What is agile project management software and could it completely change how your team manages project?
Agile project management is reflective of the new mindset companies need to take on as a whole to succeed in the coming years. Without innovative solutions and ideas and a swift approach to bringing them to fruition, companies will not survive the changing business environment. Those companies that are able to execute quickly and effectively will forever have a competitive advantage. If you take a look at the world’s top performing companies, age and size don’t mean much anymore. There are very small teams overcoming large, traditional companies because they have the competitive advantage of agility. Implementing just a few changes to make your team approach projects and changes more efficiently can make a huge difference.
What is agile project management?
Agile project management is a highly collaborative, more transparent, and faster way to manage projects so teams can move with market trends effectively. Agile works based on customer feedback and making constant adjustments to meet market demands. Long gone are the days of hoping that what you’re spending large amounts of time and money on is worth the return. With Agile project management, teams work in short “sprints” towards goals and collect and incorporate feedback after each to ensure constant progression. This is how teams should approach a number of tasks.
An agile routine follow this pattern:
- Planning a sprint: An initial planning to determine what is to be completed in a sprint.
- Sprint demo: A meeting after to go over what was done and provide/collect feedback.
- Morning meetings: Short 15 minute meetings to sync goals.
- Retrospection: Review and incorporation of feedback moving forward.
How to really manage an agile project for better productivity:
For productivity for any project or teamwork in general, functionality in a few areas needs to be improved: communication, collaboration, and information sharing.
Communication:
Rarely to project planning softwares fix one of the biggest hindrances to productivity: outdated communication. If your team is well organized in terms of your planning and tasks but is still using email to work together, you’re being held back. Email is non-inclusive, disorganized, and time consuming; the opposite of agile. For better communication that matches the principles of collaboration and transparency of Agile, try using company chat like that in Hibox instead. Chat is intuitive, inclusive, and real time communication that allows for collaborative conversation in one central place everyone can be a part of. Company chat also improves idea generation as it eliminates perceived hierarchy and allows everyone a voice.
Additionally, Hibox allows groups to video chat with just one click. There is no need to go to another platform to start a group video conference. This eliminates the need for meetings that take up time but are not productive. No matter where they are located, team members can work face to face like they are in the same room. This is great for remote teams who want to improve communication, engagement, and clear up the team game plan quickly. Brainstorming and hashing out ideas is still best done “in person”. Hibox video calling helps your team act like a small agile startup no matter where you are.
Collaboration:
Working together in surprisingly difficult the current way a lot of teams are going about it. Work is not collaborative and is much more segregated than it should be for an agile team. Emailing various copies of files and working separately until it’s time to put something together is ripe for mistakes and miscommunications. Working together on shared documents in a platform like Hibox where delegating work clearly with detailed task management and sharing feedback and instruction with chat is a much more intuitive way. To stick with traditional methods, you can even create Kanban charts for projects and share them with your team as a visual guide in a Hibox chat and task stream.
Information sharing as a part of agile project management software:
Transparency is key to agile project management. Unfortunately, a lot of teams are not sharing key information and files in a way that is convenient and transparent for team members. This causes miscommunications and multiple versions of work. Information and files should well organized with tasks and easily accessible to avoid confusion, keep information central and private, and eliminate barriers to efficiency. With file sharing in Hibox, team members can share files directly within chat streams and attach them to tasks. This way there can also be active discussion and feedback around files in an organized way. All team members can find the latest versions of files shared in the central file list.
Agile project management is a fantastic method to apply towards projects to keep companies responsive to industry changes and on point with market demands all while staying as lean and efficient as possible. However, method is only as good as how you apply it. Using software like Hibox for agile project management software guarantees your team will have all of the functionality necessary to meet the principles of collaboration, transparency, and speed of agile project management. Try Hibox free with your team today.
