12 Steps To Getting a Rock-Solid Agile Workflow
Product development without an agile workflow would be like building a house without a blueprint or defined roles on the construction team. No one knows what to do or who does what. 🤔
The result: time and energy wasted building a single house that would most likely reveal its darkest flaws over the years.
So, here’s what you need to know: Process increases efficiency. It also increases efficacy, customer satisfaction, and a better experience for the team members who take a part in the process.
Follow this how-to guide to building and implementing an agile workflow in Jira. In this article, we’ll cover what an agile workflow is and define the steps for its creation and its principles in depth.
The notion of workflow
The execution of a team's work is dictated by one or more processes. In other words, a process is a way the team gets to the finish line with deliverables. And if you're developing products with an agile framework, an agile workflow is a way to structure that process.
Generally, a workflow is made out of:
- Activities, tasks, and steps
- Roles
- Work products
- A few other things to help improve team collaboration and work execution
With such a structure, it gets easier:
- To repeat the process
- For team members to work with each other
- To scale the process and the work itself
It seems like a workflow is so well-organized that teamwork would flow smoothly just because it exists. Well, that's not the case. In the next section, you'll learn that there's not a workflow for any team or project. Instead, there are one or more workflows that work for your team or your project.
Why there's no one-size-fits-all workflow
The size and maturity of teams have an impact on their workflows. Also, the type of project and both company culture and team culture influence the configuration of workflows. Bottom line: Your agile workflow will depend on many factors, and it’ll likely be unique.
You might, however, find online suggestions of workflows that prove to work with other companies. So, if you prefer, you might use those as a starting point for the definition of your own workflow. It might be the case that excluding some steps does the trick for you. On the other hand, you might define your own workflow from scratch.
Jira is a very versatile solution for workflow management that supports many different agile workflows.
With Jira, you may customize workflows to different company cultures or team cultures. In this context, culture means the way team members work with each other. In the same vein, a workflow expresses the dynamics of a team in one or more projects.
Now, if we're talking about Jira workflows, you should know what one of those contains.
What's a Jira workflow exactly?
A Jira workflow is an agile workflow built on top of and implemented with the help of Jira. It's a digital board that allows checking the statuses of work items. It may also send notifications when those items change status. You can also use your Jira board for Scrum meetings such as daily standups and sprint retrospectives.
You absolutely need to keep the statuses of ALL work items accurate. That means updating the status of each work item whenever and as soon as it changes.
Only an up-to-date agile workflow — and Jira board — fulfills its purpose and delivers benefit. It's an awesome tool for team members, Product Owners, and Scrum Masters to track work progress at all times.
Let's move on to our guide now. You'll find out, one tip at a time, how to become an agile workflow rockstar with the help of Jira.
Your guide for agile workflow in Jira
Start your engines! You're heading on a fabulous learning journey about the creation and management of agile workflows in Jira. Here are our best tips to make this process happen:
1. Start now
Don't postpone getting your hands dirty with workflow definition.
Even if you start simple, just get started. Don't delude yourself into thinking that you'll succeed at agile if you start big. In fact, that could work against you and your project.
2. Don't overwork
Don't spend weeks structuring, restructuring, and then restructuring your workflow some more.
Overworked workflows are hard to understand and much harder to implement and comply with. That would harm the basic principles of agile methodology.
With an overloaded workflow, you'd end with team members not knowing what to do and when to do it. Consequently, at the end of the sprint — or iteration — and project, no deliverables would be ready to roll out.
3. Don't forget about workflow stakeholders
You should account for roles that will somehow use the workflow you're defining. Whereas some will use it daily to get work done, others will use it only for some kind of management analysis.
You should understand with them what their workflow needs are. It'll take time, so you must be patient.
4. Understand the concept of ‘issue’ in Jira
In project management, an issue describes a problem for which there's no solution yet. Those issues come from risks to the project's development process and ultimate success. For instance, adding a functionality to the project scope — the issue — could come from the possibility of requirement changes — the risk.
