Agile project management tools are crucial for team leaders to adopt the agile methodology in delivering customer satisfaction. While the type of approach is challenging, it provides a lot of flexibility to respond to problems as they arise.
One challenge of the Agile Project Management approach is the potential for disorganization and miscommunication. Its focus on small tasks for the overall project makes it susceptible to risks. Each team member should be mindful of the overarching goal even as they perform their jobs.
However, you can still boost the chances of success for project delivery when you adopt the following measures:
- Aging Work in Progress. It measures the time that passes from the time you started the task and the progress of the work. However, it only applies to any unfinished tasks. Why should you measure non-finished tasks? It will provide you with benchmarks on how much the team members spend working on a job. You have to compare the current time with previous data.
- Cycle Time. As opposed to work in progress, the cycle time measures the amount of time spent on the task from start to finish. Sometimes, cycle time is erroneously mistaken for the lead time. However, the lead time begins from the time the client requests the task. So, even if it is sitting in the queue, you begin to count the lead time. The cycle time, meanwhile, starts when the project manager starts to commit to the project.
- Work in Progress. The work in progress refers to the total tasks that you committed to doing, but have not managed to finish. It gives the project manager an avenue to track each of the team member’s performance. You can monitor the work in progress on the Kanban board. You can then see the productivity of each individual based on the data on the board. With this, you can plan and reassign the workload to workers who consistently produce more quality output with the same amount of time.
- Blocked time. The blocked time is put on the Kanban board, and it refers to the stagnating task. You can easily visualize the blocked task using a sticker. It is not the same as a task that is sitting in the queue since work has not stopped on the latter. A blocked time is a red flag. You need to resolve it immediately unless you want the project workflow to suffer massive delays.
- Throughput. It refers to the mean number of tasks that each team member processes per time unit. In simple terms, it means how many cards the individual can process per day. The time unit can be customized. You can measure per day, per week, or month. You can benchmark your current productivity by comparing the past performance of your team. You need to implement throughput in conjunction with the aging work in progress or the cycle time. One limitation of the throughput is that it does not show when the task starts.
The metrics mentioned above are crucial components to increase the success of the Agile Project Management approach.
However, you do not use each of the metrics in isolation. The methods all complement each other in terms of giving you the entire picture.
