Scrum in Wrike: making software development more agile

We keep telling you that Wrike is very flexible and easily adjusts to your needs. We told you how you can make your project management mobile with your Blackberry or PDA phone. We also wrote a guide about getting things done with Wrike to make your days more productive.

Here we’ll tell you how to use Wrike for the Scrum method, which is gaining popularity with project managers nowadays. The Scrumapproach to managing projects is becoming more and more popular. A small, cross-functional team can be much more mobile and agile in producing the best possible results in delivering a project. The Scrum method is based on daily meetings, during which every team member reports on what he has done since the last meeting, notes whether there are any problems and says what he is going to do until the next meeting. This makes management more adaptive to emerging circumstances. Scrum is now successfully applied in various spheres from marketing and finance to medical products development. But first of all, Scrum is applied to management of software development projects.

As a lightweight process, Scrum complements agile management practices and makes the process of software project delivery more efficient. But can Scrum be even more agile? Yes, if you use Wrike.

With Wrike support, Scrum practices make the team even more productive and reduce project delivery terms dramatically.

Customers become a part of the development team: In Wrike you can share your project workspace with your clients so that they can follow every step of the team’s progress and add something on the go.

The whole work process is transparent: The tasks on the project are shared among all the team members, Scrum master, stakeholders and clients, so that interested parties know who is responsible for what.

Reports on accomplishments and commitments: In Wrike, the workflow process is reflected in detail. When a task is marked completed by any of the team members, all the others get an immediate e-mail notification and can move the project further ahead. There are also e-mail notifications when task attributes are changed by anybody in the team, like when somebody adds comments, attaches files etc. Team members get a chance to quickly react when they are able to promptly receive the necessary information.

Development team can contribute directly to project plans: In Wrike, each team member can update his plan. All the other members of the team, as well as clients and stakeholders, will be instantly notified of any changes in the project work.

Flexible workplace: Wrike is a web-based service, so project developers can work from any computer with an internet connection. Moreover, they can create and manage tasks just by sending e-mails. So when members of the team are separated by great distances, Wrike still makes Scrum-like process possible.

Quick timeline make Scrum planning easier. Wrike allows you to get an overview of the whole project and see who is working on which part of software development. It’s also possible to see what every team member is planning to do next.

Wrike is indispensable when projects overlap and developers, Scrum masters or stakeholders participate in several projects. In Wrike, you share different projects with different people and can always quickly find out where any of your projects stand.

With multiple overlapping projects, it is vital to get business-value products fast. Scrum methodology allows you to get this product much earlier than the traditional “waterfall” management method. With Wrike support, Scrum helps you to get the best project value in the shortest possible time. If Wrike is a platform for Scrum iterative and incremental practices in your team, you save hours on reporting. Wrike gives every team member an opportunity to be aware of all the changes in the project before the daily meeting. So you go straight to discussion of possible issues.

Scrum in Wrike makes the work on a project less bureaucratic and more productive. We developed Wrike to help everybody involved in a project’s development easily communicate and collaborate to move this project ahead faster, bringing more immediate business value to you and your partners.

Project Management 3 min read

Set Hours in Task Duration

Besides project discussions, another feature often asked for by many of our users--estimation of task duration in hours--is now live in Wrike project management platform. To help you build a more precise schedule, we’ve added the ability to set task duration to minutes (1). Examples of valid entries in the duration field: "2h 30 m", "5d", "3h", "15m". In other words, you can use the following format to set tasks’ duration: "3d 4h 5m". The task duration feature allows you to enter the correct number of days, hours and minutes or to remove unnecessary parameters. If you enter a fractional number of days, like "0.5d" Wrike will turn it into "4h" to represent half of the working day. If you enter a fractional number of hours or minutes, Wrike will round it to the nearest whole number.

