The foundation of agile transformation is breaking down a monolithic application into the smallest possible units and building them iteratively and incrementally. Sometimes, in focusing on the smallest units, the bigger picture might be lost. 

In response to that conundrum came the Agile Release Train. Let’s see what it is and how it helps.

What’s an Agile Release Train?

An agile release train (ART) is a team of agile teams that builds solutions in a value stream. A typical agile release train is:

• Long-lived, with experienced team members holding the fort
• Aligned to a shared business and technology mission
• Organized around the enterprise’s value streams
• A team of teams, typically including 50-125 people
• Cross-functional with capabilities to define, build, release, operate, and maintain software

The Scaled Agile Framework visualizes the agile release train as follows.

Why do we need an Agile Release Train?

Within large organizations, even those that follow agile development and project management, there can be silos that inhibit value delivery. For instance, each business unit might have their own agile teams working in silos, duplicating work. The agile release train model prevents this.

Effective hand-offs: The larger teams facilitate faster flow of information, enabling better hand-offs.

Meaningful collaboration: Silos often have leadership and political systems that prevent collaboration. ARTs circumvent that by design.

Value-focus: ART ensures that an organization delivers on the promised value by building solutions that create customer value.

Core Principles of an Agile Release Train

The agile software development world is filled with frameworks and models that can help teams do more, better, or faster. Scrum is a popular development approach. Kanban is a preferred project management style. DevOps vs. agile is a never-ending debate.

To truly understand what Agile Release Trains mean and how they work, let’s begin with its core principles. In addition to agile scrum principles such as iterative development, continuous improvement, cross-functional collaboration, customer focus, etc., here are some specific ART principles.

Organized around value

Instead of organizing teams around functions or departments, the ART is structured around development value streams. Leveraging lean thinking, agile release trains bring together a set of agile teams that can deliver and support a significant product. 

Additionally, when the value stream is expired, the market has changed, or the organization has pivoted, ARTs can be reorganized around other value on the network.

Team alignment

Agile release trains are aligned to shared business and technology missions. This principle is crucial for maintaining coherence and focus across multiple agile teams.

One of the ways in which ARTs ensure alignment is through comprehensive Program Increment (PI) planning. During PI planning, all teams within the agile release train come together to set shared goals, understand dependencies, and establish a collective roadmap.

Built-in quality

Agile teams that form the ART come together to set standards for product quality. They choose practices such as Test-Driven Development (TDD) or automated agile testing to strengthen delivery. 

These practices help identify and address defects early, reduce technical debt, and ensure that the final product meets the required standards across the organization.

Common cadence and synchronization

Agile teams often work independently. This hinders real-time collaboration and a big-picture view of organizational value. Agile release trains solve this problem by emphasizing the importance of two principles:

• Cadence: Events conducted on a regular basis, such as system demos, iteration planning, etc.
• Synchronization: Scheduling sprints, iterations, and PI cycles concurrently among all the teams in the ART to better manage dependencies

This ensures that iterations and continuous improvement aren’t restricted to the individual units and that the entire system evolves cohesively.

Held together by critical roles

Each agile team within the ART has cross-functional roles. However, to hold the ART together as a functioning unit, a few rules are designed.

• Release train engineer: Like a Scrum Master, release train engineers enable execution, remove roadblocks, coach teams, etc.
• Product manager: Oversees the ART backlog and makes decisions around the product’s roadmap
• System architect: Defines the architecture of the solutions in the value stream
• Business owners: Ensure alignment with business outcomes

Now that you understand how agile release trains fit into the context of agile software development, let’s see how you can implement the framework in your organization.

How to Implement an Agile Release Train

In essence, agile release train is a virtual organization, without the traditional hierarchical structure. So, it is a collection of teams working on sprints, products, iterations, user stories, and bugs within the value stream. 

To keep the coaches together and steer it in the right direction, implement your agile release train thoughtfully. A good agile project management tool like ClickUp can offer a significant boost. Here’s how.

1. Define the value stream

Start by defining the value stream. Value streams are typically of two types: 

• Operational: Steps to deliver a product/service to the customer. This could be manufacturing, e-commerce, fulfillment, payment processing, etc.
• Development: Steps to convert a business process into a technology product

While these are closely interrelated, agile release trains are concerned more with the development value stream.

Identify the primary value your teams deliver to the customer and map the process from concept to delivery. Conduct workshops with key stakeholders to gather detailed insights into how value flows through your organization—document every step, from initial idea generation to final delivery and support. 

ClickUp Whiteboards is a great place to map your processes visually, sharing with everyone on the team for asynchronous collaboration later if needed. Given it’s a digital agile tool, you can, of course, update the value stream as it evolves.

2. Organize teams around the value stream

Assemble 5-12 agile teams, each focusing on different aspects of the value stream while working towards the same overarching goal. Ensure each team is cross-functional, with developers, testers, designers, and product owners. 

For instance, one team might handle frontend development while another manages backend services, yet both work towards the same release planning for developers. Clear roles and responsibilities within each team help to optimize collaboration and efficiency.

3. Create a program backlog

Create a program backlog to serve as the single source of truth for what the ART will build. 

• Populate with features derived from the value stream mapping
• Work with product owners to prioritize items based on their value to the customer and the overall business strategy
• Make every item on the backlog well-defined with clear acceptance criteria
• Regularly review and update the backlog to reflect changing priorities and new insights

This backlog guides the work of all teams within the ART, ensuring alignment and focus. Therefore, a centralized tool like ClickUp tasks is necessary to keep all the information in one place.

Within ClickUp tasks, you can add a description for each item on the backlog, set acceptance criteria on checklists, assign to the respective team member, collaborate using nested comments, set priority, customize task types, and more.

4. Plan your program increments

Schedule program increment planning meetings on a regular cadence to align all teams on the ART towards common goals and deliverables. Each increment typically lasts 8-12 weeks. You can automate this as a recurring event on the ClickUp Calendar view.

Bonus: If you’re new to sprint planning, here’s everything you need to know about agile release planning for developers.

5. Set goals

With a 50-125 member team running increments of 8-12 weeks, the project can become unwieldy. Setting clear goals and tracking them regularly can fix that. So, create a system teams can use to point their focus towards.

Use ClickUp Goals to:

• Set targets as numerical, monetary, true/false, or tasks
• Create sprint targets, increment targets, etc.
• Connect tasks to goals and automatically track progress
• Publish goals so the entire team can see the progress

6. Review and adjust

Build reporting: Track progress on all your goals in one place. Choose the metrics that are important to your agile workflows and create customized reports.

For example, with the help of agile burndown charts, you can accurately track each sprint’s progress. Burnup charts, cumulative workload view, team velocity, etc., will provide valuable insights.

Conduct retrospectives: Review performance at the end of each PI to reflect on what worked well and what didn’t. Use this feedback to improve processes and practices continuously.

Encourage open and honest feedback: Create a culture of continuous and timely feedback among members of all agile teams. Here’s why that’s necessary.

Bonus: For inspiration, see how Gabriel Hoffman, solutions engineer at ZenPilot, uses ClickUp to implement scrum.

The Role of Feedback in Agile Release Trains

Within all agile models of working, feedback plays a crucial role. The same is true in agile release trains. 

Business feedback: ARTs collaborate with business teams to understand if the solution delivered has met the business goals.

Customer feedback: ARTs actively seek customer feedback on their increments as a way to validate value. This could be performed internally, like tracking usage, retention rates, social media reviews, etc. Or in collaboration with the user, like surveys or interviews.