However, in Jira, an issue doesn't necessarily represent a problem. Rather, it represents a piece of work that teams must complete. For instance, a Jira issue can be a task or a helpdesk ticket.
With software development, a Jira issue may symbolize more specific concepts such as:
- Product features and functionality that the development team must implement
- Bugs that must be solved
5. Know the pieces of the puzzle
In Jira, a workflow has four types of components:
- Status. This indicates the position of an issue in the workflow. It can be an open — or unresolved — status or a closed — or resolved — status.
- Transition. This defines how an issue changes status, and it can be either uni or bidirectional. You can create more or fewer constraints depending on how statuses change. You can even define that only certain people or certain roles can change an issue from one specific status to another.
- Assignee. This is the person responsible for an issue.
- Resolution. This describes why an issue went from open to closed statuses. Additionally, it should only stick to an issue while it’s resolved.
In software teams or projects, it's common to find statuses such as:
- "To Do" for issues yet to start
- "In Progress" for issues that the team already started to tackle
- "Code Review" for completed coding tasks that need a review
- "Quality Assurance" for completed issues that require testing by a team of testers
- "Done" for completed, reviewed, and tested work
When a code review is successful, the work is done. In this example, the code review's success is a transition from the status "Code Review" to the status "Done." And the resolution would be the reason why the code review failed.
Finally, you can set up transitions with:
- Conditions. They prevent an inadequate role from changing the status of an issue.
- Validators. These ensure a transition only occurs under certain circumstances. If not, the transition doesn't happen.
- Post functions. They describe actions on issues besides changing their status, and you can automate them. For instance, remove the resolution from a resolved issue before changing its status back to unresolved. Another example would be to remove the assignee from that issue.
- Properties. These are characteristics of transitions. For example, one characteristic could be to only show resolutions relevant to the type of issue.
6. Define ‘done’
Every team is unique. It’s made up of different people, different habits, and different experiences with technology and methods. Different ways of getting work done. This means you need to define what “work done” means to your team or your project.
For instance, you need to answer the following questions for your team or project:
- What status should a product or a feature have when it’s approved to launch or release?
- What should your team members do to get each work product to that status?
- Who should make decisions — such as approvals — along the way, which decisions, and at which points?
- Who declares work as done?
7. Customize Jira default workflow
Remember that you could use Jira to customize workflows to different ways of working as a team? Here’s how to do it:
Step #1: Define your workflow's statuses and transitions in Jira workflow designer.
You may go with Jira default Scrum or Kanban workflow — Jira classic templates — or make some changes to it. Alternatively, you may choose the Jira simplified Scrum workflow, which is adequate for reasonably basic requirements.
The simplified version of the Scrum workflow contains:
- Three statuses: "To Do", "In Progress", and "Done"
- Two transitions: from "To Do" to "In Progress" and from "In Progress" to "Done"
- Four columns to organize issues distributed across boards: "Backlog," "Selected for Development," "In Progress," and "Done"
Step #2: Build your workflow by adding components to the simplified Scrum workflow.
To track issue progress in agile development, you might add statuses such as "Code Review" and "Quality Assurance." And, you might add a validator to the transition from "Code Review" to "Done" to force that you need a successful code review to mark “Done.”
In addition, you might include approval stages in the workflow such as "Awaiting QA." These stages are prior to those in which an issue is closed or changes to a closed status.
Step #3: Nail the visual presentation of the diagram.
Once you finish tailoring the workflow to your team or project, make sure that the diagram is visually readable. That's essential when sharing the diagram with stakeholders for feedback. You should collect feedback from at least one representative of each kind of stakeholder.
An interesting feature of Jira is the workflow lets you give visual highlight of issues. This lets you see where the issue is in the workflow according to its status. Just open the issue and click on the "View Workflow" button next to the issue's status.
