Agile Project Management: Requirements, Planning and Tracking
Whilst ‘Agile’ is a descriptor originally born out of software development teams, it’s becoming more common in other areas — like marketing and project management. But just what does it involve? Agile project management is an iterative approach to delivering something (whether that’s a piece of software, a product, or a project) throughout its life cycle.
Some key principles to bear in mind are:
- Iteration — small, incremental steps, rather than large tasks
- Collaboration — both across teams and with your potential customer base
- Reflection — getting feedback every step of the way and implementing it as you go
- Integration — planning and execution happen side-by-side, instead of linearly
Agile project management has many benefits. It encourages engagement and flexibility, and lets you build towards a final project with feedback on the way, rather than at the end.
If this sounds like something that would work for you, read on. We’re going to take a look at the requirements, how to plan, and how to track:
Requirements
Be Open To Learning
Adopting ‘Agile’ as a principle involves learning a lot of new terminology and practices.
If you and your team aren’t willing to spend the time learning this, you’ll fail at the first hurdle. That’s not to say every employee has to understand each tiny detail before you can start. Everyone, though, needs to know the basics, and your management team must be familiar with the nuances.
Make sure anyone involved in new hire onboarding has a strong understanding, as they’ll be responsible for introducing new staff to the concept. Some terms that you definitely need to know are:
- Sprint — a short development cycle, also known as a timebox or iteration
- Backlog — work that still needs to be finished
- Waterfall — a linear method (the opposite of Agile — what you want to be avoiding!)
- Scrum — a methodology involving regular meetings about sprints
- Stories — requirements or requests from the perspective of an end user
- Velocity — a measurement of work accomplished in each sprint
- Burndown charts — a representation of what you have left to do compared to the time you have
There’s a lot more to learn beyond this, but being open to learning is vital to implementing Agile project management.
Be Communicative
You can’t be Agile if your team doesn’t collaborate.
Regular communication is a huge part of this method. Whether that’s in-person meetings, video calls with screenshare and text chat, or email, it needs to be a regular part of your process.
Some teams using Agile have daily scrums, but you don’t necessarily need to do this. Depending on what you’re working on, you might want to have weekly all-hands meetings and then smaller check-ins with individual teams.
Using a project management platform can help with keeping your team up-to-date without filling their inboxes with minor questions. Finding the right level of collaborative communication might take a bit of time, but err on the side of more, not less.
It’s important to encourage cross-team communication here too, especially if you’re all working remotely. Since so much of the process relies on feedback, you’ll need to speak with your customer service team, and data analysts. The more of the company that’s involved — or at least, aware of — what you’re doing, the better it’ll go.
Make Sure Everyone’s On Board
Obviously, you need to make sure your team is on board. But don’t forget to get the management on side, too!
If the C-Suite doesn’t understand Agile and they’re expecting the process to look a certain way, it’ll add extra challenges. Make sure they’re aware of what it involves, how your budgetary needs may change, and what to expect.
It can help to have data on hand to show why you want to use Agile.
The Harvard Business Review gives an example of John Deere’s implementation. They found that switching to Agile for the Enterprise Advanced Marketing unit of the R&D group led to the following:
- Shorter innovation project cycle times, sometimes by over 75%
- Velocity increased, on average, by more than 200% — with some teams increasing over 400%
- Increased quality
- Team engagement and happiness — once in the bottom third of companywide scores — moved to the top third
It can also be worth looking into other new solutions your company has started using recently, and talking to the team who pushed it through. For instance, if you’ve recently adopted HR digitalisation, the HR team might have some tips on how they did it!
Embrace Risk
Agile can be a more risky method than waterfall, but it also has more benefits.
If you’re particularly risk-averse, it might not work for you. However, if you’re happy to embrace the idea of ‘failing fast’, you’ll excel.
By continuously moving forward and opening yourself up to feedback, you leave yourself vulnerable to the possibility of criticism early on.
