Are we Agile is a question a lot of us ask, and a lot of us strive to be, but as an agency, it’s hard to be fully agile or traditional, so we tend to do a mix both. Working with clients in the tech industry, studying and evaluating different methods, we have found pulling from both Agile and Traditional Project Management Methods has given us opportunities to cater to how our clients work the best.
The Agile methods we have found beneficial are Sprint Planning, User Stories, Standups, and constant Collaboration.
Every Friday, we meet internally to plan our sprints. We found we are most successful when we get together with our project team to prepare what we will get done each week. This meeting helps our team know when they have accomplished everything needed for the week. During Sprint Planning, we ensure that all of our tasks have user stories giving a clear understanding of the specific task needs. Daily, our teams have Standup, and we review the tasks planned for the day to answer questions or give additional insight into what we need to accomplish. We manage all of our work within Asana, which allows us to track progress visually and collaborate timely.
There are a handful of traditional project management practices that are crucial to the success of our project. We have found creating a project source of truth document containing much of what is outlined within traditional project management has reduced the number of open questions our teams may have. We suggested creating a place to document the stakeholder register, collection of requirements, and define the scope, which we share with the client after our initial project kickoff to ensure we are aligned. Our scope document also contains our known risks and any project exclusions. One of the areas that have brought us the most success has been moving our entire company to Asana and implementing the Work Breakdown Structure, which is a significant component of traditional project management.
We believe that having the right plan in place, continually evaluating how we can make projects more efficient, being able to identify issues and move on them quickly really matters to the success of a project.
References:
- Agile Methodology
- Traditional Project Management Methodology
- Asana: Project Management Software