8. Rely on Jira reports for progress tracking
Jira provides two useful reports for tracking the team's work progress on a sprint:
- The Burndown Chart, which shows:
- The amount of work left to do in a sprint
- The work that team members are executing at the moment
- The distribution of work throughout the sprint
- Whether issues fit into the sprint and the effort estimation was adequate
- The Sprint Report, which includes:
- The Burndown Chart
- A list of open and closed issues for that sprint
- Extra work added to the sprint
As with any other report, Jira reports allow you to reason about success and failure. In this case, it's the success and failure of each sprint in terms of:
- Effort estimation
- Team performance
- Process irregularities
- Sprint planning
Most importantly, you can use Jira reports for the continuous improvement of those aspects and preventing problems such as:
- Too much work for a sprint
- Rushing work
- Sudden changes in priorities
A Jira workflow comes in handy when detecting outliers in the development process such as:
- A large number of open issues
- Frequent issue reopening
- A high number of unplanned issues added to the sprint
Being able to detect these problems is extremely valuable in that it helps avoid a massive sprint failure.
9. Share information
People at your company who aren't members of your team might need information from your workflow. So, take that into consideration when defining your team or project's workflow.
Those people might need to know about:
- The amount of completed work
- The product backlog dimension when compared to team performance
- The number of open and closed issues or the number of issues in a specific status
- The average issue completion time
- The average number of issues that take too long or experience bottlenecks, which means not moving forward at specific statuses such as "Quality Assurance"
10. Keep it simple
⚠️It can be tempting to create issue statuses while moving issues through the workflow, but don't do it! Each additional status adds more transitions and all their customized characteristics.
❌If your workflow already allows you to assess the sprint and feed your stakeholders with valuable information, that's just perfect. You don't need to add more issue statuses to it.
✔️Add extra issue statuses only when you have no other option. For instance, when different teams need to track work in different stages of development, you might need different statuses.
11. Limit work in progress
You may determine a specific limit to the number of issues in a specific status. When doing so, you should make sure all the team has enough work at each workflow status.
Plus, you should ensure that the limits you introduce into the workflow don't exceed the team's capacity. If you don't, the team will need to prioritize and you may not want that to happen.
Team performance should increase if you set the right work-in-progress limits. 🤗
12. Prepare to scale up
Agile teams should be small. Nevertheless, an agile workflow should cope with an increase in the number of people working with it. This means no one should notice if an increase takes place.
Here are some golden rules for scaling agile workflows:
- Agree on agile practices for workflow definition and minimize customization when multiple teams working on their own projects must collaborate.
- Different teams working on the same project should use the same workflow, or things could get messy.
- Teams should compromise when defining a common workflow. However, that's when teams build workflows based on multiple past successful experiences.
What else can you do?
Whenever you hear about workflows, it’s a sign that the work’s execution is being structured. It's also a sign of a long way ahead, but the outcome will be awesome if you:
- Follow the 12 rules above
- Choose a flexible issue tracker in terms of workflow customization, such as Jira
- Complement the issue tracker with the right apps
Don't force your team or project to comply with a tool. 😨 Rather, do the exact opposite! Choose the tool that allows you to build and implement the right workflow for your context.
That will increase throughput and workflow compliance levels, which is exactly what you want when creating a workflow.
Keep your agile approach strong — streamline, discuss, and iterate. These are the keywords for building and implementing an agile workflow, so don't forget them for a single second! As a result, you'll avoid:
- Complicating the workflow when it's not absolutely necessary
- Disregarding the pains of stakeholders and team members have when using or viewing the workflow
- Having an outdated workflow that's no longer adequate for both the company culture and the team culture
Kick your agile workflow up a notch
Easy Agile TeamRhythm helps you build and implement a Scrum workflow in Jira. Optimize your agile workflow by:
- Visualizing what the team will deliver and when by arranging user stories into sprint swimlanes
- Prioritizing user stories in each sprint by ordering them inside the respective sprint swimlane
- Reviewing sprint statistics at a glance to ensure that the team's capacity isn't exceeded
- Registering effort estimation in user stories.
