5 Best Agile Tools for Project Management

After project planning comes project management. This is the long, hard slog that lies between you and your business goals. But it doesn’t have to be a painful process. With the right agile project management software, you can bring your project to fruition smoothly and efficiently.

Here’s What We’ll Cover:

What Is Agile Project Management?

The Top 5 Agile Tools

Key Takeaways

What Is Agile Project Management?

Agile methodologies are a style of project management that’s geared towards flexibility and savings. The key element is enhanced communication. Collaboration software allow the entire team to understand the current process in the context of the larger project.

Enhanced visibility gives project managers the ability to track progress with fewer meetings. Clients can also provide feedback in real time instead of needing to wait for the deployment phase. This helps the deployment process to go more smoothly when the time comes.

The net result is a project with less repeated work, less waste, and easier oversight.

The Top 5 Agile Tools

Here are the five best agile development tools for bringing your task to completion.

FreshBooks

FreshBooks offers a combination of collaboration software and a project management interface. You can use it by yourself or with a larger team. You can even send invitations to contractors and clients, so your agile team will include all interested parties. You can set due dates, schedule inspections, and view where each step of the project stands.

By keeping all your communications in the same place, you’ll have a reliable way of referencing past conversations. Moreover, you can integrate with a number of other services like Dropbox to make sharing even easier.

In addition to all this, FreshBooks offers a number of other features for freelancers and small to mid-sized businesses. You can use it to accept payments, draw up estimates, handle your invoicing, and even keep tax records.

Forecast

Forecast is an agile planning tool for software development. The most impressive feature is its advanced AI, which adapts to your performance over time. It uses data from the past to determine your sprint capacity, so you can plan better for the next upcoming sprint.

The platform allows for easy bug tracking and issue tracking. And the AI provides insights and continuous improvements. Far from a simple tool, Forecast is another team member.

Forecast can also integrate with a wide range of third-party tools that are popular with software developers. You can easily access files on GitHub, GitLab, Jira, and Azure DevOps, among others. 

Clarizen

Clarizen is a powerful tool for helping cross-functional teams through the development process. It’s a professional-grade tool designed for larger organizations with large software teams. The main interface consists of a dashboard where everyone on the team can see their role as well as the whole project.

Like Forecast, Clarizen is an adaptive tool that learns from past projects. The more you use it, the better estimates it will give you. It can even be used to run multiple hypothetical project plans to see which ones work best.

This tool is designed to integrate with a number of other enterprise-grade applications. It works seamlessly with Salesforce, SharePoint, Jira, and Tableau, just to name a few. You can also download a number of free and paid apps to provide added functionality, such as Excel reporting.

Monday.com

Monday.com is a more versatile tool that’s designed for the agile process as well as other similar methods. Instead of a ton of complicated features, Monday.com is slimmed down. The main interface is a spreadsheet-like custom workflow that everyone shares.

On the workflow, you can assign tasks, send automated notifications, and receive alerts for tasks that are behind schedule. You can integrate with a number of popular tools. These include Gmail, Google Drive, GitHub, Google Calendar, Slack, Jira, Dropbox, and several others. Not only that, but their 24/7 customer service line is one of the most responsive in the business.

Nostromo

Nostromo is a newer tool, geared mostly towards software development teams. It comes with all the standard features, such as task management, to-do lists, and team communication.

This is a powerful Kanban tool with a number of added features like time tracking to support the agile methodology. The only real downside is the integration. For now, Nostromo will only integrate with Slack. That said, it’s a young tool, and they’re adding new features regularly.

Key Takeaways

As you can see, there are a number of tools to monitor your project progress and help your team collaborate. And we’re inclined to say that FreshBooks is the best of the bunch.

But of course, we’re biased. The fact is, there’s no single feature that’s most important for all people, so take your time to shop around. Eventually, you’ll find the perfect agile project management software for your organization.

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