More than 7 in 10 companies use some or the other agile approaches for managing their projects or teams. The different agile methods and best practices are based on the values and principles that are documented in the Agile Manifesto. Organizations such as CISCO, Lego, The National Bank of Canada are adopting agile for their teams. Why?
There are many reasons from getting constant feedback, having early ROI, increasing efficiency and customer satisfaction to having faster delivery cycles. Brucira brings to you 5 such practices that will help you achieve all that.
1. Kanban
Kanban is a visual means of managing projects. It defines and controls the team’s tasks’ flow. You can also see your team’s progress so far and what’s coming up next. A typical kanban board consists of three columns: “To do”, “In progress” and “Done”. Trello is one example of what Kanban looks like.
You can also modify the cards using different colors or formats to suit your team’s requirements. For example, for your content marketing team, you could divide the entire work process into 5 stages: brainstorming, research, to write, in review and published.
The benefits of adopting Kanban for your team are:
- Everyone knows who is doing what and it’s easy to know when a task is stuck somewhere. All the employee needs to do is show what points are blocking his activity.
- Bottlenecks are easy to identify and resolve and thus improvisation of workflows and delivery rate can take place.
- It helps reduce wastage of time as you work solely on tasks that are needed at present or that help move the project forward.
2. Scrum
Scrum is somewhat similar to Kanban in the sense that the workflow is divided into columns. The difference being, in Scrum, the project is broken down into sprints and these sprints have a specific time period ranging from 1 week to 4 weeks or even more. The scrum master is the central figure who eliminates all obstacles and makes sure the work is carried out efficiently. The product owner on the other hand prioritizes the various tasks and provides timely feedback.
The various advantages of the scrum method are:
- Mistakes can be identified earlier and corrections can take place. This leads to an ideal environment of innovation while using Scrum.
- If you find out that your client wants a new feature, you can easily redefine priorities in the planning of a new sprint, thus not having to harm the project as a whole.
- As the work is broken down into sprints and constant feedback is there, the avenue for rework at the final stages is reduced.
3. OKRs
OKR means “Objectives and Key Results”. It is used by teams to set challenging goals with measurable results. The objective should inspire the team and represent a real need for the company whereas the key results serve as a benchmark and monitor how the team needs to get to the objective.
An example would be:
Objective: Grow our global business
Key results:
- Hit global sales target of $75 million
- Increase upsells by 25%
- Reduce churn to less than 7% annually
- Increase year on year sales growth by 45%
The benefit of this method is that everyone knows exactly what to do and what results to achieve and if there’s a lag in meeting some KRs, appropriate action can be taken which can lead to continuous improvement.
4. Design sprints
What if you spent months working on a product but when you shared it with your customers, the result was an utter failure? Not only did your efforts go to waste but you could have spent that time working on a requested feature from your clients or bettering your existing product.
What if I were to tell you could engage in prototyping and testing ideas with your end users in just 5 days? The sprint design cycle for this purpose is broken up into 5 stages:
- Map out the problem
- Brainstorm and come up with solutions
- Turn your ideas into testable hypothesis
- Make a prototype and
- Test it with your audience
Design sprints help validate hypotheses quickly and thus correct mistakes faster without compromising the entire project. Not only that, you can find the most appropriate solution for your app or website that is liked by the audience and thus help you gain more efficiency.
Are you interested to know how to better work with your teams? We have specially built Brutask that is a simple and easy task management app for small teams that require regular updates. You can check it out here: https://brutask.com/
Want to know more about web design services? Reach out to us at [email protected].
Check out our blog for more useful articles on UX, UI and development: https://blog.brucira.com/
