Top 10 Agile Project Management Tips for Beginners

Businesses need to improve their project using a strategic approach compared to other traditional project management strategies. Traditional project management may encounter certain concerns such as lack of project management knowledge and time managing the multitasking. Lean thinking is a popular technique to ensure maximum efficiency. The philosophy was initially founded in the 1990s and is applicable to several projects. In the year 2001, project managers emerged with a relatively new term known as agile project development or management. If you are new to agile project management, read on to enhance your project management skills and knowledge.

1 Lead by Example

It’s important to lead by example by implementing core agile practices. Make sure to visualize the work in an open and transparent way and encourage feedback. Carry out frequent demonstrations to ensure consistent improvement and error correction. Also, boost the everyday synchronization of team members with one another.

2 Take Away Traditional Techniques

If your company is involved in ineffective and traditional practices, you might want to modify them. Perhaps you should consider other approaches that bring any positive changes. Though make sure to involve the client in the project progress. At times, customers require information in the initial stages of a project. To handle the situation, here’s what you should do.

• Feedback between the technical team and the client.
• Evaluation of initial prototypes.
• Involve senior management in the early phase of the project.

3 Respect Client Deliverables

A client is not only the sponsor and user of your services but also the stakeholder of your internal project management team and the external approving entities. It’s important to connect the predecessor and successor practices such as that internal client is involved in the very initial phase of the project. You should have a brief collaboration period between the client and the team. The initial prototypes are typically very efficient in involving the acceptance authorities in the formal project approval procedure. Finally, information ahead of time to the sanctioning authority is an effective strategy to acquire preliminary feedback on multiple changes needed on the project.

4 Perform Risk Analysis

Perform a risk evaluation before beginning with the project execution and ensure it should mitigate any upcoming problems to assist you with being more agile. It is evident that risks cannot be completely eliminated. Though these risks can be easily managed through comprehensive planning, identification, response planning, qualitative and quantitative analysis, monitoring and controlling. With the qualitative risk evaluation, you can identify the most prominent risks that may affect the project finance, quality of work and deadlines.

5 Use Agile Project Management Tools

Once you understand the fundamentals of the Agile methodology and the settings in which software will perfectly suit your project team, it’s time to opt for the right project management tool. There are several project management tools that are designed to work within an Agile framework. Some of the most commonly used Agile-friendly project management tools are Asana, JIRA, Wrike, Airtable and Monday.com. These tools offer Agile workflow templates to implement. You should definitely consider giving it a try.

6 Don’t Skimp on Training

The agile methodology may appear simple and straightforward on the surface, though remember there is some complexity involved in every piece. Project managers that don’t train their teams on agile are similar to sending their military into battle with butter knives. Training and practically implementing are two important antidotes to solve this problem. It’s important to offer proper training to your team on agile project management so they can inculcate the knowledge in their practices.

7 Lean Development

While practising agile methodologies, it’s crucial to consider the fact that agile alone might not be sufficient. Although it gives in-depth knowledge on how to build fast with minimal risk, it doesn’t explain what and how to build. This is where the lean approach comes in. Lean is about determining the optimal set of features to generate maximum ROI. Lean development is authenticating assumptions through experimentation techniques and market data. The objective is to enhance efficiency while minimizing the associated risk.

8 Team Work

Agile approaches differ from one business to another. When people join the team, it’s significant to onboard them with the organization’s strategy to agile and how they are expected to actively participate in the role they are allocated to perform. Failure to do so will probably result in misunderstandings or slow down the progress. Teamwork surely achieves dream work!

9 Two-Way Communication

Agile focuses on independence but at the same time needs healthy communication to ensure smooth and successful project execution. You should encourage your project management team to speak up about their tasks requirements, completion deadlines, and pitfalls. In case you lack a centralized system, two-way communication will be almost impossible. Not only it is important to bring communication within a team but also among multiple teams. You may want to choose project management software as an effective tool to ensure smooth communication. Cross-team communication strategies are crucial to ensure a smooth flow of diverse project practices. Also, make sure to have reflection meetings more frequently so everyone can talk about the progress of the project and what shortcomings are needed to be addressed.

10 Consider Project Prioritization

To work on several tasks simultaneously without a plan doesn’t come parallel to an agile business. As a substitute, plan projects with committed teams on a preference basis that is significant to the business. To ensure a smooth workflow, sanctify priority projects. For this purpose, you should create a list of priority projects and focus on the resources accordingly that can add value to it.

Conclusion

If you have read this far, you are more likely to get yourself familiar with important tips on Agile project management. When it’s done correctly, it makes sure that you can actively buy-in from every team member to deliver the best of their abilities. We hope the above-listed tips will help you with an effective planning session and execute the project successfully. If you have any queries, write to me in the comment section below.