We all have core values that guide us in our life decisions. The little voice inside that defines the path we take.
My core values revolve around integrity, contribution, and growth. And ice cream. Many a vital life question has been answered by a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Truffle Kerfuffle.
With all their volatility and uncertainty, having something to act as a North star can be reassuring for projects.
Having a trusted buddy share the best tools to deliver against those values can feel like a gold mine for project managers.
In this article, you get both (you lucky thing). We’ll explain the core values that keep Agile project management on the straight and narrow and share the tools you need to help your project live its best life.
What do we mean by Agile values?
Agile project management methodology differs from traditional methodologies in that the project scope is emergent rather than fixed.
Over a series of short development cycles — usually called “sprints” — the customer gets greater clarity about the desired project outcome, and the development focus narrows toward it.
While there are several different approaches, the most common Agile framework is Scrum.
The Agile methodology is defined by the Agile manifesto, which has 12 principles and 4 values.
If you need more information, we’ve got a whole article on the 12 Agile principles and the benefits of adopting an Agile environment. For now, let’s concentrate on the 4 Agile values.
The Agile values define how Agile teams approach work, prioritize, and measure success.
Modern Agile project teams use supporting Agile project management software to provide the tools they need to live these values effectively.
Try monday devHow the right tools deliver the Agile values
Let’s look at each of the 4 Agile values and how tools can help companies embrace these Agile practices in their projects.
1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Companies need to value people — and their knowledge, skills, and experience — over strict processes and tools. It’s people that drive innovation within projects. An excellent Agile project management tool should be flexible enough to respond to their ideas.
Putting tools or processes first limits the opportunity for continuous improvement and for team members to build workflows that fit their style. The ability to customize tools to suit individuals’ needs can make for greater efficiency in delivering work.
It’s also people, rather than processes or tools, who respond to change. Whether that’s changing customer requirements or a change to the business environment, people need flexibility in their tools so they can pivot effectively.
As a Work OS, monday.com has all the building blocks you need to build workflows to suit your Agile team and project, which means you’re not forced into a structure that doesn’t work.
The drag-and-drop functionality and low-code app builder mean it’s easy to change your processes to support your people.
And with monday.com’s many boards and 8 different views to visualize information, your team can organize tasks in a way that works for them while still maintaining centralized data.
Try monday devPrefer a Kanban board? No problem. Gantt chart more your bag? Coming right up.
2. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Unlike Waterfall project management, where the entire scope of the project is agreed upon initially, Agile projects deliver work in iterations throughout the life cycle of the project.
Agile development means it’s not a one-and-done for business stakeholders. They need to act as partners for the project’s duration, offering guidance and feedback as deliverables are produced and preparing the business for implementation.
To maximize the value of this, well, value, tools need to enable effective team communication options with appropriate access and real-time updates.
Timely and engaging reporting that clearly shows project progress is also important for transparency, keeping everyone on the same page, and building trust.
monday.com helps businesses live this value with its stellar in-platform collaboration options. It’s simple to share, view, and annotate documents. If you need specific feedback, just tag the required person to alert them instantly.
Plus, if something changes, you can use automation to update the team by email.
You can also customize access levels to control who can make what changes and when. For stakeholders without platform access, monday.com integrates with all your favorite collaboration tools, so there’s no excuse for poor stakeholder engagement.
3. Responding to change over following a plan
In traditional project management — where the scope is agreed on upfront — significant changes to requirements can be costly and result in a considerable delay.
Agile project management enables iterative development, where changes are welcomed as an opportunity to do things better. Teams and work are organized to support incremental development approaches. Tools and software also need to align.
The sprint retrospective — which occurs after each phase of development — is ideal for reviewing how teams can improve on the next phase.
The output from that meeting — combined with the sprint review, where stakeholder feedback on the sprint output is gathered — informs how the next stage of development is planned.
Planning happens at the beginning of each sprint, which allows changes to be accommodated.
Working together with stakeholders, a sprint goal is identified, and the critical task or tasks from the product backlog are selected and prioritized for the upcoming sprint.
These tasks form the sprint backlog and can be visibly displayed using a Scrum board.
monday.com has over 200 templates — including a Scrum board — that are fully customizable to suit the way you and your team work. This makes task management a breeze.
For example, add color-coded priority labels to tasks, so everyone’s clear on the sprint backlog’s most important tasks.
And, if things change during the sprint, just re-label and move on.
It’s not that Agile does away with planning. The plan is just short and responsive, which means that change shapes rather than breaks it.
The plan produced during the sprint planning meeting provides focus at a micro-level and is combined with a product roadmap that provides a high-level guide to the project.
Try monday dev4. Working software over comprehensive documentation
Traditionally, software development required extensive technical specification documentation to be produced before a single line of code was even written.
With Agile project management — where software is developed by iteration — working software is the measure of success, not thorough documentation.
That’s not to say that documentation isn’t valued. It is. But it’s not what drives Agile software development initiation.
For each piece of development, a user story — a simple description of a required feature from the perspective of the end-user — is created that gives developers just enough information to build the piece of software required.
This is then tested for bugs and usability and refined through feedback. This test-and-adjust approach is flexible, delivers value earlier, and leads to greater customer satisfaction than a build where the specification is nailed down early and can’t be changed.
This value is all about getting the right information to the right people at the right time.
Whether that’s user stories to developers, bug tracking information from testers, or feedback from stakeholders, you need an Agile software tool that can make that happen.
We’ve already shown how monday.com makes collaboration between people easy. And, it makes system collaboration easy, too, with more than 40 integrations.
So, if you’re using Jira or Gitlab to manage open issues or bug tracking, you can sync it with monday.com to keep all your updates in one place.
This continuous integration means you don’t have to worry about version control or if what you’re looking at is already outdated.
Agile tools create value from values
In this article, we’ve explored the 4 Agile values and how using them can benefit your project. We’ve also outlined the essential tools to look for that enable those values to become valuable.
The monday.com Work OS has all the Agile tools you need to manage your team and engage your stakeholders effectively. Its intuitive interface allows you to get straight to work, building a flexible, fully customizable project workflow that enables you to respond effectively to change.
Let monday.com be your North star. It requires a lot less gym time than a pint of the good stuff.