Related Articles
WorkflowScrum Workflow: Roles, Stages, and Automation Options
You can stick to manual Scrum workflow, or you can automate with free Jira software. We know which method we prefer.
Whichever you choose, implementing the Scrum framework creates a streamlined workflow. Each person has a specific role throughout the framework's steps.
The Scrum workflow provides team members with a simple process to help teams meet stakeholder needs.
While agile methodology aligns with Scrum, Kanban, and Lean, here, we’ll focus on what a Scrum workflow is and how this methodology can support organizational teamwork.
What is Scrum?
Teams use the Scrum framework to guide their workflow. Having a structure to follow means they can easily share, track and improve their deliverables.
Scrum divides work into smaller work parcels known as sprints, which typically last 2-4 weeks. Once the sprint is over, team members do a sprint retrospective meeting (also known as a sprint review) to chat about what worked well and what can be improved.
Scrum roles
Let’s look at the different roles that make up a Scrum team.
1. Product owner
The product owner has a core role in the Scrum workflow. They guide agile team discussions about product backlog items and features. In addition, product owners guide quality assurance to make sure deliverables are up to par.
2. Scrum Master
The Scrum Master will closely follow the principles in the agile manifesto to support sprint planning. Scrum masters guide development teams through agile methods to add value for stakeholders.
3. Software development team
Development teams are skillful and cross-functional. Teams that work in agile software development environments will typically include designers, developers, testers, and others to prevent the need for external assistance.
With the basics in place, we can take a closer look at the agile workflow stages.
Components of the Scrum workflow
The Jira workflow involves an iterative feedback cycle that focuses on creating value throughout the product development process. You can use the basic Scrum workflow steps or customize these.
The parts of an agile workflow are as follows.
1. Backlog development
A product roadmap guides team members in creating user stories and product requirements, which make up the sprint backlog. In the backlog, teams propose a list of features or user stories that the team must deliver. Product owners decide which features will make up the backlog.
2. Backlog release
Produce owner and team collaboration now decide which user stories will make it into each backlog release. Each backlog release is the completion of a smaller set of activities which eventually make up a sprint release. After completing this planning and setting timeframes for each action item, team members choose specific features for each sprint.
3. Sprint work
In a sprint, team members complete a set of backlog tasks within predetermined timeframes (usually 14-28 days). During this time, the agile team builds the product features from a specific sprint backlog.
Scrum or sprint meeting
Teams also hold Scrum or sprint meetings. During sprint meetings, the team sets a sprint goal (usually work on a specific feature). They agree on which product backlog items to complete in order to complete this product iteration. The team will prioritize, plan, and estimate the time needed to complete each task within the sprint.
Daily stand-ups
Agile teams use these daily standup meetings to track their agile workflow towards meeting sprint goals. Daily standup meetings are typically held — naturally — standing up, as they should last no more than 15 minutes. Standup meetings help teams discuss solutions to daily work issues.
4. The burndown chart
Team members can use Jira software to create their burndown charts. Burndown charts show original time estimates compared to real-time activities, which shows where expectations or team resources need to be adjusted.
5. Testing
During testing, the team demonstrates product functionalities for stakeholders. Feedback from product testing guides any needed changes.
6. Sprint retrospective and follow-up planning
The final phase of the Jira workflow is to hold a sprint retrospective. Sprint retrospectives are post-mortems on the previous workflow. At this stage, agile teams question what they did well, what didn't go as they hoped, and what changes they should make in the next sprint. Groups hold these sprint retrospectives to concentrate on better value deliverables through continuous improvement.
Jira software offers a visual display of the team's velocity, task progress, and project status. All these elements link back to the user story, and the group begins a new lifecycle to complete their project.
Create your Jira Scrum workflow in a few simple steps
You can either carry on using a manual Scrum process or transition to an automated Jira workflow for Scrum.
