Project managers in their quest to satisfy the needs of their clients and meet their expectations in terms of value creation and on-time delivery encounter a lot of challenges in their bid to meets the requirements set by the client.
The challenges could truncate the success of their projects and make them deliver products that are not of high quality thereby causing them to miss out on the desired goals and objectives. No doubt, project managers always strive to guard against such occurrence in their projects.
However, the success of every project is centered on effective planning and the tools used in carrying out the project. Without mincing words, agile tools are effective and reliable tools that assist project managers in planning and undertaking their project with ease and ensuring that their clients have a great value for their money.
According to the Developer survey results, 85.9% of software developers use agile tools in their project to enhance their efficiency. Also, Forbes revealed that 92% of the senior executives around the globe believe that agile tools are vital to the success of their organizations.
Agile tools offer the project managers and their teams the agile roadmap that ensures teamwork and flexibility in delivering a product that satisfies the client’s requirements.
Sinnaps, an online project management tool is an agile tool that supports effective planning of project activities. It helps teams in carrying out their tasks in a manner that the objectives of the projects are fulfilled.
Again, it will save the team a lot of time by determining the critical path of the project activities by emphasizing the dependencies of tasks thereby ensuring that the deadlines of the project are met.
Índice
Why Agile Tools are Important For your Project
The integration of agile planning tools into the management of projects enables the project managers to do comprehensive planning of their activities to ensure that nothing vital is left out. The following are benefits you derive from agile tools.
Achieve high product quality in your project
Agile tools guarantee high product quality by ensuring that the team focuses on core value creation to the customers through continuous inspection and design of product iterations during the development cycle of the project.
Also, they are agile project management software promoting ease in project management. They allow the project team to be on the same page through effective communication.
They boost the satisfaction of your customers
Agile tools enhance the satisfaction of the customers by entertaining their feedback. The feedbacks are then integrated into product iteration to match the requirements of the customers. They are collaboration tools for agile teams for engaging the clients to improve their satisfaction.
Furthermore, the project teams are afforded increased project control by helping them in the management of their priorities which result in greater efficiency and productivity with agile tools.
You are assured of effective risk management in your project
Also, the tools ensure the practice of agile risk management in software development projects by identifying the risks that could have negative impacts on the project and put in measures to mitigate or eliminate them.
It promotes a higher rate on investment
Again, these tools are synonymous with greater productivity thereby assuring the relevant stakeholders of the higher Rate on Investment (ROI) through quick iteration, incremental changes, and flexibility to change. These boost the ability of the project team to complete the final product swiftly and deliver to the customers and enabling them to achieve the rate of investment faster than anticipated.
Agile Scrum Tools
Agile scrum tools are tools with agile board software that allows you and your team to plan, track, report, and manage all your agile software development project activities from a single point.
They are scrum software designed with an agile methodology for building products in a series of fixed-length iterations. They are useful for sprint planning, stand-ups, sprints, and retrospectives. In the sprint planning meetings, the team members determine what they should complete in the next sprint from the product backlog.
Agile tracking tools are used in tracking and managing the sprints of the project team. The tools will properly track the work being done in each sprint. In the stand-ups, the team members gather to examine a quick list of what they have been able to do.
Also, agile retrospective tools are used to carry out the retrospective by reporting data-driven results that can be used to improve the upcoming sprints. Agile reporting tools provide visibility into how the project is going; it helps in conveying information to the relevant stakeholders about the challenges, risks, and issues being faced by the project team.
Furthermore, it is essential to do agile estimation at different levels in agile software development. Hence the need to integrate agile estimation tools for effective planning, management, and estimation of the total efforts that are being used for implementing, testing, and delivering the desired product to the clients in terms of time within the specified deadlines.
Example of Agile Scrum Planning Tool
Best Agile Project Management Tools
Achieve an overview of your activities with ease
The best agile project management tools are the key that promote flexibility during software development projects. They help in tracking the project and organizing the agile team’s progress.
These tools do not always impose strict schedules and roles on the team members but they make the task of managing software development project easier for the team by setting priorities and helping them in executing the tasks.
The tools ensure agile management technique with agile planning built on effective communication and collaboration among the agile team to ensure that the goals of the projects are achieved.
The tools allow the project managers to gain insights into an overview of the completed tasks, ongoing tasks, and dependencies. They are effective in helping the project team in eliminating the bottlenecks in their projects and attain greater efficiency and productivity.
The examples of the best agile project management tools are the following:
Version One
This is a tool that unifies the team members during software development exercise. It offers end-to-end visibility of the team’s activities and can automate the decision-making strides of the entire software development lifecycle.
Sinnaps
Sinnaps is a collaboration tool for agile project management; it has an easy-to-use interface that ensures effective coordination of the project activities. The team can easily share the project data, plan their schedules, and report the progress of their project to the relevant stakeholders.
Also, agile requirements management tools support user story creation and management, traceability to other requirements and test cases. This allows social collaboration to effectively track requirements-related discussions and decisions, tracks requirements status and change impact analysis and integrates agile tools to support backlog and requirement prioritization to boost the satisfaction of the customers.
Trello
Trello allows teams to work collaboratively and get more done. It enables you and your project team to organize and prioritize your project tasks for optimum productivity.
Scrumwise
Scrumwise offers you a tool that will effectively coordinate the activities of your team and keep track of the team activities. It is useful in creating and managing backlogs, planning releases and sprints. It assists the team in predicting what the project team will deliver to the customers.
Some other examples are agile tools are the following:
Clarizen
Clarizen ensures flexibility and full visibility into all the divisions for business activities thereby allowing iterations of project schedules to be done easily. It empowers teams to drive their focus and respond faster to the feedback of the customers.
Axosoft
It is very easy to plan sprints with Axosoft. It has release planner that can view the capacities of your sprint, team, and the members. It can assign duties properly to the team members and will ensure proper utilization of the project resources.
Quickscrum
It improves the operational efficiency of teams by streamlining their workflow and helping them in implementing their best practices and will promote team communication and collaboration.
Popular Tool Used in Agile Software Development
The tool is used by project managers in software development to divide the whole task into multiple smaller tasks and attach them with the short and incremental phases of work (sprint).
For example, Sinnaps helps in the management of project by reducing risks, avoiding delays in project execution. It eliminates overspending in the project and it improves the collaboration of the team members.
It can calculate the critical path of your project, earned value of the project and will assist you in planning your project properly. It can prioritize, organize and distribute work depending on the responsibilities of team members.
As an agile tool, it promotes rapid, early delivery, consistent reassessment and adaptive planning, continuous improvement and flexible response to change in a software development project to ensure the satisfaction of the customers. It will also aid in reporting and time-tracking the activities of the project.
Furthermore, Scaled agile framework tools provide the project managers with effective workflow patterns that help in scaling lean and agile practices in their project management strides. Agile project management with Kanban promotes the effective organization of the project activities by visualizing the activities to enhance optimum productivity and efficiency.
For instance, Sinnaps has Kanban boards in it and it will properly visualize how the tasks of your project are being executed to achieve effective project management that yields the desired results in terms of meeting the needs of the customers.