Agile Project Management: Trello and Placker
Use the Projects by Placker Power-Up in Trello implement more agile practices
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Agile can be defined as “the ability to create and respond to change”, according to the Agile Alliance. It is the result of guidelines written by a group of software developers that summarized their best practices in a document containing values and principles.
There are several frameworks that are based on this way of working, and each of them presents techniques applied in an open to change context with the goal of providing value to customers.
Even though there are many factors that will support these goals, project management software and tools can help your team have quick access to the information they need to apply agile practices successfully.
Encouraging an adaptable culture in your team
One of the biggest challenges in this change of mindset is the fact that people are used to traditional project management methods.
For this reason, success relies on making sure the whole team understands the need of adaptability and customer-centricity. Only then everyone will be on the same page and ready to get benefits from a new way or working.
The Projects by Placker Power-Up is the best all-in-one Power-Up for Trello to give team members insight into the real status of the work and plan and manage the work effectively.
Trello + Placker as Agile management tools
Trello boards are great for planning work and adding details such as labels, owners and due dates.
When projects are simple and don’t involve many people, this can be enough.However, as things become more complex, the need of advanced attributes and statistics increases.
That’s why Trello integrates with many power-ups, and Placker is one of the most highlighted of the market, because it’s the all-in-one power-up that makes it possible to better manage agile projects.
Use cases
Backlog management
Creating a product that is aligned to what a customer wants requires planning every interaction between users and the product. Based on this agile practice, the development team can select some of those features.
You can use this by creating lists as product epics (a group of similar features) that can be broken down to cards as user stories, that is, a statement that explains how the interaction should look like.
For example, users need to be able to retrieve their passwords in case of forgetting it, and the software under development has to make this available.
In addition to the user story statement, other attributes can be added to clarify what is expected from it, such as priority, story points, status and more.
Placker allows you to add all of these attributes to a card. This video will show you how to do it.
Sprint Planning
One of the Agile principles refers to delivering value constantly.
This includes collaboration among team members and prioritization of work in a cyclic manner.
That’s why many Agile frameworks split the development of a product into iterations.
In Scrum, for example, these are called sprints, and usually last from one to four weeks - more would be too much to plan and less would result in a lot of meeting overhead.
Clearly the whole product cannot be finished in one iteration. For this reason, it’s a good idea to create separate boards for each sprint so the team can focus on the work that is almost due.
With Placker, you can create sprint boards and connect them with a product backlog board by “mirroring” cards, which are synchronized copies that will be updated in two ways.
You can even use the story points added to a card to visualize a burndown chart, which is often used in agile development. See how this works in the next video.
Work in progress (WIP)
It doesn’t take a project management expert to understand that it is not productive to start many tasks and not finish any of them.
However, not having a system that will remind people of focusing on completing work that is in progress can make people forget about this important principle that comes from the lean and kanban method.
With Placker, you can use different layouts to visualize how many cards are open, what they are and get reports on their updates.
Placker and Agile Project Management
At Placker, we follow agile practices and understand that every way of working is different. So, Placker can be adjusted to your workflow and help your team transition to agile practices. This will provide you with tools like syncing team boards, plan work based on sprints, create scrum graphs and more.
We have a customer success team prepared to help you figure out the best way to get started on using an agile methodology in your Placker boards. Please contact us, using the chat button.
And getting started is simple, you can access the Trello power-up page to enable the Projects by Placker power-up in your boards and start using Placker view modes right away.