In order to stay competitive in a drastically digital and dynamic marketplace, businesses are steadily adopting an agile project management framework. The project managers now increasingly depend on an activity-based dashboard for obtaining timely and user-friendly information and sharing it with the project stakeholders who want to know the breakup details of a project's progress at a glance.
Dashboards, therefore, have an obvious appeal to project managers and even the members of a project team. Everyone can easily notice the variances between the actual and expected metrics, signaling process breakdowns. They can quickly take the needed actions to ensure the work progresses smoothly.
Agile Dashboard - An Overview
Agile dashboards give you a visual representation of A to Z of the details of your project. For example, the activities and happenings, things done or being done or to be done and also show some agile metrics.
Essentially these are designed to give you a complete picture of all the activities of a project in an organized and easy-to-understand way. Some examples are Jira Agile Dashboard, ClickUp, Scrum, and others.
The Agile project dashboards present comprehensive information gathered from different teams, related projects, and tools and capture automated activities. As per the requirement of companies, the variables can be personalized based on what they need and the suggestions/feedback from team members.
In fact, an Agile expert project manager who has mastered the art of how to use agile approaches and methodologies can harness all the features of an agile dashboard as its nuances are easily understood and managed by them. Your organization or a team leader can conveniently become an Agile adept by attending online Agile Management courses.
There are many moving parts in an Agile dashboard which, at times, could be confusing. Here is a brief on some major touchstones.
1. Burn Up Charts
It represents the work that has been completed and also anticipates what is pending from a team. A convenient way to measure the scopes or provide feedback to the teams which are trailing behind.
2. Delivered Business Value
It gives an estimation of the backlog and what value work has been delivered. Apart from this, the past history of the projects completed within a set time limit is also available for comparison. To give an example, a company can compare the projects of May 2018 to 2016 and understand how productivity and values have changed over time. Value Points of the Agile dashboard help to prioritize a product backlog.
3. Highlights
This section contains the data and information of importance to the entire team. For example, the most important and relevant topics to discuss in a daily meeting, the most important achievement of yesterday, what is the focus of today, and more.
4. Performance
Gives information on performance measures and team achievements using Velocity and Story Points.
5. Risks
The teams can anticipate the potential jolts of a project and plan for bypassing any issues by making the needed and timely changes to avoid crashes, warn other team members, and also reduce the impact of the consequences of any risk.
6. Schedules
As the name signifies, this tool shows the time allocated to a project, the balance time left, and the used-up time.
7. Status
Indicates the status of a project with respect to different goals, risks, objectives, and other variables. A very useful platform to give feedback at a glance and plan future sprints and meetings.
In terms of functionalities, you can have different types of Agile dashboards like:
Agile project dashboard: displays metrics for a project's overall performance and progress or highlights particular problems that require further attention.
Agile Sprint dashboard: just like a project dashboard, it gives a place where you track the progress of your sprints. Every sprint has a dashboard in it with a detailed report on its headways. You can track the advancement of the items in your sprint from the moment you begin working on them.
An agile KPI dashboard helps to measure the Key Performance Indicators (Value, Predictability, Productivity, Quality).
Agile portfolio dashboard: gives a more flexible way of managing a portfolio of projects, programs, initiatives, etc.
Agile Dashboard Software
The 15th Annual State Of Agile Report with more than 1,380 respondents across the globe involved, shows a strong increase in Agile use both in IT and non-IT sectors.
94% of respondents confirmed that their businesses have adopted some form of the Agile methodology or the other in 2021. It is no wonder, then, that the use of the right agile tools is crucial to maximizing a project’s success.
By right Agile dashboard tools, we mean some project management tools designed to support agile methodologies like Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, or other agile hybrid methods suited to meet the business purpose.
There are many Agile team dashboards available, and here we will discuss a few of the best tools.
For effortless task management, it gives a complete picture of:
1. Tasks completed
2. In- progress tasks and
3. The dependencies to ensure you prevent any future bottlenecks.
The ‘Free Forever’ plan will be very handy for small teams.
The features include:
- Epics: for setting up milestones and sprint planning.
- Story Points: to know how to improve an Agile project.
- Sprints: for managing the sprint dates, their statuses, tasks, automation, etc.
- Dashboards: all metrics, for example, Burnup Chart, Velocity Chart, and Cumulative Flow Diagrams for the sprint planning and sprint review meetings.
- Docs: for documenting your engineering wiki, product backlog, and sprint backlog and sharing with the members.
- Templates: Time-saving Pre-made project templates for ready use.
- Custom Task Statuses: for easy customization of your agile workflow.
- Tags: for better organizing.
- Goals: for creating easy-to-track Targets within each sprint goal.
- Time Tracking: to keep track of how long you spend on each task.
- Integrations: Integrate with other tools like Slack, Gitlab, and Google Drive to your workspace.
- Apps: Available apps for Android, iOS, Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Pricing: Free for life, the paid version is $9/user per month.
Jira is extremely popular in the market throughout the world. However, it is a bit complex and could need the intervention of developers to set up.
The features include:
- Issue tracking
- Boards
- Agile Epics
- Bug Tracking Software
- Custom fields
Pricing: Free to $14 per user/per month
The beauty of the GitHub tool is that it integrates with many other tools so that multiple team members, right from the developers to the product owner, can work in tandem, making it a fantastic Agile tool for development teams.
Additionally, the developers can store all the codes for a vast number of projects there. The software also helps to record edits across the entire team involved in the project in real time. Not only that, it provides a private space for each member and a public space where others can jointly help improve coding.
Its various agile project management tools help project managers see and manage the team members’ activities.
The features include:
- Issue tracking
- Mentions for teamwork
- Labels
- Link issues and pull requests
Pricing: Free to $21 per user/per month
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Build a Dashboard Using Agile Methodology
In an Agile environment, you must also keep track of your work and the progress of your team members. The dashboard gives you the space to do it easily. You can assemble a dashboard to get either a high-level overview and also a granular view of the progress.
We will discuss how to set up an agile dashboard using the Jira Software with the help of the building blocks of the dashboard to organize your projects, assignments, and milestones.
5 Steps to Create an Agile Dashboard
Creating your Jira Agile Dashboard in 5 Easy Steps
Step 1:
i) Go to Dashboards in the top navigation bar.
ii) Click Dashboards for a drop-down menu.
iii) Click Create Dashboard at the bottom of the drop-down menu.
Note: An option for Copy Dashboard is also available.
Step 2:
Give a name and description of the dashboard. You can name it after a project, team name, or something that all the team members can easily identify.
Step 3:
Fill out the rest of the information as per your requirement and choice. For example, if you wish to the dashboard in your dashboard dropdown, click the star icon, or if you wish to share the dashboard with everyone, you can do so.
Step 4:
Click Save.gil
Step 5:
Now you can start adding the gadgets to your dashboard by selecting your dashboard from the View all dashboards section.
Conclusion
The 15th State of Agile Report on the ‘Agile adoption accelerates across the enterprise’ (we mentioned a while ago) finds that the most important Agile adoption barrier includes inconsistencies in process and practices, with 46% of the global participants voting for it. It boils down to the fact that Agile needs persuasion and expert intervention. Project managers will definitely be benefited if they undergo some agile management courses that are available online. Knowledgehut online Agile Management courses could be a choice to explore.
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