You need a team who can see this criticism as a blessing, not a curse. By embracing the risk of failure and being willing to turn it in your favour, you’ll end up with a stronger project at the end. Just be aware it can be more challenging than your usual tactics.
Planning
Most businesses use what is known as ‘waterfall’ — you plan everything up front and then start work on it. Agile, however, doesn’t do this.
You’ll have a vague goal at the beginning and smaller subtasks on the way, but they’re subject to change.
Let’s walk through an example.
Your company is releasing a new ecommerce website. This involves work from a few different departments. You may even be outsourcing software development as part of the process.
You need the backend and frontend of the site, written content, photographs of products, cohesive brand image, customer service, marketing campaigns…and probably a lot more!
Waterfall
Waterfall project management would set an end goal for what they want the finished website to be. They’d assign tasks to certain teams, and only release the site when everything was finalised. There might be some communication between teams, like the content and marketing groups. However, other departments might never interact — like the developers and customer service.
Once the website is launched, you’ll start getting feedback.
You might find that your pre-existing customers find it hard to navigate, or that your customer service department is dealing with queries they didn’t expect. All of these challenges will happen at once, and you’ll need to decide how to resolve them.
Agile
Agile project management is very different. You have your end goal — a completed website — and you have some starting tasks in mind, but you’ll be much more open to adapting along the way. It could look something like this:
Sprint 1 — Get the backend up and running with basic stand-in content.
Feedback — Internally: does it work? How easy do other departments find it to upload content?
Sprint 2 — Adjust backend according to feedback. Content teams create photos/written content for a set number of products (perhaps the bestsellers). Frontend communicates with the marketing/design teams to implement basic brand image.
Feedback — Externally: solicit customer feedback and assess metrics. Is there a high bounce rate? Do they like the design? Have customer support had any particular complaints?
Sprint 3 — Split content team — some create new content for more products based on feedback, others update the already existing listings. Tweaks are made to the frontend.
Feedback — as in sprint 2
And so on!
You can already see the benefits of this more open-plan style. Things that are criticised are fixed earlier on. Rather than listing all 500 products you have and then having to go and rewrite them all based on feedback, you can trial with 50, and then adjust future content accordingly.
It speeds up the process — and also means you have an accessible website available much earlier.
Just make sure you have the technology for remote working in place before you start the process. You don’t want to be scrabbling for this whilst trying to collate feedback.
Tracking
Of course, with this different method of planning comes a different method of tracking. This is where you want to make sure you have dedicated project management tools. They’ll make it a lot easier! You want something that will let you:
- Handle task management — the ability to assign tasks to individuals and teams, as well as share associated files, time records, expenses and other relevant information
- Manage your backlog — prioritise stories and tasks, and accurately label and assign them
- Represent user stories — as individual cards or part of a larger story board
- Encourage collaboration — share task lists and feedback, and show off updates
- See Agile analytics — track velocity, team performance, and show burndown charts
Without a good tracking system in place, your project management will fall apart.
As Agile is so iterative, there tends to be lots and lots of small tasks, rather than a few larger ones. This is one of its benefits, but it also makes keeping track a bit harder.
For this reason, it may be worth trialling the process on one small project first to see how it works, rather than trying to implement it on everything.
Conclusion
Choosing the right style of project management for your business is critical. It can be the difference between success and failure of vital projects. If you’re looking for a more flexible style that encourages engagement, agile project management could be for you.
The iterative process lets you collect and act on feedback as you go. That shortens innovation cycles and can help you reach your goal more quickly. Just remember that for agile project management to work you need to embrace its nuances. That means being open to learning on the job, getting your whole team on board, and embracing some additional risk.
Author Bio: Sam O’Brien is the Senior Website Optimisation & User Experience Manager for EMEA at RingCentral, a global UCaaS systems provider. Sam has a passion for innovation and loves exploring ways to collaborate more with dispersed teams.
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