7 Agile Project Management Tools that you should Know

Every agile company has agile project management tools to follow the methodology in a more efficient and strict manner. These are a few tools that I found to work effectively when I am managing various Agile projects no matter the size. Many of these tools have other alternatives that will deliver the same results. However, I will be introducing you to 7 tools I use and explain the purpose of how they drive effective agile projects.

1. JIRA is a tool developed for tracking tasks (User Stories) and manage the software development processes. It has an easy to follow Kan-ban board that will allow the team to see what work is being done within a specific sprint. It includes issue types, workflows, fields, and other attributes. This is one of the main tools when driving an Agile team as it acts as the single source of truth for teams to collaborate through.
2. Confluence is also a tool created by the same company as Jira; Atlassian. It is a wiki tool for documentation. Confluence has amazing templates for Project Managers to document various information on the project and integrates into Jira. We normally track all our scrum session notes as well as risk and our mitigation strategies within Confluence.
3. Retrium: One of my favorite tools, really comes in handy when doing team retrospectives. Retros are one of the most key team activities all agile projects must include. It gives the team time to reflect on the past sprint and looks at what works and what didn’t work, the basic template on running a retro. However, Retrium has taken that process a step further to include many types of retro templates that keep growing. For example, there are templates around scrum ceremonies, coffee time, as well as giving you the opportunity to create custom retrospect. Finally, to top it all off, it allows for RADAR charts to track and manage how effective your team is during a project.
4. Pointing Poker. This is one of the free tools that still holds a key place in the toolbox of tools needed. There is a need to get individual inputs on the level of difficulty for a user story whenever our team is doing a Sprint Planning session. Pointing Poker reduces group-think to allow a person to vote anonymously on the User Story using point estimates.
5. Harvest is a time tracking application to unlock key information about your team. Harvest makes it easy to track time and expenses, so you get access to critical data without driving yourself (or your team) crazy. Many Software Development companies are consultants to larger firms as such there is a need to log time for the work done into an invoice. It not only logs but enables a firm to track their burn rate and see the remainder of revenue based on a specific budget. A key reason we use Harvest is that it integrates with Jira and various calendar applications making it easy to log hours.
6. Slack brings together all your communication and tools in a single place. It’s amazing for teams to stay up to date and drive productivity no matter where they are working from. Slack prevents us from having constant meetings in our calendar but still allows for group discussions and instant feedback.
7. Google Hangout. There are various web-based video conferencing tools such as Zoom, Skype, GoToMeeting, etc. However, the firms I have work with in the past mostly used Google hangout, therefore it has made this list. Hangout is great because many times you will find that clients and even team members will be located all over the globe and it’s great to invest in a tool that can allow for real-time collaboration.