Is Kanban really helpful in Project Management?
IT projects are by definition complex, and being an IT project manager (PM) is a multifaceted and advanced role to fill. You manage teams, budgets, contracts, plans, and the risks that may hit you. You must keep your managers and stakeholders satisfied, and you likely manage sub-contractors as well.
To structure these diverse tasks, most companies have implemented a PM method (PMM) of some sort. Many are inspired by PMI, PRINCE2, IPMA, and others. But why do we still see so many projects failing? For the past 10 years, PMI has issued its annual “Pulse of the Profession” report, which typically shows that only around half of the projects we start are completed within time and budget.
Kanban, an agile method that is rising in popularity, and which addresses the complexities of IT projects in a unique, visual way. Elements that influence the success or failure of Agile projects include:
- Company maturity and level of agile understanding
- Team maturity and competencies
- Allocation of team members to multiple projects
- Effective product ownership
- Acceptance of transparency and visualization
How Kanban makes the lives of project managers easier
In a Kanban process, there are physical (or virtual) “cards” called Kanban that move through the process from start to finish. The aim is to keep a constant flow of Kanban so that as inventory is required at the end of the process, just that much is created at the start. In this article, we’ll take a look at 6 benefits of Kanban for your business.
- Visualize your work
- Limit work in progress
- Manage flow
- Make policies explicit
- Implement feedback loops
- Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally
When used for software development, Kanban uses the stages in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) to represent the different stages in the manufacturing process. The aim is to control and manage the flow of features (represented by Kanban cards) so that the number of features entering the process match those being completed. Kanban is an agile methodology that is not necessarily iterative. Kanban allows the software to be developed in one large development cycle. Despite this, Kanban is an example of an agile methodology because it fulfills all twelve of the principles behind the Agile manifesto, because whilst it is not iterative, it is incremental.
The principle behind Kanban that allows it to be incremental and Agile, is limited throughput. Each phase of the lifecycle is recognized as having a limited capacity for work at any one time. A small work item is created from the prioritized and unstarted requirements list and then begins the development process, usually with some requirements elaboration. A work item is not allowed to move on to the next phase until some capacity opens up ahead. By controlling the number of tasks active at any one time, developers still approach the overall project incrementally which gives the opportunity for Agile principles to be applied.
What Makes ConnectEazy good for Agile Projects?
When your company requires better Agile project management, there are a lot of choices in the marketplace. However, if you want the best in Agile project management solution hosted on Salesforce Platform we are on the top spot.
ConnectEazy is offering a complete project management system that manages your project’s requirements, sprints, modules, userstories, tasks/bugs and test cases etc. Designed specifically to support agile methodologies such as Kanban, it allows teams to manage all their information in one environment. ConnectEazy is purely built on Salesforce CRM which is a cloud platform offering flexibility, scalability, and security.
Kanbans
ConnectEazy provides a Kanban view of the project, where you can see all of the requirements planned for each release organized according to their position in the lifecycle.
This view lets you see the flow of the requirements and identify then rectify any bottlenecks. Kanban boards are visual, anyone looking for information about a piece of work doesn’t need to muddle through a correspondence thread to find the piece of information they need to get started on a task or story and can drill down to see more details. This kanban shows multiple data views like Userstories, Tasks, Bugs, or Sprints which helps managers to view all the project information on a single screen.
Sprint planning with Kanban can be a big shift for Scrum teams. The scrum master or Project manager can pick the pending tasks or stories from the backlog and assign them to the future sprints and they get a clear picture of what tasks or stories are assigned to each sprint.
Sprint kanban eases for moving stories or tasks across sprints and the above screen offers multiple other views like viewing all the tasks or stories across multiple modules or resources. This kanban helps for efficient planning of work items in a sprint and gives a clear picture of what is allocated and can easily migrate tasks from one sprint to another at the end of the sprint cycle.
There are various other features related to project management available on ConnectEazy. Please check our features in the website
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