Teamwork PM
If you have never worked with Teamwork PM here is a little overview of the system and some of the cool stuff it can do. Teamwork is a tool that allows you to keep all of your projects, milestones, tasks, time, and effort organized in one spot. With the ability to add new projects you can easily manage all aspects and customize each project in a way that makes sense for you.

You can learn all the ins and outs of using teamwork here (Running Projects in Teamwork) but let’s get into how teamwork can be used to effectively manage an agile project.

Benefits of task lists and milestones
With any agile project, it is important to deliver partial solutions frequently as you continue to test, develop and produce toward completion of the project. Teamwork gives you the ability to create any categories you need, so it is possible to accomplish agile processes seamlessly.

Let’s start off with milestones. In the life of an agile project, each section is broken out into short and manageable sprints. Within each sprint there is a list of tasks that need to be developed and tested before that section of the project is delivered. In Teamwork, you can add in each sprint as a milestone.

Every project is displayed on a new line with diamonds indicating the different milestones or sprints that have been set up. This makes it easy to visualize what’s happening with your projects throughout the whole project life.

Task Lists
Aside from an overview, you can also easily navigate through all parts of a project in Teamwork. For each milestone, you can create a specialized task list. This list can include things like Product Backlog Items, Functionality to Build, Work in Progress, QA Issues to Resolve, Ready to Test and Ready for Production. Once you have a standardized task list for a project it can be copied over from sprint to sprint and project to project, which helps provide a structure everyone is familiar with.

When you start planning your agile project, the product backlog is a great place to start. This is where you can keep the full list of items that need to be completed for the project. As you go through sprint to sprint, this list will be adjusted but it’s great to have a place where all project features are compiled.

Planning
After you have outlined the first sprint through planning poker or any other planning technique, you are ready to set up the rest of your task lists. Teamwork makes it super easy to go into your Product Backlog list and reassign any tasks to the correct developer and drag each task into the current sprint Functionality to Build section.

As the sprint kicks off, developers can go in, look at the backlog items assigned to them and create any subtasks for steps they will need to complete in order to build this functionality. They can also assign a time estimate that is displayed for each task, giving you a great overall time estimate for each task list and milestone for a given project.

Once all estimates are in, team members can complete tasks as they go along and drag these into the Ready to Test category. The QA team can go through testing as tasks are moved to start searching for any bugs or other issues that may have generated in development. As QA confirms tasks and bugs are fixed and completed, they can move the tasks into a Ready for Production list so you can see the current progress of everything that has been completed in a sprint as the sprint goes on. You may need to adjust the tasks included in your sprint as the developers build and QA logs bugs, so that you get the core features you need for this sprint ready for production- but with the dragging and editing features in teamwork, this is an easy process.

When the sprint comes to an end, you will have a list of previous backlog items that are now ready for production and you are another step closer to project completion! Setting up the next sprint is as easy as creating the milestone, and once you have a planning meeting you can drag any new features from the backlog list to begin work.

There are many different ways to manage an agile project and many different tools you can use to help accomplish success in this process. Teamwork is one tool that has great features that can help make the organization of this process a breeze.