Technology feedback: ARTs run regular integration testing and technical spikes to collect tech feedback. Several monitoring processes also give feedback to the infra team.

Team feedback: Multiple teams working together as one unit need honest and trusting feedback. ART teams speak openly in reviews and retrospectives to understand the behavioral aspects of working together and iron them out as needed.

Project management feedback: Another key aspect of feedback is how well the projects are managed. Resource utilization, timeliness of delivery, adherence to standards, etc. can be derived from project management dashboards, which can be used to improve productivity and efficiency.

The Impact of Agile Release Trains on Software Development Process

Since the turn of the century, software development has undergone a sea change. Agile development teams of the past suffered from:

Fragmented teams: Traditional agile teams worked well within themselves, with great local optimization. However, organization-wide, silos remained with limited coordination, leading to misalignment and inefficiencies.

Inconsistent quality: Fragmented teams had different quality standards, leading to inconsistent products and higher bugs across the value chain.

Slow feedback loops: Feedback from stakeholders and users was slow, which is somewhat counter-productive to the accelerated sprint cycles the teams were going for.

Suboptimal collaboration: Independent teams worked asynchronously, creating gaps in visibility and affecting the big picture.

Agile release trains came as a solution to all these problems that software development teams face. It brought the benefits of agile to serve the needs of large, complex organizations.

With ART, enterprises achieved:

Value realization: The value-stream driven approach of ART ensures that all the software development work is focused on delivering customer value. 

Better team coordination: ART brought multiple agile teams together systematically, fostering better coordination and alignment around shared goals and objectives.

Built-in quality: Quality practices were integrated into every development phase, leading to consistent and high-quality outputs across the value stream.

Rapid feedback loops: Synchronization and common cadence ensure timely reviews and retrospectives for quicker feedback and more responsive adjustments.

Accelerated delivery: ART enabled shorter, more predictable delivery cycles, allowing for quicker releases and better adaptability to market changes.

Challenges in implementing agile release trains

Despite it’s several benefits outlined above, implementing an agile release train is not without its challenges. When agile teams embrace ART, they might be faced with the following.

Cultural shift

Adopting ART requires a significant cultural shift within the organization. Teams that are used to working in small setups, independently and asynchronously, might find the larger structure of ART unsettling.

For instance, synchronized sprints or common cadence for retrospectives might feel stifling. To avoid this disruption, ART leaders must introduce the idea slowly and build consensus within the organization.

Initial learning curve

The initial learning curve in understanding and adopting ART practices can be steep for many teams. ART introduces new roles, ceremonies, and practices that team members must quickly learn and integrate into their daily workflows.

For instance, the Inspect & Adapt (I&A) is conducted at the beginning of every iteration, in addition to the retrospective at the end of each iteration. 

Providing comprehensive training, resources, and mentorship can help mitigate this challenge, enabling teams to transition more smoothly and start realizing the benefits of ART.

Dependency management

Managing dependencies across multiple teams within an agile release train can be a bit of a nightmare. Ensuring all teams are aligned and their work integrates smoothly requires meticulous planning and coordination. 

To avoid this, set up:

• Clear communication channels: For instance, ClickUp Chat view consolidates all messages ensuring that nothing gets missed even if there’s a lot of noise
• Visual management tools: A dependency board—mapping tasks that are dependent on one another—helps teams identify and address dependencies early

Effectively Manage Your Agile Release Train With ClickUp

Agile practices are fantastic for small software development teams. In fact, agile recommends breaking down large teams into smaller units for better efficiency and quality.

However, this often creates a problem of scale. Agile release trains are the answer to the problem of scaling agile practices across large organizations. Great agile release trains align multiple teams around shared goals, synchronize efforts, build coherence in solutioning, and deliver on business value streams. 

Implementing and managing an ambitious framework like the agile release train requires a robust, comprehensive, flexible, and customizable project management tool. From outlining tasks to managing dependencies, it needs to do everything.

ClickUp is designed for exactly that. ClickUp for agile teams empowers you to manage value streams—and sunset the ones you’re done with—effortlessly. It allows you to see the big picture as well as zoom into the nitty-gritty detail. It serves individuals, projects, teams, and team of teams, like the agile release train.

Try ClickUp today for free!

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A kanban board is simple to use, but it can be a powerful tool for teams. A kanban board creates a visual workflow that illustrates how a team works together and how work is produced. Such workflows help teams improve productivity by providing a glimpse into efficiency at each project stage.

Historically, kanban was used in manufacturing and development teams, but managers across all industries have joined in the fun after seeing just how helpful the tool can be. In this article, we’ll show you how to set up a professional kanban workflow that will work wonders for your team.

What Is a Kanban Workflow?

A kanban workflow is a work management system that allows organizations to manage workflows by using kanban tools and principles. A kanban workflow can help you manage any type of business process, which is why they’re used by businesses across industries such as manufacturing, software development, marketing and more.

To do so, you’ll need to customize kanban board columns so that each of them represents a stage of a process or workflow. Then you can use kanban cards to represent tasks, which you’ll then move across the kanban board columns as they go through various workflow stages.

ProjectManager is an award-winning project management software that offers kanban boards that allow you assign tasks to your team members, monitor costs, track their progress and automate your workflows. In addition, you can use Gantt charts, project dashboards, timesheets and many other tools to plan, schedule and track your manufacturing process. Get started today for free.

What Is Kanban Workflow Management?

Establishing a kanban workflow system for managing your organization’s business processes it’s only the first step. Then you’ll need to oversee its implementation by taking actions that include:

• Onboarding your team with the kanban methodology principles and best practices
• Allocating resources needed for activities and ensuring they’re available when they’re needed
• Managing the costs of resources such as labor, materials and equipment
• Establishing work-in-progress (WIP) limits to avoid bottlenecks
• Defining key performance indicators
• Monitoring your team’s performance by calculating activity lead time and other metrics
• Managing recurring tasks
• Balancing your team’s workload to avoid over allocating team members with tasks

Kanban boards can help you manage almost any type of process or workflow, which is why they’re used by organizations across industries. Let’s take a look at some kanban workflow examples so you can better understand how they’re used.

Kanban Workflow Examples

As stated above, there are hundreds of possibilities when it comes to creating kanban workflows, here are some examples which we hope will inspire you to create your own.

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Kanban Board Template

Use this free Kanban Board Template for Excel to manage your projects better.

Download Excel File

Project Management Kanban Workflow Example

A project can be simply defined as a set of activities that are executed within a defined timeline. A marketing campaign, for example, meets those requirements so it can be considered a project.

In the example below, you can see how kanban boards can be used to manage simple project workflows. In this case, the kanban board columns define the four workflow stages that all the marketing campaign activities must go through: “to do, in design, in production and ready for approval”.

This kanban board allows the marketing manager to assign tasks to team members, allocate resources, track due dates and assign a level of priority to all these activities. In addition, ProjectManager’s kanban board also allows you to track the costs of these activities, track their percentage of completion, collaborate with your team members online and much more.

Manufacturing Kanban Workflow Example

Besides project management applications, kanban boards can also be used to manage ongoing activities, such as the daily operations of a manufacturing team. This manufacturing kanban workflow example works almost identically to the previous example, but in this case, the kanban cards represent tasks that members of a manufacturing team execute to produce their products.

