Agile methodology is one of the most popular methods of software development and is a great way to organize and plan projects with your team. When organizing sprints, it’s important to share knowledge and information with your team, and the most efficient way to do this is to use a visualization tool. Through using these tools you can easily access flexible templates that align with the agile methodology and make collaborating on projects incredibly easy.
In this article, we will outline how important online whiteboards are to the agile methodology and talk about some of the best templates that engage teams using the agile development method.
Best Templates for Agile Methodology
Agile methodology is defined by its ability to promote flexible development and align teams towards iterative releases. This method of development becomes very effective when teams are able to collaborate with ease, something that is enabled by structuring collaboration through pre-made templates. Here are some of the best templates that help make the agile methodology even more efficient.
Online Whiteboards and Agile
Agile development encapsulates many values that align well with the abilities of online whiteboards. It focuses on user-centric development and flexibility while promoting the deliverance of incremental variables rather than many all at once.
These points of emphasis make using online whiteboards incredibly easy and convenient for teams working within the agile methodology and provide a massive collaboration boost.
One of the most important features of agile development is the ability to align your team to the relevant goals and touchpoints that push the project towards its nearest release. Online whiteboards are the pinnacle of visual collaboration and enable scalable interactions on a shared interface. This means that whatever your goals are through using agile development, online whiteboards have the flexibility and collaboration capacity to help meet them and more.
Online whiteboards are also are able to incorporate complex and useful structures to collaboration in order to make collaboration more efficient and easy to understand. By using templates to structure collaboration, teams are able to understand each other much better and are also able to visually plan out their projects with agile development in mind.
This flexibility means that online whiteboards are the perfect tool to implement agile methodology into your development, and they provide access to a large bank of templates that work very well with the agile method. Here are some of the best templates to use with your agile team.
Kanban
The Kanban template is famously one of the best templates to track projects and develop flexibility within your team. This ability makes it a great option for teams looking to implement agile development into their projects and integrates project planning directly with the agile methodology.
Kanban boards are task-based project organization templates that allow you to organize the actionable tasks required to complete a project. This means that you and your team can effectively align your priorities based on what tasks need to be accomplished before the next release date.
The Kanban prioritization is perfect for incorporating agile development strategies because it can quickly turnover tasks and backlog items based on what the most recent priorities are. This is critical for agile teams and being able to quickly prioritize tasks is very helpful.
Because online whiteboards are accessible all the time, these boards can always be edited and rearranged based on the important tasks, and will always be an accurate portrayal of the project as a whole. This visibility and flexibility make kanban’s really helpful for organizing agile development.
Product Roadmap
Product roadmaps are some of the best tools for teams looking to organize a project on a deeper level. While kanban boards are task-oriented organization tools, product roadmaps are able to outline the release deadlines and organize the project on an actual timeline.
Product roadmaps align very well with some of the distinct features of the agile methodology, one of which being the iterative releases of a product. They focus on the different components and stages of a product’s release, which mirrors the mentality of iterative release schedules present in agile development.
These roadmaps are built to organize projects into different sections, with different release timelines and different branches for tangential projects. Having multiple projects on a moving timeline makes product roadmaps extremely useful for agile teams, and gives them a collaborative space where they can watch their product grow and evolve through various different iterations and releases.
Customer Journey Map
Agile methodology is all about being flexible and adaptable. This means you need to be able to plan for many different scenarios and understand the outcomes if and when they need to change.
Customer journey maps are templates that detail the step-by-step experience of the user as they interact with your product or service. These maps can be made either in preparation for a planned experience or can be made to audit the current experience of the customer.
While customer journey maps aren’t templates that inherently incorporate risk aversion tactics, they can be easily modified to include such material and create a map that identifies multiple different scenarios all in one. This increased vision makes customer journey maps an easy template to incorporate with agile teams and applicable to almost any new project.
Not only are customer journey maps easy to make risk-averse, but they can easily account for changes in the journey or personal details that make or break a customer’s experience. When using a customer journey map you are able to curate the path that the customer follows based on their feedback and prompts. Since you create the journey yourself, it can be easily changed and adjusted depending on the ideal trajectory for the experience.
Retrospective Analysis
Just because Agile methodology focuses on iterative sprints and creating unique adaptations doesn’t mean it’s strictly a mentality that looks forward. Any effective product team also takes some time to look at previous projects in an effort to optimize their future projects.
The retrospective template creates a kanban-like organization for previous projects, allowing you to organize your project into sections that worked well, things that could be improved, and things that should be avoided going forward.
Through this organization, you are able to prioritize certain features or look out for pitfalls while working through the next iteration of your project. This ability to look backward and forwards and adapt to what has worked best with your team is a key feature of agile teams and makes the retrospective template a very effective addition.
Conclusion
Agile methodology is a really important strategy to understand and can be effectively applied to a ton of different templates available on online whiteboards. Not only can you apply agile methodology to these pre-made templates but you can customize them to reflect any changes or adaptations that need to be made to meet your specific touchpoints.
Hopefully, this article was helpful in understanding the intersections between the agile methodology and visual collaboration templates, and if you are looking to test out a virtual workshop make sure you check out all the possibilities available on Fresco.