To create an automated, custom workflow, go to the Jira workflow designer. From there, you can manage the workflow scheme for your Jira project. You can also organize backlogs, complex workflows, workflow statuses, or view an issue status using custom fields.
In your workflow, you can:
- Use statuses like "In progress" or "Under review."
- View status items on lines for transitions.
- See issue resolutions.
- Check conditions that restrict assignee roles in bumping up issues to the following stage.
- Use validators to limit who can make transitions.
- Link further changes with transitions.
- Use triggers for automating transitions within specific parameters.
- Set workflow properties for transitions.
- Establish a link between the simple or complex workflow and issue types using workflow schemes.
As the agile team goes through the product lifecycle in a series of sprints, they need a tool to guide their journey.
With the free Easy Agile Scrum Workflow for Jira plugin, you can move Jira issues between the "To do," "In progress," and "Done" sections. You can also use the top right button to drag and drop specific issue types in the "Backlog" and "Selected for development" areas on the board.
More features from the Jira workflow plugin
In terms of automation, plenty of tools are available. You can use Easy Agile’s free Jira workflow plugin as valuable support for agile project management. This can help you create complex workflows and save all the details in the Jira cloud, ensuring nothing is ever lost. The free Jira workflow plugin also includes your burndown chart and sprint report.
Add the Confluence wiki tool to your Jira software for greater team collaboration. Also, use the Team Calendars add-on for better team collaboration.
Automate your Jira workflow now
Don’t wait for providence to come knocking on your door. Automate your Scrum workflow today with software that works.
We design agile apps for Jira with simple, collaborative, and flexible functionality. From team agility with Easy Agile TeamRhythm, to scaled agility with Easy Agile Programs, our apps can help your agile teams work better together, and deliver for your customers.
WorkflowHow to Simplify Your Workflow With Visual Task Management
How organized are your Jira boards? On the scale of “well-thought-user-stories-beautifully-prioritized-by-customer-value” to “the-digital-equivalent-of-a-90’s-era-laminate-desk-cluttered-by-sticky-notes-and-old-coffee-cups”, where do yours sit?
It might be time to find a tool to help you whip your Jira issues into shape. And the best way to keep things in shape is to visualize the work in one place.
Read on for tips and to see how Easy Agile TeamRhythm helps you prioritize work effectively.
Visual task management
Put simply, when you can see something clearly, it’s easier to understand and manage. Enter: visual task management.
Visual task management uses boards to display and track work, which can give you a view of complex project tasks that makes it easier to comprehend.
For those of us who work in Jira, well yes we can see our epics, stories and tasks on the screen, but it isn’t always clear how they relate to each other.
That’s where a tool like a User Story Map, such as the one in Easy Agile TeamRhythm, offers so much value.
Get to the benefits
Giving yourself the ability to visualize your work comes with a long list of benefits. When your whole team can see the work laid out before them, communication is easier and teamwork can improve.
1. Consistent communication
Local and remote teams can see the same view of work from any location. Epics across the backbone with linked issues lined up beneath. When work is added or changed, you still have a central source of truth that is shared by everyone, no matter where they’re located.
2. A time-saving tool
Sprint or version planning is quick and easy when team members have all the information they need in a single view. Planning is much easier when initiatives, epics, user stories and subtasks along with story points and goals, can all be seen in one place.
Easy Agile TeamRhythm provides this all-in-one view, along with the ability to create and estimate new issues on the story map, and sequence them with drag and drop. Easy.
3. Avoid unexpected roadblocks
Ever had a release derailed by an unexpected dependency? For a smooth and dependable release, you need visibility of issues that are dependent on others.
We’ve made it easy to visualize the dependencies between issues on the TeamRhythm User Story Map, so you can avoid unexpected delays and keep delivering value to your customers.
You can choose to see dependencies between issues that are on the same board (internal dependencies), and where one issue is on another board (external dependencies). This gives you a clear picture of how work should be prioritized so that you avoid roadblocks and manage delays before they become a problem.