Order Fulfillment Kanban Workflow Example

In this order fulfillment kanban workflow example, each kanban card shows the details for a customer order such as its scheduled delivery date, production costs, priority levels, files and more. By using this kanban workflow you can visualize all your customer orders in one place, track their status and identify bottlenecks and issues.

Inventory Management Kanban Workflow Example

Kanban boards were first created as a lean manufacturing tool that could greatly help with inventory management. In a kanban inventory system, kanban cards have information about inventory items such as order quantity, unit price, minimum inventory level, among other details that employees need to know when ordering these items from suppliers.

When an employee notices that an inventory item has reached its reorder point, he’ll need to take the kanban card for that item and place it in a physical kanban board to indicate that the item must be ordered.

However, you can use a kanban board software like ProjectManager to use digital kanban boards and cards to manage your inventories instead. The kanban workflow image below shows the various steps of the ordering process, which you can use to manage your inventory restock workflow.

Kanban Board Template

This free kanban board template for Excel is a good place to get started with kanban boards for managing tasks, processes and workflows. Simply follow the instructions to customize its kanban columns and cards.

Why Make a Kanban Workflow

When a workflow is represented visually on a kanban board, a team can learn loads of information about how they work together. Teams can see which stages of a project are efficient, where bottlenecks are occurring, and whether other team members might need help to keep things on track.

Kanban workflows offer an easy-to-read glimpse into work, so naturally, managers love them. Managers can monitor the workflow in real time to understand their team’s productivity, and then optimize their work processes for future projects.

Kanban workflows are also helpful for keeping stakeholders in the loop. Your boss won’t have to chase you down for a project update if they can simply look at the workflow and know exactly what’s going on in the project. Workflow management software makes this process even easier.

How to Make a Kanban Workflow in 6 Easy Steps

Kanban boards are deceptively simple. They are easy to set up, but first you have to understand the mechanics. Here’s how to create a kanban workflow.

1. Signup for a Kanban Tool

The first step in making your workflow is to sign up for kanban software. ProjectManager’s kanban tools are free for 30 days, so sign up for a free trial. You can try out the tools before having to pay any money or make any commitments.

2. Add Your Team Members

While kanban boards can be used to manage the work of a single person, they are extra helpful when used by a team. Once you are in the kanban software, you should invite all of your team members so that they can collaborate with you on your projects.

At this point, you can also invite any stakeholders that you’d like to keep informed. However, you may want to wait until your workflow is built out so that they have something to look at the first time they log in.

ProjectManager makes it easy to invite new people to your workspace at any time and offers different permission levels for each new team member. This gives you control over who sees what within the workspace.

3. Make a New Kanban Project

Once your team members have been invited to the workspace, you’ll need to create your first project to house the workflow. Navigate to the big green “+” in the top right corner of your screen and click it to add a new project. Give your new project a name, choose who will be working on this project and click “create project”.

All of your project planning details can be edited later, so don’t worry too much about getting this perfect. The most important thing is that you get a new project launched so you can begin building your workflow.

4. Add All of Your Tasks

Now that your new project is created, navigate to the “Board” tab in the menu to go to the kanban board view. This is where you will build out your entire kanban workflow.

On the default board screen, you’ll see three columns that are already built for you: To Do, Doing, and Done.

• To Do: This column will host all of the tasks that need to be done to complete your project.
• Doing: This column will show all of the tasks that are currently being worked on.
• Done: This column will show which tasks are complete.

Start by adding all of your team’s tasks to “To-Do”. Give each new task a name and create a kanban card for it. In our example, we’ll be creating a kanban workflow for a marketing team that has been asked to add two new web pages to their company website.

We’ve added two tasks called “New Webpage 1” and “New Webpage 2” to the To Do column. You should then click into each task and add a little bit more information about this task, so that team members have all of the information they need once they begin working. You can add a task description, start dates and due dates, and attach any necessary files.

5. Make Custom Columns

Now that a task has been created for each piece of the project, we can begin customizing the columns to fit our team’s workflow.

We know that we need to build two new web pages, but that’s easier said than done— many different people will be involved with this project. Therefore, we’ll create custom columns to represent each stage of the creation process. The different stages of creation for a webpage are content writing and editing, design, publishing and promotion.

Since this kanban workflow will be more complicated than the standard three columns that are currently in place, we will update the columns. The old columns were

• To-Do
• Doing
• Done

But after we customize our project, the new columns are (from left-to-right)

• To Do
• Write and Edit Content
• Design
• Publish
• Promote

6. Assign the Work

Now that the project phases are created and ready to go, we can begin utilizing the workflow. Since the first thing needed in order to build a webpage is content, we’ll move “New Webpage 1” into the “Content” column and assign the task to the content writer. Once a task is assigned to a team member, they will receive an email notification letting them know to get to work.

The kanban workflow is now in action! After the content writer finishes their work, they can attach the content to the task, move the task into “Editing,” and re-assign the task to the editor. Once the editing is done, the task is moved to “Design” and so on until the webpage is done.

You’ll be able to see the task as it flows through the creation process, hence the name “workflow.”

Best Practices for Kanban Workflows

Once the workflow is up-and-running, it is important to keep an eye on it to make sure things are going smoothly. Sometimes you’ll find that you need to add a new column to the workflow if new people become involved, and the process becomes more complex.

It’s also important to keep an eye out for bottlenecks in the workflow. A bottleneck is where a project gets stuck and stops moving forward.

To use our example workflow again, maybe you notice that the two new webpages are due for publishing in three days, but both are still sitting in the “Design” column. In this case, your web designers might be overloaded with work, so you may want to see if another designer can help.

Related: 12 Resource Allocation Tips for Managers

This is why kanban workflows are so useful: they can help you catch problems as they happen, and prevent problems that could cause delays in project completion.

ProjectManager Takes Kanban Even Further

You can build all of your kanban workflows in ProjectManager to collaborate with your team and get more work done efficiently. Thousands of teams all over the world utilize our platform on a daily basis to stay organized and do amazing things.

In addition to kanban boards, ProjectManager also offers a whole suite of useful project management tools. These include Gantt charts for making project plans, timesheets for tracking time on work, and project reports for analyzing the productivity of a team.

ProjectManager is an award-winning tool that organizes teams and projects. Our cloud-based software gives you real-time data, so you can make better decisions and lead the project to a successful end. Try our kanban boards and see how we can streamline your workflow by taking a free 30-day trial.

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As an agile practitioner and advocate, I’ve always emphasized the importance of effective estimation techniques. Planning poker has been a go-to method for many teams, but in today’s increasingly remote and distributed work environment, traditional in-person planning poker sessions can be a challenge. That’s where free online planning poker tools like Kollabe come in to save the day!

You can learn more about Kollabes free online planning poker.

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Agile teams know the struggle of aligning on task complexities and estimations. Enter Planning Poker, a gamified way for dev teams to estimate the value of a task.

Unfortunately, these tasks are usually hosted in a separate system. However, with Kollabe’s Planning Poker Jira integration, this is no longer a problem. This integration allows a seamless connection between Planning Poker and the Jira tasks. Teams can now easily estimate, discuss, and align on task complexities on Kollabe, and have everything synced back to Jira.

What makes this integration essential? It simplifies the setup process into manageable steps, allowing for seamless connection to Jira, addition of story point fields, and importing of tickets.

To dive deeper into how this integration can revolutionize your agile planning sessions and for a step-by-step guide on setting it up, head over to this detailed post.

