Agile Project Management and Hosted Collaboration

What is Agile Project Management?

Agile project management is a practice for managing development projects in a highly interactive and flexible way. It takes the iterative approach to determine the requirements of the customers. Agile project management’s goal is to reduce the duration of delivery. The delivery typically happens in stages and this practice of agile lays emphasis on the importance of collaboration not only with the teams but with the customers and other stakeholders as well.

If you are mentioning the word ‘agile’ from the project management or development point of view then you cannot avoid bringing in the comparison with the traditional waterfall project management approach. Whereas agile project management is certainly the new school of thought, it is not necessarily the best and has its own flaws just like the traditional waterfall approach to project management has some inherent flaws. The main point is to appreciate the benefits of each practice and adopt the one that suits best for your kind of projects in your organization. In fact, the beauty of the matter is (as some experts believe) that they can coexist also.

However, you cannot deny the importance of the role that the agile project management practices play in today’s world. The seamlessly integrates with the collaboration and social networking phenomena which have gained high importance in execution of any kind of undertaking – small projects at enterprise level to larger social movements running across the geographical boundaries, all to deliver the best results in the shortest possible time-span. The essence that has to be understood is that any disruptive methodology (such as cloud or agile methodologies in this case) which gradually becomes a practice, aims towards providing leaner structure to an enterprise. Agile project management provides the similar benefit where its practices strive to bring in lean development structures.

On Integration With Cloud Collaboration Tools

Unlike waterfall project management approach, agile project management focuses on all possible stakeholders in a project – programmers, testers, management, customers and vendors. Agile methodologies focus on delivering completed, tested and deployable products at frequent stages, thereby reducing the total time-to-delivery. As a natural fallout, agile project management requires highly efficient collaboration among all the stakeholders to achieve (agile’s) set values and goals.

Aligning with the agile manifesto, the agile project management practice too promotes having lean development teams along with the iterative and collaborative requirements gathering approach. These values in the project management can be made effective by utilizing the hosted collaborative tools. Collaborative tools in the cloud will ensure that the manifesto gets translated directly into the actual practice because of the following reasons:

• Cloud is cheaper as it needs less upfront capital investment
• Is available instantly hence saving on time as a cost
• Is scalable as and when required by the user
• Facilitates quick response to the changes in the market

Our hosted tool, i.e. BootStrapToday, is designed to integrate the new age business operations and execution by making it feasible to take advantage of the merits of cloud computing and the agile project management. For example, one of the features, Milestone, can be used to list the iterative steps as and when they are conceptualized. On-going features which are developed and maintained across the milestones can be defined as components. Task associated with each milestone can be defined as tickets.

This very simple-to-use tool with simple dashboard helps in tracking all the projects with a bird’s eye view. Not only this, BootStrapToday lets you collaborate with your customers and vendors who can be important stakeholders in any project. BootStrapToday lets you give restricted access to select few stakeholders other than the team members and this feature helps in collaboratively involving the opinions of those who matter the most – the end users.

While agile project management is not for every kind of projects, it certainly can fit any industry and most of the time is suitable for those projects where new features and functionalities are added frequently. It is also advocated that agile project management is more suitable for the small and medium scaled businesses that look for project management solutions which are:

1. Cheaper
2. Faster, and
3. Respond to market changes quickly

All of the above advantages get clubbed together in the hosted agile project management and collaboration tool. And here I cannot refrain from adding that BootStrapToday is one such superior hosted solution.

Related articles you might be interested in:

1. Advantages of Project Management in the Cloud
2. Cloud Benefits for Start-ups and SMEs
3. SaaS can Help Organizations go Lean