How to Run an Agile Project?

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Agile project management is the most popularly and widely adopted development methodologies. Known for its incremental and interactive approach businesses across the world are employing agile principles to achieve higher productivity.

If you want your business to grow like Google and Microsoft, then you need to follow their methods of working.

Successful companies update their product once in a week or two whereas other companies took almost a year to deliver a new product.

So, the secret of developing your business is Agile Project Management. With Agile Project management, the process becomes easy and quick.

Contents

What is Agile Project Management?

Agile Project management is an iterative approach used to manage software development projects. It focuses on continuous releases and getting customer feedback with every iterative process.

The iterative process refers to the approach used by designers, developers, and others to improve designs and products.

Many software teams have observed their growth in the speed of development. It has raised their ability to better respond to market trends, and expand the collaboration by using agile project management tools.

Agile Project management is a philosophy for products. It is built to create an often releasing, fast-moving, and helps to learn from actual users.

Many researchers have discovered that Agile organizations are more likely to complete the projects on time and they successfully achieved their goals.

With agile boards, you can organize projects and check out the progress of every task.

Principle of Agile Project Management

The Agile Project management tool is widely used because of its key principles.

So here is the list of major principles of Agile Project management:

Easy to collaborate
Provide quick response
Open for data-driven change

The Agile Project management Methodologies involved many short phases of work such as frequent testing, reassessment, and adaptation throughout.

What are the benefits of Agile Project management?

The Agile approach helps the team in many ways. It helps the team to keep up with the demands of a modern workplace.

Agile Project Management Methodologies focus on providing flexibility, quality, and transparency with continuous development.

Here are some of the benefits you get from Agile Project Management tools:

Customer Satisfaction:

The customers are always involved in the decision-making process. This generates customer retention.

Getting feedback from the customer and changing it accordingly, delivers value to your customer.

It also ensures the result or final product is according to the customer’s requirement.

Quality product:

The client is involved in the development process and can ask for changes depending on the market realities.

In Agile Project Management, repeated testing occurs in the execution phase. It states that the final product delivered is of good quality.

Improved Project Predictability:

Effective mitigation plans get easier with increased visibility and better risk identification.

With the Agile Framework, you can follow many ways to identify and predict risks and plan accordingly to ensure the smooth run of the project.

How to run an Agile project?

If you want to run an Agile project, the first thing you need is to choose your project framework.

Some of the popular agile frameworks are Kanban, scrum, and lean, it helps you to organize and run a project.

So here are six steps you need to follow these six simple steps to run an Agile Project by using scrum methodology.

Team assigning:

The project team needs to have a scrum master, a product owner, and many other team members. Therefore you need to develop, produce and test the result.

Documents:

Once you form your team, the product owners need to stabilize the product. The product shaping is a high-level visual of the project’s requirements. It includes a rough time frame that tells you when you need to develop each one.

From the process, you will develop a product backlog that sets priorities for the project and products.

Develop your sprints:

You can break down the project into sprints and develop the release plan according to your requirements. The release plan consists of the requirement for the version of your project which is created at the end of each sprint.

Plan and execute the Sprint:

Once the project breaks down into sprints, You can create a detailed schedule for the first one.

And a scrum master must hold meetings daily with the team members, as they are the ones to execute the sprint. Here they can discuss the progress and deal with problems.

Hold a retrospective:

During the end of the first sprint, a review meeting is important. In this meeting, the outcomes and changes to include in the next one are discussed.

Repeat the 4th and 5th steps:

Once the detailed planning for the next sprint is finalized. The repeat cycle is held until you reach the last spring and deliver the products to your customers.

Top Agile Project Management Tips for Managers

Understand Agile Principles: Familiarize yourself with the core principles of agile methodologies like Scrum, Kanban, or Lean to grasp the philosophy behind agile project management.
Empower Self-Organized Teams: Trust your team to self-organize and make decisions collectively. Provide guidance and support when needed but avoid micro-managing.
Prioritize Deliverables: Use techniques like MoSCoW (Must-haves, Should-haves, Could-haves, Won’t-haves) to prioritize project features and requirements.
Frequent Iterations: Break the project into short iterations or sprints, usually 2-4 weeks long, for continuous feedback and adaptation.
Create a Product Backlog: Maintain a prioritized list of user stories or tasks in a product backlog, making it easy to plan upcoming iterations.
Daily Standup Meetings: Conduct daily standup or daily scrum meetings to keep the team informed about progress, impediments, and goals.
Use Burndown Charts: Track progress using burndown charts to visualize work completed and work remaining in a sprint.
Embrace Change: Be flexible and open to change throughout the project. Agile projects are designed to adapt to evolving requirements.
Continuous Improvement: Encourage retrospectives at the end of each sprint to identify areas for improvement and implement changes accordingly.
Customer Collaboration: Involve the customer or product owner in regular feedback sessions to ensure that the product meets their expectations.
Limit Work in Progress (WIP): Implement WIP limits in Kanban to prevent overloading the team and maintain a steady workflow.
Automate Testing: Automate testing processes to ensure that code is continuously validated, reducing the risk of defects.
Collect Metrics: Gather data on project progress, team velocity, and cycle time to make data-driven decisions and improve predictability.
Focus on Delivering Value: Always prioritize delivering value to the customer over completing tasks. Focus on the most important features first.
Cross-Functional Teams: Ensure that teams are cross-functional, with members possessing a variety of skills necessary to complete all aspects of a user story.
Transparent Communication: Maintain open and transparent communication within the team and with stakeholders to foster collaboration and trust.
Limit Scope Creep: Be vigilant about scope creep and manage changes through the proper channels, such as backlog grooming and sprint planning.
Invest in Training: Provide ongoing training and development opportunities for team members to keep their skills up-to-date.
Celebrate Achievements: Acknowledge and celebrate team achievements, both big and small, to boost morale and motivation.
Adapt and Learn: Continuously learn from project experiences and adapt your agile approach accordingly to refine processes and achieve better results.

Conclusion

Agile development is a dynamic and adaptive method of executing tasks. This process focuses more on collaboration, flexibility and delivering a finished product rather than extensive documentation.

To embrace the principles of agility the team needs to immerse oneself into the culture of continuous improvement; be it in one’s professional or personal life.

To implement agile in your professional life you need agile project management tools. One of the best software for managing the agile development process is Orangescrum. It gives you a complete view of all your tasks and activities, and lets you manage projects remotely.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are Agile Project management Tools?

Agile Project Management is one of the various types of project methodologies.

It is an interactive approach that is used for the successful delivery of a project throughout its Lifecycle. This includes several iteration steps for completing the project.

Agile Project management focuses on delivering maximum value against the priorities of the business.