Increase your team’s efficiency and alignment with the Planning Poker Jira Integration today!

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I’ve been captivated by The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. It masterfully adapts lean manufacturing to the tech startup scene, championing agility, rapid iteration, and customer focus. The book isn’t just theory; it’s a practical guide to innovating more effectively and efficiently, valuable for anyone in tech.

Key Insights & Real-World Applications:

1. Build-Measure-Learn Loop: This core loop is about turning ideas into products quickly, then measuring how customers respond and learning whether to pivot or persevere. A vivid example from the book is Ries’ own experience with IMVU, where initial assumptions about customer needs led to rapid iterations before finding a successful product market fit.

2. Validated Learning: This principle involves learning what customers really want, saving time and resources. The book discusses how startups like Dropbox used a simple video to validate customer interest in their product concept before building it, significantly reducing unnecessary development work.

3. Pivot or Persevere: Deciding whether to pivot (change direction) or persevere (continue with the current strategy) is crucial. Ries shares the story of how a pivot in the development strategy, from focusing on complex technology to understanding what was truly valuable to customers, led to the success of Zappos.

4. Innovative Accounting: Setting up metrics that demonstrate clear progress toward the goal. Ries emphasizes the importance of actionable metrics over vanity metrics through examples like Aardvark, a company that pivoted based on learning from customer interactions, which eventually led to its acquisition by Google.

5. Sustainable Growth: Ries explains that sustainable growth comes from products that cause customers to refer others. The example of Votizen, leveraging users’ social networks to drive growth, illustrates how focusing on features that encourage referrals can create a self-sustaining growth loop.

I’m curious to hear about your experiences with Lean Startup principles. Have they shaped your approach to projects or leadership? Let’s share success stories, challenges or limitations in these methodologies.

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A lot of software development best practices focus on what is to be done in the present—at best in the current sprint. While this is necessary, it is also short-sighted.

Good product teams also keep an eye on the future. An essential process in such future-focused planning is backlog grooming.

Thoughtful backlog grooming can transform your team’s productivity, streamline processes, and lead to successful delivery. Here’s how.

What is Backlog Grooming?

Backlog grooming, also known as backlog refinement, is the collaborative evaluation, enhancement, prioritization, and update of the items on the product backlog. 

This is not to be confused with the sprint backlog, i.e., items of the current sprint yet to be completed, which are taken up only after it’s refined and deemed ready for development.

Typically, the backlog grooming process involves iterative sessions, during which the entire cross-functional team discusses items to ensure they align with the project’s strategic direction and available resources.

Benefits of Backlog Grooming

During each sprint planning meeting, teams choose and prioritize items from the backlog for development. At this point, they also evaluate and expand on the features/user stories they choose. 

Why should product teams look at backlog items that may or may not be taken up in the future and groom them? Let’s see.

Makes sprint planning easier: A well-groomed backlog prioritizes tasks based on value, complexity, and urgency. During sprint planning, you can focus on immediate relevance to market/business needs and move forward effectively.

Improves productivity: An essential part of backlog refinement is adding information to the user story through definition, expected outcomes, and acceptance criteria. When developers begin work, they already have everything they need to build great products.

Brings predictability: By breaking down larger tasks into manageable pieces, backlog grooming brings a sense of repeatability and predictability into the process. As a result, teams can tackle work more efficiently, avoiding the paralysis that often comes with overwhelming projects.

Supports resource allocation: Backlog grooming ensures that resources are allocated to tasks that offer the most value. It prevents the backlog from becoming a dumping ground for every idea or request, which can dilute focus and impede progress. 

Better team collaboration: Through regular grooming sessions, team members can discuss and align on the project’s direction and priorities. They can visualize the future state of some of the best whiteboard software. These discussions ensure everyone has a shared context and is working towards the same goals.

Potential drawbacks of backlog grooming and how to overcome them

Though highly beneficial, backlog grooming, when done wrong, can present significant disadvantages. Here are some potential drawbacks of backlog grooming and how to avoid them.

Time box grooming sessions: Teams can take too much time grooming tasks, not even in the current sprint, wasting critical resources. So, set time limits for grooming sessions and direct the conversations to be focused and productive. 

Know when to stop: Without a clear process, delivery teams prioritize and reprioritize the same tasks, leading to analysis paralysis. To avoid this, know when to stop and accept that you can make adjustments as new information becomes available. 

Focus on long-term goals: When you groom your backlog regularly, you can lose track of long-term objectives and optimize based on immediate resource availability or need. 

Avoid this and guide backlog grooming towards the project’s overarching vision. Incorporating milestone reviews into the grooming process ensures that both short-term tasks and long-term goals are aligned.

Remember to be creative: The structured nature of these sessions might stifle creativity, as the focus tends to be on refinement and estimation rather than ideation. Encourage open brainstorming outside of the grooming process to balance creativity with productivity. 

While we theoretically understand what backlog grooming can do, let’s get deeper into what it looks like in practice.

Backlog Grooming or Refinement in Project Management

If project management is the process of planning, scheduling, and implementing a series of tasks towards a common goal, backlog grooming will be among the most important decisions you make. 

Unlike traditional software development methods such as waterfall or critical path method, which offer little flexibility for adapting to market changes, agile engineering—and backlog grooming—empowers you to always stay in line with user needs and market demand.

In project management, especially in agile software development, grooming is critical in the following areas.

Scope of work

Backlog grooming clarifies the scope of work. It helps evaluate the work that needs to be done and estimate effort/time. It enables the project manager to identify dependencies and make proactive adjustments. 

Sprint planning

Agile backlog grooming is a prerequisite for good sprint planning. Good grooming ensures backlogs and sprints are populated with work items that are well understood and accurately sized, minimizing surprises and roadblocks.

Unsure where to start? ClickUp’s Backlogs and Sprints template is the right starting point for you.

Team productivity and velocity

A groomed backlog:

• Offers a 360-degree view of the project workload, encompassing all planned features, enhancements, and bug fixes
• Prioritizes tasks based on their expected contribution to the project’s goals
• Supports resource allocation with specific effort/time estimates

Agility

Backlog grooming provides much-needed flexibility in an agile delivery team. It enhances task organization to embody the agile ethos of continuous improvement and responsiveness to change.

Stakeholder collaboration

When you bring business stakeholders and client teams to the grooming session, you turn them into active participants in the project’s journey, fostering a sense of ownership and shared vision. This also helps mitigate risk through early identification and discussing of potential issues or impediments.

An important question in a process that is critical to effective project management is who should attend the backlog grooming sessions. We answer that next.

Who Should Attend Backlog Grooming Sessions

The efficacy of the product backlog grooming process in agile and scrum methodologies hinges on key stakeholders’ active participation and collaboration. Those who should attend every backlog grooming session are as follows.

1. Product owner

The product owner is tasked with articulating the vision and ensuring that the product backlog aligns with it. A product owner’s role in backlog grooming meetings are:

• Articulating the business value of backlog items 
• Providing clarity on requirements
• Bringing the business perspective to software development 
• Ensuring alignment with business goals

2. Scrum master

The scrum master, the backlog grooming session leader, must ensure the meetings are productive and focused. Scrum master’s responsibilities in a grooming session are:

• Clarifying processes and systems the team follows
• Evangelizing a common vocabulary of agile scrum terms
• Keeping discussions on track
• Forging progress through discussions
• Ensuring adherence to agile principles

3. Development team

Ultimately, the developers and quality analysts will build the items on the backlog, so they need to be there. They provide invaluable insights into the technical feasibility and effort required. They will ensure the backlog is realistic, achievable, and aligned with practical capabilities.