Read more: Dependency lines on the TeamRhythm User Story Map >>
4. Productivity increases
Working life is better when you can see how your contribution makes a difference. When everyone in the team can see how their work is important, and ideas for how to do things better start to flow, that’s when you start smashing your goals.
We’ve designed Easy Agile TeamRhythm to help teams focus on continuous improvement. That is something for everyone to get excited about because the team leads with their ideas for how they can make their working life better. Turn those ideas into Jira issues in just a few clicks so you can put things into action in the very next sprint.
TeamRhythm helps you see what to do first
Laid out clearly in a User Story Map format, with the ability to overlay a map of dependency lines, TeamRhythm makes it really clear which issues need to be tackled first to make sure that you can keep delivering for your customers.
Everyone in the team has an instant view of their priorities. Communication is streamlined. Collaboration is simplified and productivity increases. Doesn’t that sound great?!
Watch a demo, learn about pricing, and try for yourself in our sandbox. Visit the Easy Agile TeamRhythm Features and Pricing page for more.
Easy Agile TeamRhythm
Agile Best PracticeAgile Implementation: How to Choose an Approach and Framework
“Agile” is a simple word that means quite a lot today. What was once resigned to software developers and product development is now commonplace in many businesses, and agile implementation is showing no sign of slowing down.
It all boils down to this: Businesses today must be able to adapt fast.
The rigid approaches that worked for years don’t fit our rapidly changing business landscapes. Businesses of all shapes and sizes need to continually adapt to changing requirements, the changing needs of a global economy, cultural shifts, and evolving technological advancements.
It’s clear that agile is the way of the future, but how do you implement such a massive change across an organization, especially enterprises? Do you need a top-down approach, a bottom-up approach, or something in between? Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of agile and how to choose the best agile implementation approach.
Are you practicing SAFe®?
Bring the SAFe® Program Board into Jira
Why switch to an agile approach?
We’ve covered the benefits of agile in detail in our Beginner's Guide to Agile Methodology, but let’s recap some of the key points and why so many businesses are choosing to make the switch.
Agile practices focus on an iterative approach that continually adapts to new information and circumstances. By contrast, traditional project management generally adopts a waterfall approach — the project manager lays out a plan at the beginning of a project that the project team is expected to follow to the letter.
The problem with the traditional project management process is that it leaves little room to quickly grow and evolve. Agile project management and agile software development, on the other hand, need feedback and iterations at every turn. Agile teams test early and often to ensure they are on the right path, and they make adjustments in real-time.
The benefits of agile methods are far-reaching — that’s why we love it! Though it may take time to implement, agile is a worthy investment for any future-focused organization.
Additional benefits of agile:
- Managers can more easily account for the capacity of individuals and entire teams.
- The team can better manage work in progress (WIP).
- Everyone can clearly visualize the prioritization of tasks.
- Bottlenecks or roadblocks are addressed before they halt progress.
- Wasteful processes are eliminated or changed to improve efficiency.
- Multiple voices are included in the decision-making process.
- Teams can make iterations on products or projects in real-time.
- Stakeholders, customers, and end users are involved in your processes.
- Teams can provide continuous delivery to customers and stakeholders.
- Collaboration and teamwork improve.
With Easy Agile Programs you can equip your distributed or co-located teams to implement the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) without leaving Jira.
Agile implementation: Top-down or bottom-up?
So, you believe in agile and you’re ready to make it happen, but what’s the best approach? Do you implement it from the top-down or bottom-up? Let’s find out!
A top-down approach to agile implementation starts with those in charge. It often begins with management or business owners who hear about the benefits of agile and want their business to adopt agile practices. The problem is, when an idea only comes from the top, it can catch the rest of the organization off guard. If those in charge don’t give enough notice or provide all of the necessary resources and time to implement new ways of working, employees can become resentful and push back against the change.
