly tasks strive towards.
Teams and organizations of all sizes will huddle around solutions such as Nifty to streamline and standardize their workflow to optimize their workflow processes.
Before we dive into the different agile templates you can use as layouts for your projects, let’s cover some of the verbiage to maximize understanding.
Agile Project Management Components
Milestones — Milestones cap off a workstream to effectively bundle a group of tasks. There are many different ways Milestones can be used, and this blog will address a few ideas as to how to incorporate them into your workflow.
Statuses — Statuses are lists within your project that tasks exist within. Your projects will offer a To Do status by default (which can be renamed if you’d like) as well as a Completed Status. We’ll discuss different statuses that can exist in-between these two out-of-the-box lists.
Agile Template 1: Two Week Sprints
This template is great for Product, Marketing, and Development teams.
This template will use Milestones as two-week sprints to bundle and measure the completion of all of the tasks based within each sprint. Milestones can be set to recur on a bi-weekly basis so that the next sprint is created automatically. Marketing teams may revise the two-week sprint into a monthly milestone to indicate the progress month’s marketing calendar.
Statuses in this template will be Backlog, To Do, In Progress, Review, Completed. Tasks can sit in the Backlog section until they are tied to a Milestone (thus selected for the sprint), at which point they’re moved into To Do to start the funnel.
Agile Template 2: Scope-based Milestones
This template is great for product development teams and client-facing teams
For this template, Milestones emphasize the completion of a phase rather than a completion of time. This phase might be a feature push, an event, or a client deliverable. Connecting these Milestones with dependencies will maintain the project’s relative structure if delivery dates are adjusted at any point.
The Statuses in this template are similar, though a second Review Status might be created for Client Review for teams who are leveraging Nifty to formalize the approval process of their deliverables with their clients. Teams might also elect to ditch the Backlog Status here as they’ve pre-planned which phase these tasks will belong to.
Agile Template 3: High-velocity Tasks
This template is great for Sales and Ticketing teams
While it’s encouraged to use Milestones when possible to add context to daily tasks in order to prevent employee burnout by feeling that they’re on a never-ending productivity hamster wheel, some high-velocity workflows might not require Milestones, such as sales or ticketing workflows. Milestones may still find their use, such as which bugs will be updated in a single push, or who has ownership over a grouping of sales targets, these Milestones are situational and don’t steer the workflow.
Statuses in this template are going to vary based on the type of Workflow. Sales might see Statuses such as Warm, Hot, Proposal, Lost and Completed (which we’ll use as Closed). Bug Tracking might see Reported, In Progress, QA, Approved, Completed (which we’ll use to indicate that the update has been pushed.
In Summary
Building project structures based on how your team currently or aspires to work is what allows them to be productive while proactively answering questions of task statuses and progress reporting. Don’t forget, if you build a workflow that you absolutely love, you can save it as a template for future use!