4. Business representatives

Business representatives ensure that the backlog reflects the priorities of the business. Their participation in backlog refinement meetings aligns development efforts with business goals. 

Their role in agile backlog grooming includes:

• Validating the relevance of items
• Evaluating the urgency of items
• Measuring the value of backlog items in business terms

Now, invite all these people and get them into a meeting. We’ll show you how to do it right.

Running a Backlog Refinement Meeting

No individual refines backlog independently, even though many stakeholders add their input offline. Much product backlog refinement happens in meetings through discussion, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

You need the right processes and product backlog management tools to have a productive meeting. We cover both next.

1. Gather and analyze backlog data

The first step, even before getting into a backlog meeting, is to gather and analyze data. At this stage, compile all existing items, including:

• User stories
• Bug reports
• Feature requests
• Technical debt tasks

Use a tool like ClickUp’s free project management software for a comprehensive and organized overview. See your backlog as a list, table, or a Kanban board. 

You might also speak to the customer success team for any specific feedback or input they’ve received from users.

If you’re new to backlog management, use any of these product backlog templates to get started.

2. Categorize backlogged items

Not all tasks are created equal, so categorize them accordingly. Identify which of your items are:

• New features
• Enhancements
• Bugs and fixes
• Documentation updates

Update the task type accordingly on ClickUp for easier access.

This step simplifies prioritization by grouping similar tasks, making allocating resources and estimating timelines easier.

3. Prioritize, rinse, repeat

Prioritize items based on key factors, such as business value, customer impact, and technical feasibility. Remember that work is not done when you prioritize once. Through every backlog grooming session, revisit—at least cursorily—all previously prioritized tasks and ensure they’re still in the same status.

4. Estimate effort and resources

For each high-priority task, estimate the effort and resources required. At this stage, get the entire team’s buy-in, including developers, testers, and DevOps specialists.

Add comprehensive user stories and use cases to ensure your estimates are accurate. Ensure that each task has an explanation of the feature from the perspective of the end user.

Set clear and measurable acceptance criteria. This ensures everyone has a shared understanding of what needs to be achieved for a task to be considered complete.

Map out dependencies between tasks. Identify potential bottlenecks or risks associated with each high-priority item, such as technical challenges or resource constraints.

5. Schedule review and refinement sessions

Organize regular backlog refinement sessions with the project team to review progress, reassess priorities, and update the backlog. This keeps the backlog relevant and aligned with project objectives and stakeholder expectations.

Maintain open lines of communication with all stakeholders, enabling a live feedback loop. Incorporate lessons from completed tasks to refine and adjust the backlog. 

6. Document and share updates

Keep a detailed record of all changes made during the backlog refinement process and share updates with relevant stakeholders. This will promote transparency and keep everyone informed about the project’s progress and direction.

ClickUp Docs are a great way to record your grooming sessions. ClickUp Brain can also help summarize, proofread, and enhance your notes!

Tools and Techniques for Effective Backlog Grooming

With the process nailed down, let’s look at some specific agile tools and backlog grooming best practices that can help, including the ClickUp product management software.

Timebox backlog refinement meetings

The duration of backlog grooming meetings can vary depending on the project’s complexity and the team’s maturity. However, as a general guideline, these sessions should last 1 to 2 hours. 

Feel free to use ClickUp’s time tracking features to measure time spent on grooming sessions.

Be concise and focused

It is straightforward to discuss every little idea and lose track of time. So, get into the meeting with an agenda that clearly outlines the expected outcome. Keep the discussion focused on that. Document the conversation as well as the points you couldn’t discuss.

ClickUp Docs is a great way to do this. You can also connect ClickUp Docs to various tasks/sub-tasks, assign users, share, etc., to guide your grooming sessions.

Schedule in advance

No one likes an ad hoc ping about a 2-hour grooming session. Schedule recurring meetings as part of the project.

ClickUp’s Calendar view is a great way to integrate regular backlog grooming sessions within the project tasks and timelines. Set automated reminders to ensure all stakeholders join the meeting. For each meeting, include details on the ideal outcome so stakeholders can come prepared. 

Make meeting collaborative

Use visual tools in your grooming meetings to encourage everyone to participate. Invite input and inspire ideas.

ClickUp Whiteboard is a great way to visually note new user stories, prioritize tasks, and connect them as a mind map.

Use agile estimation techniques

Estimation can be tedious, so people just take a guess or wing it. Avoid this by making it contextual and, perhaps, even fun. Some commonly used agile estimation techniques are:

• Planning poker: Gamified way to estimate effort by discussing and assigning agile story points to user stories
• T-shirt sizing: Use relative sizes (e.g., XS, S, M, L, XL) to estimate the effort required for each backlog item

Try prioritization frameworks

Prioritization is a huge part of product backlog grooming. Use the best techniques to get this part right. Two commonly used methods are:

• MoSCoW method: Categorize user stories into Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won’t have buckets
• Value vs. effort matrix: Plotting tasks on a matrix based on their value to the project and the effort required to complete them

Ace Your Next Backlog Grooming Session With ClickUp

One of the fundamental principles of agile software development is simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.

This principle emphasizes the need to prioritize work carefully and deliberately so that we only do what creates maximum value. Backlog grooming is a great tool for achieving that.

Backlog grooming helps a project/product manager visualize the future more clearly. It helps them shape the product roadmap in the medium and the long term while actively working on the current sprint.

Product teams can dramatically improve backlog grooming effectiveness with the right project management tool. 

With detailed feature descriptions (user stories), acceptance criteria (checklists), time tracking, scheduling, reminders, comments, and collaboration features, ClickUp’s agile project management software is purpose-designed for agile software development, including backlog grooming.

See how ClickUp supports backlog grooming. Try ClickUp for free today.

FAQs About Backlog Grooming

1. What is a better word for backlog grooming?

Backlog grooming is also called backlog refinement or story grooming.

2. What is the purpose of grooming in scrum?

The purpose of grooming in Scrum project management is to review, prioritize, and refine the product backlog items to ensure clarity, relevance, and alignment with project goals.

3. What is the role of backlog grooming?

The role of backlog grooming is to ensure the software development team’s product backlog remains organized, prioritized, up-to-date, and ready for use.

The post How Can Backlog Grooming Help Your Product Team? appeared first on ClickUp.

The post How Can Backlog Grooming Help Your Product Team? appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Two approaches that have been increasingly popular in the field of software development throughout time are DevOps and Agile. With the goals of enhancing cooperation, streamlining procedures, and producing high-quality outputs quickly, both DevOps and Agile present distinctive methods for project management and software development.

DevOps aims to increase the cooperation between teams working on development and operations, whereas Agile prioritizes iterative development and continuous improvement. We’ll examine the distinctions between DevOps and Agile in this blog article, as well as each methodology’s advantages and disadvantages, before deciding which is most likely to become the standard in the future.

Introduction:

DevOps and Agile have revolutionized the way software development teams operate, enabling them to deliver products faster and more effectively. While both methodologies share common goals, such as improving efficiency and quality, they differ in their approaches and focus areas.

DevOps emphasizes automation, collaboration, and integration between development and operations teams, while Agile prioritizes flexibility, customer collaboration, and iterative development. Understanding the nuances of each methodology is crucial for organizations looking to optimize their software development processes and stay ahead in today’s competitive market.