On the other hand, when agile implementation comes from the bottom-up, leadership can push back. Teams and team leaders may want to improve their processes and adopt new ways of working, but they may not get adequate support or resources when they need them. It can take time to convince those in charge of the benefits of agile, which can take away from the time needed to actually learn and implement agile practices.
A hybrid approach
The good news is you don’t need to pick just one. The best approach for your business may turn out to be a hybrid approach. The more people you have on board, the better.
Agile implementation is easiest and most effective when as many people as possible buy into the process. It’s best if you have buy-in throughout multiple levels of your organization, from employees to managers to owners to CEOs.
Push-back on change is quite common in organizations, no matter the industry. It’s important to have people throughout the company who believe in the value of agile, are passionate about agile processes, and are excited about the possibilities agile presents.
Choosing an agile framework
As you implement agile principles, you’ll need to choose the framework that works best for your team. Depending on the needs of your team and organization, you may choose to adopt one framework or establish a mixture of frameworks.
Below, we’ll outline a few popular agile methodologies.
Scrum
Scrum is a strange word that’s very popular as a software development process. It’s a series of events that revolve around repeating sprints. One sprint (or Scrum) begins with sprint planning. The product owner reviews the product backlog, which represents all of the work that needs to be completed. They choose which items/tasks are the most important for the upcoming sprint and move those tasks into the sprint backlog.
Next, the development team, guided by the Scrum Master, works over a two-week span to complete the sprint backlog. Each day, the team meets for daily standups, which allow the team to go over what was accomplished over the previous 24 hours and discuss any possible roadblocks that stand in the way of the team completing work.
Lastly, the team completes a sprint review to gather feedback from stakeholders. They also conduct a sprint retrospective to discuss what went well and what didn’t over the course of the sprint. The insights are carried over into the next sprint to help all team members keep improving.
Wow! 🤯 That was a whirlwind explanation of Scrum. If you want to understand the process in more detail, we cover Scrum in a number of other guides, including the difference between Kanban and Scrum and guides to Scrum sprint planning and Scrum retrospectives.
Kanban
The Kanban framework is a visual process that helps teams manage the amount of work in progress. It allows teams and team leaders to see an at-a-glance view of what’s currently in progress and what’s on the horizon.
A Kanban board has three sections: to-do, doing, and done. Tasks flow throughout these sections one at a time to ensure no one is taking on more than one task at once. This ensures focus is always put on work in progress, no one gets bogged down with too many tasks, and potential bottlenecks are discovered before they impede productivity.
Chances are you’ve seen a Kanban board in action in some form or another. Trello is an example of an interactive Kanban board. The Kanban framework can be used on its own or paired with other frameworks, such as Scrum.
Lean
The lean methodology focuses on eliminating waste to improve efficiency. Lean follows five main principles: identify value, map the value stream, create flow, establish a pull system, and seek perfection.
Lean aims to waste less time by ensuring processes, communication, and the transfer of products or services run smoothly. When waste is eliminated and time is optimized, businesses can reduce costs. Efficiency is paired with a continuous improvement mindset, which helps teams work better together and deliver ever-improving products and services.
➡️ Learn more: Understanding Lean Agile and the 5 Lean Principles.
These are only a few popular agile methodologies. To learn more, read our article on 8 Software Development Methodologies Explained.
Seamless agile implementation
Agile implementation works best when people at all levels of the organization buy into the agile transformation. A top-down approach means the leadership is on board, but it forces employees to adopt a new way of working, and they may not be comfortable with the change. When it’s the other way around, employees, team members, and team leaders will struggle to implement agile without the support from those in charge and the people who allocate resources. A hybrid approach is often ideal, where as many people as possible are excited about and invested in the transition.
With the right tools, agile implementation becomes even easier. Easy Agile is dedicated to helping teams work better with agile. We design products that highlight the customer journey and allow teams to collaborate with each other seamlessly.
Easy Agile Programs is simple to use, collaborative, flexible, and it integrates directly with Jira. You can contact our team at any time to learn more about our suite of Jira products!