Project Management 5 min read

Why Project Management 2.0 Is a Different Ball Game

that I attended in October, I met many project management practitioners. Some of them asked me about my views on Project Management 2.0. One of the questions was “How is Project Management 2.0 different from what many organizations have today?” I decided to summarize my answers and came up with a short list of key factors that distinguish Project Management 2.0 from traditional project management. They are: Environment. Manuel Castells, the author of "The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (v. 1-3)" and a visiting professor in 15 universities around the world, states that we are currently experiencing an IT revolution, just like our predecessors lived through an agricultural revolution and an industrial revolution. According to Castells, there is a shift from industrialism (mass production) to informationalism (flexible production), and this new type of economy is empowered by the development of technologies— first of all, the Internet. As the world shifts from an industrial economy to an information economy and big part of the workforce becomes information workers, the importance of innovation, creativity and productivity rises. In traditional project management, people are often managed like any other resource, just like bricks and machines. In the present economy, people cannot be managed the same way, as it will simply be counterproductive. In Project Management 2.0, people are encouraged to participate in project planning, to introduce their ideas on project development and to give their feedback on other team members’ jobs. Environment as the main differentiator drives the other distinctions listed below: Collaboration and collective intelligence. In an information economy, only organizations that are flexible enough, so that people and capacity can be rearranged and recombined quickly without major structural change, will be able to thrive. Quick access to information and rapid data-sharing become critically important in this environment, as they help companies minimize expenses, innovate, make better decisions and make them faster. Project Management 2.0 emphasizes the importance of leveraging the collective intelligence of the whole team, no matter where the team members are located, at the same office or on different continents. At the same time, Project Management 2.0 stimulates collaboration and catalyzes the change in processes. Here I’d like to paraphrase Andrew MacAfee’s quote about Enterprise 2.0 and apply it to the new trend in project management: Project Management 2.0 technologies are “trying hard not to impose on users any preconceived notions about how work should proceed or how output should be categorized or structured. Instead, they’re building tools that let these aspects of knowledge work emerge.” Emergent structures, one of the basic principles of Project Management 2.0, empowers people on the team level to easily share information and make changes to their part of the project plan. This way, bottom-up field knowledge makes its way into a project schedule, and the schedule becomes more realistic. Comparing this approach with the one represented by most current project management platforms, wiki inventor Ward Cunningham highlights an important shortcoming of the traditional way. He says: “For questions like ‘What’s going on in the project?’ we could design a database. But whatever fields we put in the database would turn out to be what’s not important about what’s going on in the project. What’s important about the project is the stuff you don’t anticipate.” The Project Management 2.0 focus on collective intelligence stipulates the next differentiator. Shift in the project manager’s role. Traditionally, the project management role is focused a lot on tight control of the budget and schedule. This part of the project management job becomes more subtle in a talent economy. Organizational agility requires a more flexible approach to budgeting and deadlines. At the same time, the importance of leveraging the human talent becomes more prominent. Therefore, other parts of a project manager’s job, such as leadership skills, become more important. It's no longer enough for project managers to possess good people skills and to be fluent in project management best practices, tools and methodologies. To succeed today, project managers need enhanced leadership skills. They need to be flexible and focused on business value, writes Forrester Analyst Mary Gerush in “Define, Hire and Develop Your Next Generation Project Managers.” Productivity. Web 2.0 tools allow an unprecedented productivity increase when it comes to information-sharing and communications. There are many examples spanning from the consumer arena to the enterprise space, from Wikipedia and Facebook to GE’s corporate collaboration system. Project Management 2.0 focuses on taking advantage of this productivity to achieve better results in shorter periods of time. Have I enumerated all the distinguishing traits of Project Management 2.0? What’s your take on the main differentiators of Project Management 2.0? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Project Management 5 min read