Agile Methodology

Agile methodology is a project management approach that emphasizes iterative development, cross-functional teams, and customer collaboration. It is based on the Agile Manifesto, which outlines four core values:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change by following a plan
Agile methodologies, such as Scrum and Kanban, advocate for breaking down projects into smaller increments, known as sprints or iterations, to facilitate continuous feedback and adaptation. This iterative approach allows teams to respond quickly to changing requirements and deliver value to customers on time.

Key Principles of Agile Development
Agile development is guided by several key principles that shape its implementation and execution:

• Customer Satisfaction: Prioritizing customer needs and delivering valuable solutions.
• Embracing Change: Welcoming changing requirements even late in the development process.
• Incremental Progress: Breaking down projects into manageable increments for continuous improvement.
• Collaboration: Fostering close collaboration between cross-functional teams.
• Iterative Approach: Release small, working increments of software regularly.
• Self-Organizing Teams: Empowering teams to make decisions and adapt to challenges.
  These principles form the foundation of Agile development practices and help teams achieve greater flexibility, efficiency, and customer satisfaction.

DevOps

DevOps is a set of practices that combine software development (Dev) with IT operations (Ops) to shorten the system development life cycle and provide continuous delivery of high-quality software. DevOps aims to break down silos between development and operations teams, automate manual processes, and foster a culture of collaboration and shared responsibility.

At its core, DevOps focuses on four key areas known as the CALMS model:

• Culture: Promoting collaboration, transparency, and trust among team members.
• Automation: Streamlining processes through automation to improve efficiency and reduce errors.
• Lean: Eliminating waste and optimizing resources for maximum value delivery.
• Measurement: Using data and metrics to track performance, identify bottlenecks, and drive continuous improvement.
• Sharing: Encouraging knowledge sharing and cross-functional collaboration for better outcomes.

Comparing Agile and DevOps

While both DevOps and Agile share common goals of enhancing collaboration, efficiency, and quality in software development, they differ in their focus areas and implementation strategies:

• DevOps focuses on automating processes, improving deployment frequency, and enhancing system reliability through continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.
• Agile prioritizes iterative development, customer collaboration, and adapting to changing requirements through short feedback loops and regular sprint cycles.
• DevOps aims to unify development and operations teams to enable faster delivery of software updates and improvements.
• Agile values flexibility, customer satisfaction, and delivering working software incrementally to address evolving user needs.
  Despite these differences, organizations can benefit from combining elements of both DevOps and Agile to create a seamless software development process that prioritizes speed, quality, and customer satisfaction.

Software Development’s Future: DevOps vs. Agile

• As organizations continue to evolve their software development practices to meet the demands of an increasingly digital world, the debate between DevOps and Agile remains ongoing.
• While some argue that DevOps is better suited for modern cloud-native applications and fast-paced delivery environments, others believe that Agile’s focus on flexibility and customer collaboration is essential for long-term success.
• In reality, the future of software development is likely to involve a hybrid approach that incorporates the best practices of both DevOps and Agile.
• By leveraging automation, collaboration, iterative development, and continuous improvement, organizations can achieve greater efficiency, quality, and innovation in their software Agile and DevOps projects.

The ultimate potential of the relationship between DevOps and Agile may lie in their synergy rather than in their competitiveness. Adopting the concepts of DevOps and Agile can help companies succeed in the ever-changing software development industry as they work to provide value to clients more quickly and efficiently.

Conclusion:

Software development experts have been debating between DevOps and Agile for a long time. Although every approach has its benefits and drawbacks, the secret is to know how to best utilize them in tandem to promote creativity, effectiveness, and client pleasure.

As organizations navigate the complexities of modern software development, embracing a hybrid approach that combines the strengths of DevOps and Agile may just be the winning formula for success in the ever-evolving tech industry.

By exploring the core principles, practices, and future outlook of DevOps vs Agile in this blog post, we hope to provide valuable insights for organizations looking to optimize their software development processes and stay ahead of the curve in an increasingly competitive market landscape.

Relevant Blogs:
Discovering 5 Practical DevOps Applications with Amazon ECS
Is coding required for DevOps?
SRE vs DevOps

The post Which is going to win, DevOps or Agile? appeared first on ProdSens.live.

I facilitate daily standup meetings for our support team. When I started working for White October we followed the conventional “scrum” format, where the team get together, share what’s new, what’s challenging and what’s happening, and everyone gives feedback and makes suggestions to unblock each other.

In this article, I’ll look at 5 activities you can try in your daily team standup meeting. These make the daily scrum fun!

In our team, we valued the idea that everyone feels involved and informed, and their contribution is valuable, and the opportunity to re-group as a team once a day.

So far so good, right?

Not really. Because after a few weeks I realized that the energy levels weren’t what they should be for such a creative, innovative agency.

What’s the point of a daily standup meeting?

The purpose of a daily standup meeting, which you will sometimes hear referred to as the daily scrum, is to get together and go over important tasks that are just finishing, or about to start. It’s a way of getting everyone on the same page about priorities.

If you work with Agile methods, you will likely be attending standup meetings every day. Some teams that don’t use Agile still do standups because they are a good way to catch up with everyone, especially on fast-moving projects.

This is only one of the different types of project meetings you’ll be involved with, but it’s an important one.

How does a standup meeting work?

The meeting happens daily, and the team meets only briefly. Generally, you go around the room and each person says what they are working on, what they have completed and what their roadblocks are. You can also add ‘parking lot’ tasks for things to discuss once the round-the-room points have been made.

You can tailor what is discussed in a stand up meeting, so if you are working out what to say as the meeting chair, think about what is useful for the team to know.

Oh, and it’s called a standup because you normally have the meeting while standing up! That way people are prompted to be done more quickly. Also, it’s good for you to spend some time standing in the day, and it also means it is easier for people to move around and talk to each other.

There are plenty of benefits to agile meetings, including that this one is over and done with quickly!

Some meeting rooms have the chairs removed precisely so you can meet standing up without the temptation of a chair. Other teams hold their meetings around the Kanban board or whiteboard so everyone can refer to that if they need to.

What if you need to meet remotely?

You can hold your daily standups remotely — many teams do that these days as colleagues might not be in the office at the same time, or may work in different office locations.

If you’re holding a remote standup, you don’t have to make your colleagues on the call stand up as that might mess with what you seen in the camera and their desk set up. If they have a standing desk, they can stand, but you wouldn’t mandate it.

However, the principle of keeping the calls short stays: keep the calls short and regular, with a focus on improving communication between the team.

Even though it’s a short daily get together, it helps to have some fun standup meeting ideas to break the monotony and keep team morale high. Keep reading for some easy-to-implement ideas!

Who attends the daily standup meeting?

In Scrum, the development team attend the daily standup meeting.

Agile team roles are quite specific, and yet, at the same time, you often find everyone mucking in to get the job done in a multi-skilled team. Depending on your agile team structure, you might choose the attendees at the daily standup differently.

In a formal Scrum team, the development team members are the only mandated people to attend the daily standup. The product owner, Scrum Master and anyone else can attend, but they normally only listen and don’t contribute.

How to make standup meetings or your daily scrum interesting (and more fun!)

Our projects at the time were interesting; everyone was communicating and sharing ideas. But the traditional scrum format didn’t work for our team and made meetings flat. The team just wanted to get through them and get back to their desks.

