Are you spending your time looking for the most effective tools for project management? Let’s look at six of the best agile tools for project management and explore the reasons for using them.
Agile Project Management
From better project planning and implementation to striking a perfect balance between tasks, today’s fast-paced work culture demands a lot, including timely deliverables, without compromising quality. All this has made many organizations turn towards agile project management methodology.
Wondering why? Before we find that out, let’s first understand what it is.
Agile project management methodology refers to dividing an entire project into several tasks or phases. Each phase involves continuous collaboration with the project’s stakeholders and its team members and constant improvement.
But Why Should You Choose Agile Methodology?
- It speeds up the project by branching it into several smaller parts.
- It enables seamless communication and collaboration between project teams and stakeholders. That ensures the project doesn’t deviate from its goals at any stage.
- It allows frequent assessments and reassessments at every phase of the project. Such constant feedback minimizes glitches and saves time.
- It empowers the team to carry out adaptive planning and flexible implementation aligned with feedback and changes. That makes way for better project control compared to the traditional methodologies.
- The faster development process allows for early, rapid project delivery.
Now let’s take a look at four benefits of using it:
1. Excellent Product Quality
With agile project management, the product at hand undergoes frequent testing during the entire incremental project cycle, including automated testing. That minimizes the risks significantly and lets the team address issues in time. As a result, product quality gets a tremendous boost.
2. More Control and Flexibility
Thanks to the Agile approach, the planning, execution, feedback, and improvement loops are always ongoing. Thus, organizations are better able to adapt to changing requirements at all times, ensuring greater project control as a whole.
2. Greater ROI
The agile methodology is iterative. Meaning, the project features are prioritized and added incrementally. Hence, a functional, market-ready product with the desired benefits is achieved within a few iterations.
That helps gauge customer feedback and incorporate modifications accordingly, giving businesses an advantage over competitors and increased ROI.
Higher Customer Satisfaction
The agile project management provides for customer involvement right from the beginning till the end. There is increased transparency in customer needs, feedback, and changes in requirements, allowing the team to make apt updates to the project at the right time.
The result is elevated customer satisfaction and a final product that solves customer pain points.
Since we have looked at the benefits, it’s time to explore some of the best Agile project management tools available in the market. Here’s the list:
6 Best Agile Tools for Project Management
1. Asana
Asana is a preferable tool for managing agile projects globally. The tool has blended native agile characteristics, such as flexibility and collaboration, effectively to let your team work seamlessly.
Asana lets your agile project team plan, organize, and manage projects from beginning to end. The tool offers everything you need, from sprint planning, bug tracking, and product launches to product feedback and roadmap. The seamless communication between the team members acts as icing on the cake.
Moreover, you can easily track iterations, launch dates, and milestones to stay on track. There are Kanban boards and Timelines as well to boost development.
2. JIRA
JIRA is convenient for project management since it can be integrated with other vital tools like Confluence and Bitbucket.
Sprint planning, task distribution, and user story creation become more uncomplicated with this agile tool. Furthermore, there is complete transparency in process prioritization and team discussions. JIRA also offers access to real-time data so that your team can make real-time changes for optimum performance.
In addition, you can come up with your workflow for the project if the ones available in its pool don’t fit your needs.
3. Zoho Sprints
Zoho Sprints assists agile teams in improved planning and tracking. You can provide faster deliverables through this tool by always being prepared for change.
With Zoho Sprints, you can divide your project into user stories, move the top backlog to the next sprint, rely on release reports for planning and tracking releases, and receive early feedback. You can also leverage the release management module, scrum board, scrum reports, and sprint dashboard.
Additionally, it allows teams to connect in real time, schedule scrum meetings, and receive critical notifications. Like JIRA, it also offers workflow customization. You can also connect with other Zoho products and third-party applications hassle-freely.
4. Wrike
Wrike makes the assignment of projects and tasks more manageable. This agile project management tool helps your team implement sprints quicker and deliver continuously. Its templates allow you to begin from the word go.
Like other tools, Wrike enhances team communication and makes adapting to constant changes simpler. With Wrike, you can streamline multiple projects without getting jumbled up. What’s more, you can customize its workspace based on your unique needs.
Wrike also offers customizable, dynamic intake forms for better prioritization and automatic status reports for improved collaboration.
5. Hive
With Hive agile tool for project management, you can let your team manage the work the way they want to. While it offers Kanban and Gantt charts for your design and engineering team, it also packs in table and calendar views. The best thing is to switch between these views with the utmost ease.
Moreover, you can customize workflows and automate repetitive tasks through action templates. It’s also possible to create a personal “to-do” list to organize your tasks across all the projects you’re working on.
6. Pivotal Tracker
The Pivotal Tracker tool helps your agile team build user stories and keeps a close track of them – right from the “Start” phase to “Delivered.”
More fascinating about this agile tool is its automatic planning based on your team’s velocity. In simple terms, your previous work in the project forms your future direction.
With this tool, you can set up workspaces for multiple projects and manage them without hassles. It also offers analytics, integration with 140+ third-party applications, and many cross-functional features for high-quality and rapid shipping.
Conclusion
Agile tools for project management have been gaining much traction of late. These agile project management tools work as a small part of business process automation.
While we explored some of the best tools in this blog, you’d find a broader list in the market. Therefore, it’s even more important to carefully select the device that matches your requirements and is easier to use.
For that, you will need to try a few at first. Since most are available for free, please take the free trial and explore its features before purchasing one.
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Which Agile Project Management Tools Do You Use?
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