As we are living in a fast-changing world, businesses should respond effectively to the fast-growing market. Teamwork is currently more complex than before. So, to address the needs of a modern work environment, you need to have the approach along with the tools that guarantee the progress and efficiency of your operations.
Adopting an approach to manage your projects is currently demanded for successful business operations. One of these modern agile project management approaches is the Scrum Sprints. Sprints are simply short stretches of periods in which the Scrum team completes a certain amount of work. Sprints are the pivot of the Scrum framework.
What Is an Agile Project Management Approach?
Agile Project Management is a method of planning and guiding project processes iteratively through small cycles called sprints or iterations. A software iteration, for instance, refers to a single development cycle in Agile software development. The project team, which should include the project owners and stakeholders, reviews, monitors, and track the activities accomplished by the development team.
Getting started with Agile Project Management has the main benefit of being able to respond to issues as they arise. A timely change can help to save resources and ensure that a project is completed on schedule and within budget.
What Is Zoho Sprints as an Agile Project Management Solution?
Zoho Sprints is a highly efficient, feature-rich software that enables businesses to establish a framework for their teams to collaborate on multiple activities. It promotes the progress of projects and enables owners, stakeholders, and teams to monitor and track tasks.
Using Zoho Sprints, distributed teams can brainstorm, collaborate, and work together anywhere, anytime. It enables organizations to embrace uncertainties and be adaptable to rapid changes. Additionally, Zoho Sprints runs along with other essential applications within a unified platform to facilitate management. With an intuitive interface, you can smoothly navigate through activities.
Zoho Sprints Features and Functionalities
All features are built to designed to meet all the Scrum and agile methodologies and get sprints right with fewer headaches. Here are some of these features and capabilities that break down big, complex projects into bite-sized pieces.
Product Backlog Management
The product backlog includes all activities and tasks that need to be finished. It provides visibility and transparency to stakeholders and product owners. Backlogs facilitate the planning process by dividing the activities into user stories, tasks, and sub-tasks to boost incremental and iterative development. You can also prioritize the backlog items to come up with efficient and precise results.
Equally important, you can categorize results based on multiple parameters, such as item type, priority, or assignee. The easy-to-use interface simplifies planning through the drag-and-drop functionality that helps team members move items from the product backlog to the sprint backlog.
Further, you can set up custom filters to easily search for the prioritized items based on predefined subsections of your backlog. Zoho Sprints delivers data interoperability so that users can import backlog items from different tools with multiple file formats.
Agile Scrum Board
While processing a sprint, the Scrum board helps teams visualize the progress of the sprint backlog. It urges the teams to drag and drop their assigned tasks towards completion. The board is fully customizable to keep up with the progressive spirit of the agile approach. The sprint dashboard generates more charts so that users can review overall progress across different units and see the flow of the operations within sprints.
You can go beyond the traditional status columns of “To Do”, “In Progress”, and “Done”. For example, you can optimize your Scrum approach with a Kanban to create a focused environment for your teams to deliver superior work. Further, you can leverage the swimlane view to help teams dive deep and switch between multiple swimlane views across many categories like epics, priorities, or users.
Agile Epic Creation
Epics are collections of user stories, tasks, or bugs that span multiple sprints- with a common goal. The Zoho Sprints tool allows you to break all your larger objectives down into Epics. Your teams will be better able to share understanding and provide greater visibility when they have a dedicated view of all epics.
When it comes to creating an Epic, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Using custom layouts and fields, you can assign an Epic owner and include other details. User stories and tasks can easily be mapped to Epics once they have been created. User stories and tasks can easily be mapped to Epics once they have been created.
You can also measure agile epics by generating reports that show percentage completion, epics, and status. It is impossible to generalize about a project without considering its personality. You can also organize all the requirements related to your Epics with a custom layout. Custom fields allow you to give each Epic the context and depth it deserves by adding context and depth.
Powerful Release Management
Align numerous aspects of the software development lifecycle into one cohesive outcome. You can greatly facilitate cross-functional collaboration to speed up the release cycles. Zoho Sprints offers a release planning module that enables teams to focus on the deliverable features that are commercially valuable. Using the release planning module, release managers can group and classify items into a specific release, assign release owners, and customize the phases of release workflows.
Further, you can synchronize all your repositories with the latest progress of your projects. You can easily integrate your repository tool with Zoho Sprints. Also, the DevOps methodology offers structure and speed to your release process by integrating development and operations teams. The CI/CD module fetches the status of your builds from your favorite CI/CD tool.
The release reports are also very important so that release managers can check and review the release summary and export the notes made on a finished release. You can easily utilize the burnup and burndown charts that visualize the progress of ongoing releases.
Extensive Reports
Zoho Sprints enables users to make informed decisions based on extensive and easy-to-generate reports. The reports generated by Zoho Sprints utilize velocity charts, burnup and burndown charts, and cumulative flow diagrams to show the agile teams what was good and what to improve for the next sprint.
You can find out how your log hours are distributed across sprints, work item types, users, and months with timesheet reports. With different views, you can get a cross-project overview of all your work items. Finally, filters can help you find the most relevant data and view it in the most effective way.
Final Words on Zoho Sprints
What distinguishes Zoho Sprints is that it is a part of Zoho App Suite that are integrated to empower businesses and organizations. With Zoho Suite, you can get a unified ERP system that operates entire organizations with smooth, seamless operations. You get whatever you need from Zoho Apps via Alnafitha IT. Alnafitha IT is an advanced partner of Zoho in Saudi Arabia. You can leverage the experience of its professional team to define, get licenses, and implement Zoho solutions.