We needed to inject some energy. I experimented with a few ideas, to see what worked and what didn’t.

Here are 5 activities we tried to re-energize our project standup meetings, with tips for you to try them with your project teams too.

Activity 1: What made you unhappy yesterday and what will make you happy today?

If you are wondering how to start a standup meeting, try this exercise.

It was a good way to start the day with a positive attitude, tease out team challenges and figure out how to overcome them. It also gave everyone the opportunity to make suggestions, and gave the scrum master visibility of what everyone was working on

Afterwards everyone shared a music track to create a playlist for the day to share with the rest of the agency. This introduced a type of gamification in the daily routine which improved the team communications and engagement.

Try it: You can ask this question in your standups for agile teams. Listen to the answers and see what you can do to act on them. You can also share your favorite tracks!

Activity 2: 360 Degree Appreciation

I had this idea from Funretrospectives, and introduced it to the team the week before Christmas as a fun way to share gifts. It’s not a standup meeting game, but it’s still worth doing.

As a team everyone thanked each other for their work and said what they appreciated the most. It was really useful to speak out about why we value each other.

By subconsciously following one of the Fish Philosophy principles of ‘making someone’s day’ we realized that a little gesture of appreciation can go a long way, especially if it’s reciprocated.

Try it: Ask the team what they appreciate about each other and each other’s work. If it’s awkward to say these things out loud, ask your standup attendees to write them down. Then give each colleague a bunch of notes with appreciative comments on!

Activity 3: It’s Monday! Give one positive thing about last week and what are you going to complete today

Starting the week with a positive outlook has become a tradition for our team. On Mondays it can take a while to get into the rhythm, but when we get into the scrum team and reflect on the positive things from the previous week, we begin to interact with each other in a more productive way.

We suddenly realize that we have something to look forward to…

Try it: Ask the team to share one positive thing about last week and what they are going to get done today. This is a good exercise to kick start the week, so opt to do this one on a Monday, or when you are back at work after a long weekend or other break.

Tip: It does help to have someone facilitating these activities so that they actually get done. Whether you are of the school of thought that project managers are an outdated concept in agile teams, or whether your agile team has a project manager, think about designating someone with the role of making standups run smoothly.

Activity 4: If you were a support ticket what would you be?

This one made me laugh! Although I can see that it might not work with certain teams and corporate cultures.

This was a quick exercise but it triggered us into thinking about ourselves and what we can improve in our approach to work. One of the team members said they would make sure a process is written down before tackling any job.

Constant reviews like this are an essential tool of agile development. No matter how good a team is, a bit of self-criticism opens up opportunities for improvement and self-awareness.

Try it: If you don’t know what to say in a standup meeting, this is a good conversation starter to get people talking! Ask them what support ticket they would be — preferably related to the development you are working on.

You can also try this one when a new team gets together for the first time, or as a team-building activity.

If you are a non-IT team, like a team that uses agile for marketing initiatives, you might find it harder to do this exercise. Think about how you could adapt it to the way your department gets requests for support.

Activity 5: Write a postcard to a former colleague describing your day yesterday

This is a good game too that will harness a positive attitude and have fun at work.

Try it: Get each colleague to write a postcard to someone who has left the team, describing what their day was like yesterday.

I recommend having a different team member to read the postcard. Hearing what we all wrote helped us to think about it in a less abstract way and remember it better.

It doesn’t matter if people in the standup meeting know who the former colleague was. The point of the conversation is to reflect on how the day went, so you can learn from that and work out what to do differently.

The result? It helps to mix up standup meeting activities

This is what one colleague had to say.

“Scrums feel more energized. Doing the ‘same-old’ each day can become a drag and you go into the scrums with the same mindset, now we don’t know what task/questions will be asked.”

Adam, junior developer

As a result of these activities, our team has grown stronger and more enthusiastic. We appreciate the importance of getting together once per day to check progress and issues but also understand that this ceremony can be much more engaging.

I now enjoy when my teammates message me on Slack to remind me that it’s time for scrum. Add some fun into your daily scrum or standup meetings with these easy tips. Which ones will you try?

Read next: Books for Agile Project Managers.

Key takeaways & TL;DR

Here are some fun standup meeting ideas for your daily scrum sessions:

• What made you unhappy yesterday and what will make you happy today?
• Share music tracks to create a daily playlist
• Make someone’s day by giving them an appreciative remark or note
• Say one positive thing about last week and what are you going to complete today
• Ask people if they were a support ticket, what would they be?
• Write a postcard to a former colleague describing your day yesterday.

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This is an edited and updated version of an article that first appeared on this website in 2016.

This article first appeared at Rebel’s Guide to Project Management

The post 5 Tips To Re-Energize Your Daily Standup Meetings appeared first on ProdSens.live.

As far as mnemonics go, MoSCoW prioritization is one of the most effective acronyms in agile scrum software development. The name briefly summarizes a critical and oft-repeated practice of prioritizing items during product planning.

So, what is it? Why do you need it? How to use it? Let’s find out.

What is MoSCoW Prioritization?

MoSCoW prioritization is a powerful technique used in agile project management for setting priorities for tasks and initiatives. MoSCoW is an acronym that stands for 

• Must-have
• Should-have
• Could-have
• Won’t-have

Each of these is a category of prioritization, which guides what the team will develop in upcoming sprints. MoSCoW prioritization can be applied to anything within the agile framework, including requirements, test use cases, user stories, bugs/defects, acceptance criteria, or tasks. 

Even beyond agile product development, the MoSCoW model can help prioritize work. Across industries, the MoSCoW method is included in operations management software to help project teams make better decisions.

When there are various other prioritization methods, including the most straightforward high-medium-low scale, why do we need another one? Let’s see how it originated and evolved.

Origins and History of MoSCoW Prioritization

The MoSCoW prioritization technique was developed by Dai Clegg of Oracle in 1994 to help his team sort project tasks into critical and non-critical ones in rapid application development (RAD) processes. He used it specifically in time-boxed projects to prioritize the project’s requirements.

Over the years, this method has become a staple in agile project management. It has been adopted and appreciated for its simplicity and direction on what a team needs to prioritize while running the entire project.

Benefits of the MoSCoW Prioritization Method

Despite being two decades old, the MoSCoW prioritization technique continues to be popular among teams using the ​​Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM). Here’s why.

Simplicity

The MoSCoW technique is ridiculously simple to understand. It helps clarify the options available in front of them to eliminate distractions. (It is not as simple to use, as there can be differences of opinion about what’s must-have and what’s should-have, for instance. We’ll get to that a bit later.) 

Clarity

The categories provide clarity and reduce confusion. If it’s not a must-have, it’s not going in the next sprint. This ensures the team is stress-free and can focus on doing their best work.

Focus

The MoSCoW method helps managers and teams see what is important and needs immediate attention. By classifying a high-priority task as a “must-have,” managers can ensure they have everything they need to finish it. They can also discuss competing priorities as a team. 

Applicability

The MoSCoW method is nearly universally applicable. It can be used to prioritize anything. For example, a team lead can mark ten developers as must-have and three more as could-have to let their superiors know how many people they need. 

Communication

Assigning priority levels in this method is a great starting point for conversations in project planning and sprint planning sessions. Defining something as must-have or won’t-have encourages people to agree or disagree specifically.

Boundaries

MoSCoW prioritization is very effective in preventing scope creep. The clear priorities ensure that any newly added feature goes through the prioritization process, helping project managers manage expectations.