Andatech’s Tips: How to Develop a Habit of Logging and Updating Tasks on Time

If you have just started using Wrike, at first some employees may forget to log and update their tasks in the system. Don’t worry, Andatech’s best practices will help you deal with this problem quickly!If you have just started using Wrike, at first some employees may forget to log and update their tasks in the system. Don’t worry, Andatech’s best practices will help you deal with this problem quickly! Andatech is one of our customers, and it wholesales a vast variety of innovative electronic products for home in Australia. There are several teams within the company that are working on completely different projects, and the same employees take part in several projects at once. Prior to Wrike, the general manager spent several hours every week on collecting updates across different projects and putting them together into a general overview. Now, every team member keeps their tasks up-to-date in the system, so it’s a matter of a click or two to see how things are going. This approach is beneficial for both managers and the team, as everyone is on the same page and is moving faster. We've asked Andatech's team to share how they managed to make logging tasks into Wrike a habit so quickly! Leverage e-mail integration Andatech managers wanted an easy way to track all work that has been done, especially by remote team members. So the first thing Andatech did was to create a simple rule: Any task that takes more than half an hour should be logged into Wrike. Making this happen was easy. A lot of the team’s communication takes place via e-mail, so logging new tasks from e-mails into Wrike is literally a matter of a click, thanks to Wrike’s Gmail gadget. “Most project management tools are hard to adopt right away because people think that it’s actually more work for them. But with Wrike, the biggest thing for our staff was understanding that it’s not just a separate platform. It naturally supplements other habitual tools, such as e-mail, easily converting e-mails into tasks,” says Sunil Joseph, the head of digital strategy at Andatech. If your team is used to communicating issues via e-mail, make sure everyone on your team knows the fastest way for them to turn e-mails into Wrike tasks. This means the add-ins for Outlook and Apple Mail users, the gadget for Gmail users and simply forwarding an e-mail to [email protected] for anyone else. Update tasks in Wrike after everyday standup meetings When tasks are logged into the system, at first people may still forget to update them. So Andatech managers decided to update tasks right after the everyday standup meetings. They created a folder called “Morning standup,” where the project manager puts tasks that need to be done today and prioritizes them after each meeting. After the meeting, team members also check that all updates they have reported during the meeting have been logged into the system. If they have previously forgotten to log something, it's high time to put it into Wrike, making sure the project picture is complete. This approach makes it easier to collaborate with remote team members, as the manager can quickly show them today’s agenda and the team’s priorities. The manager also sees the overall team’s progress in one place and can quickly measure the progress for any given period with the help of Wrike’s advanced filters. Suggest that employees create personal folders for the most important tasks Quick access to all current tasks is vital to set the priorities correctly and get things done in time. That's why every Andatech employee has a special widget on the Wrike dashboard with all tasks assigned to them (by default, you only have tasks assigned to you for this week). The widget automatically shows the up-to-date list of tasks with every login. If you want to create such a widget for yourself, all you need to do is go to “My folders,” click on the Descendants button, filter tasks assigned to you and click on the “Create a widget” button. This is a good exercise for all team members! :) The widget automatically shows the up-to-date list of tasks with every login. Sometimes there are too many tasks assigned to one person, so it's hard to quickly grasp the ones to focus on. Andatech's employees have come up with a solution! Some of them created the personal “Most important” folder (not shared with anyone else) and put the most important tasks from different projects there. This is easy to do, thanks to the ability to put one task in several folders in Wrike. Within personal folders, people can drag tasks up and down the list to prioritize, and then complete items on the priority list from top to bottom. Following these three easy principles, Andatech’s team adopted Wrike quickly and smoothly! In turn, Wrike helped them greatly with tracking work progress, prioritizing things and figuring out what needs to be done and when. Learn more about how the Andatech's team successfully uses Wrike for their workflow in our podcast with Sunil Joseph. What are your team’s best practices in making task-tracking a habit? Do you have any particular rules in using Wrike and tracking the progress? With Wrike, it gets easier to share and collaborate on any kind of data. We’re sure that the relevant people will see what needs to be seen, and things will get done in time.” — Sunil Joseph, the head of digital strategy at Andatech.

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Scrum in Wrike: making software development more agile

Wrike Team

Scrum in Wrike: making software development more agile

Wrike Team

Related articles

Set Hours in Task Duration

Why Project Management 2.0 Is a Different Ball Game

Andatech’s Tips: How to Develop a Habit of Logging and Updating Tasks on Time

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