Drawbacks of the MoSCoW Method

Despite its benefits, the MoSCoW Prioritization method is not without its challenges. We’ll discuss them below.

Ambiguity: Must-haves and won’t-haves are easy to agree on. But should-haves and could-haves might be more ambiguous. While the framework lays out clear definitions, it can turn complex in practice. Moreover, teams often disagree on the definition of won’t-haves—are they left out of this sprint or the entire product?

Oversimplification: This method risks oversimplifying complex agile projects, where tasks cannot be easily categorized into discrete buckets and might not adequately address the interdependencies between tasks.

Subjectivity: Like all methods, MoSCoW prioritization is also subjective. The team has to come together to make task prioritization decisions. Its drawback is that it doesn’t do much to bring objectivity into the process.

Demanding: To prioritize a task in the MoSCoW framework, each must have detailed descriptions and context. For example, a ‘tagging’ feature in an agile project management tool might be a must-have for specific use cases while appearing non-critical. Product owners need to invest time and energy into definitions to categorize accurately.

Single-level: Within the four categories, there is no way to prioritize items further. This assumes equal priority for all must-have items, making it ineffective in planning.

Categories of the MoSCoW Prioritization Method

The MoSCoW prioritization method has four categories: must-have, should-have, could-have, and won’t-have.

#1 Must-have

“Must-have” tasks are critical items for the duration of the current sprint. ‘Must’ in the must-have category is sometimes defined as ‘minimum usable subset.’ This ensures that the iteration enables a minimum level of usability of the features.

A must-have feature typically is critical for the customers, a compliance requirement, or a safety/accessibility prerogative. Without these features, the product itself would be pointless to take to market.

#2 Should-have

Tasks considered to be “should-have” are second in priority. These tasks are important but not critical for the current timebox and can be deferred if necessary. 

A could-have feature is typically a minor bug fix or performance improvement, without which the product functions, even if not optimally. Teams often use some kind of temporary workaround to manage these items.

#3 Could-have

The third category is “could-have” tasks, i.e., desirable but unnecessary. The critical difference between should-have and could-have is that the former is important and can considerably impact product success (customer satisfaction, revenue, profitability, etc.), while the latter can be comfortably left out without much damage.

Teams prioritize could-have tasks only if they can be delivered without affecting the development team’s cost or effort. As the situation evolves, could-have items are often re-prioritized and developed.

#4 Won’t-have (this time)

“Won’t-have” tasks are recognized as not necessary for the project’s current scope. These tasks or features are of the lowest priority and omitted at the first sign of resistance. 

Won’t-have features have a very low impact on the project’s success. They neither harm outcomes nor create additional value. 

As helpful as this technique might be, it’s not universally effective. Here are the situations in which it works best.

When to Use the MoSCoW Prioritization Method

MoSCoW prioritization is a great decision-making tool for several personal and professional scenarios. When decluttering your home, instead of asking if an item “sparks joy,” you can ask if it is a “must-have.”

For an agile project manager, it can be a lot more valuable than that. Here’s how.

Time: The primary determinant of MoSCoW analysis is time. The categorization is for the current sprint or timebox. It is highly effective for time-sensitive projects with tight deadlines.

Resources: What if you have a limited team of developers? Use MoSCoW as it helps maximize deliverables within available resources.

Product initiation: Early in the project, you must decide what to focus on first and what makes your minimum viable product (MVP). MoSCoW prioritization can be incredibly useful in guiding these conversations.

However, it’s important to note that MoSCoW may not be suitable for all projects, especially those with complex interdependencies or where all tasks are equally critical. 

How to Implement the MoSCoW Prioritization Method

Successful MoSCoW prioritization needs clear and effective processes. Here is an outline of a process and pointers on how to prioritize your work with any free project management software like ClickUp to get it right.

1. Create your product backlog

Before you prioritize tasks for the future release, it is essential to create a list of possibilities. Typically, this is outlined in the product backlog. Based on research and input from cross-functional teams, build a select few from the backlog.

On ClickUp, you can set these as tasks, milestones, features, defects, and more to facilitate better prioritization.

2. Add details to the product backlog

Like we mentioned earlier, one of the non-negotiable factors of MoSCoW prioritization is adequate information about the task. Without the what, why, how, when, and who, it would be impossible to prioritize right. So, add all the information you can gather. This could be:

• Description of the user story
• Business impact
• Engineering impact, such as time/effort estimate
• Measures of success
• Dependencies for other tasks

ClickUp tasks allow you to add sub-tasks, checklists, time estimates, users, tags, custom fields, and more. Use ClickUp’s hierarchy guide to organize information effectively.

3. Set definitions for priority categories

What does must-have mean? What parameters should a task have to be considered a must-have? Does the entire team have to agree to categorize something as won’t-have?

The most commonly used methodologies are weighted scoring, the Kano model, or buy-a-feature. If that feels like another layer of frameworks/models, here are a few project prioritization templates you can use. 

Choose yours carefully. It is essential to set these definitions before getting into prioritizing tasks. This would help process standardization for proper priority management. Also, place an escalation matrix so that someone can make a decision in case of disagreements.

To ensure everyone understands and follows your priority definitions, document and publish them on ClickUp Docs. Collaborate on them to ensure the team agrees on them. You can also use ClickUp AI within Docs to summarize longer definitions for easy reference.

4. Collaboratively decide the priorities

With all the foundational work done, it’s time to prioritize. Bring the team together to evaluate every option and set priorities.

Choose from any of ClickUp’s views to see the information that suits your needs. For instance, most agile teams typically use the Kanban board view to have all the uncategorized items in one column and then drag-and-drop them into their relevant priorities. You can also filter items on the Kanban board based on what you’d like to see.

Discuss business requirements openly. Here are a few things to consider.

• Set all tasks as won’t-have and then debate about why you must have it
• For must-have requirements, ask, “Without this item, is the increment as good as canceled?”
• If there is a workaround, even if it’s manual, don’t categorize it as a must-have
• If a must-have has a dependency on anything other than another must-have, re-evaluate it

Remember that something you categorized as a could-have in the previous increment might become a must-have for the next. For example, while building the MVP, you might have categorized some items as could-have because they are not crucial for the current sprint. Once the MVP is launched, these features might become a must-have now.

5. Set priorities

Once you’ve agreed, set them up on your prioritization tools. ClickUp priorities give you four options: Urgent, high, normal, and low. You can make these MoSCoW priorities.

Alternatively, you can use the MoSCoW method with custom statuses. While setting task priorities on ClickUp, add a line or two in the comments about why you made the decision. This will help future prioritization sessions.

6. Validate feasibility

Priorities are not just about what’s important, they’re equally about what can be built within that timebox. You don’t want to overcommit and underdeliver just because you think everything is a must-have.

Before committing to a plan, look for each team member’s current workload and capacity. Use the time estimates for each task to simulate capacity. Use the Workload view to ensure no one is over-stacked.

Prioritize The Right Things with ClickUp

Product teams must remain laser-focused on what’s good for the business and the customer. They need to eliminate distractions. So, project prioritization is a superpower. Good prioritization is as much a choice about what to do as it is about what not to. 

ClickUp’s project management tool is designed to enable exactly this. The hierarchy, task management, priorities, and custom statuses help teams effectively understand and prioritize their work.

The Workload views help ensure the prioritized tasks are deliverable, and the ClickUp Dashboards help keep the priorities on track. Try ClickUp for free today and build the right thing.

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