Agile-Team™ Project Management Solution

With Agile-Team™ you can:

• Handle all tasks, bugs, issues, projects and resources in one common database.
• Provide project visibility and a single source of real-time information to all roles in the organization.
• Customize the process for each team to Agile, Scrum, Lean, Waterfall etc.
• Spot potential budget overruns and project delays early.
• Use automatic scheduling, and handle resource management across the projects.
• Easily change priorities of tasks, projects, and resources.
• Create reports, charts, burn downs, Gantts.
• Provide a portal to your customers for incident and issue management.
• Get workflow support from the issues are created until they are solved for the customer.
• Get extensive support of time tracking and reporting.
• Get extensive support for version management.
• Support outsourcing and separated teams.

With a flexible folder structure with inheritance of properties, support of user defined dimensions, groupings on any property and strong customization possibilities it is possible to support most projects situations in a direct and intuitive way. The strong resource management concept allows handling of shared resources across teams in the enterprise. The integrated customer portal facilitates good customer contact. Agile-Team™ is an integrated project management, bug tracking and helpdesk system with many features. You can start simple, and turn on features as you need them

Agile-Team™ combines a flexible and powerful Windows client solution with an Internet customer web portal.

Agile-Team™ is an ideal tool for the following organizations:

• Software companies and organizations doing internal software development.
• IT service organization. Research and development organizations.
• Specialized construction work, where part of the construction are customized.

Agile projects take a collaborative effort involving many roles. Agile-Team™ helps developers, managers, product owners, testers, supporters etc. to work together better - whether the team is situated in one location or distributed around the world!

Top managers and group leaders can inspect project status and performance and see if there are adequate margins to critical milestones. For resources they can see their utilization and the agreements about their priorities and allocation to projects.

Product managers / product owners can manage backlogs, plan roadmaps, get overviews of the known problems and get assistance for producing release notes.

Project managers/Scrum masters can get comprehensive information about status, progress and completion level of projects, estimates, time overruns, which items need attention for re-estimation or other considerations, how time has been used - the balance between time spent on bug fixing, new feature requests, and overhead, etc.

Team members can get lists of their tasks and issues, and description and information for these.

Supporters can automatically receive reports about issues, change requests and incidents from customers and for each customer get an overview of open items.

Customers can report problems, get support assistance, see known problems in their version of the product and see release notes.

At Agile-Team Aps, we are devoted to Agile Project management and Development. The support of Agile development is the main mission of the Agile-Team™ system. By adopting the Agile development methods, you can obtain the benefits proven by so many teams around the world.

Agile-Team™ provides everything a team needs to manage an Agile Project, including:

• Backlog management.
• Release and Sprint planning and management.
• Burn Down charts.

Agile Benefits:

• Shorter release cycles.
• Improved quality.
• Lower cost.
• Increased productivity.
• Flow in the development.
• Improved communication.
• Customer satisfaction.
• Greater employee satisfaction.

Agile-Team™ has the focus on agile methods and processes, but it can just as well handle traditional projects and ongoing work.

An organization with multiple teams and projects can with Agile-Team™ allow each project to customize the process to the local situation, while still managing the portfolio of projects at a higher level.

A research overview from Dr. jobs in 2009 shows that many different methods are being used:

Waterfall

Iterative Waterfall

Lean

SCRUM

Agile-Team™ can support an Area manager or a Business unit in managing a Portfolio of projects. It is possible to inspect status, milestones, resource usage, and remaining time etc. for the projects.

With Agile-Team™ it is easy to obtain answers to questions for the project like:

• What has been done? What is the remaining work?
• What is in progress right now? Who is doing what? Who is planned to do what?
• When will the work be finished? How does the trend look?
• How many hours have we been using? Does it look like we will keep the budget?
• What Bugs are resolved, and what is still open?
• What are the requirements? Who is the originator? What is the description of each work item?
• How long time did each feature take? How much time do we spend on what?

Besides being a strong tool for project visibility, Agile-Team™ is a powerful tool to make the management of projects easy:

• Easy drag and drop for updating the plan, priorities and changing resource assignments.
• Assignments of work items to teams (or skills).
• Automatic schedule calculation.
• Rule checking for warnings to project manager about potential problems.

In Agile-Team™ a backlog is a folder that contains requirements, feature requests, wish list, problems, issues, concerns, ideas, technology, architecture, bugs etc. to be done in the future.

It is the responsibility of the Product Owner/Manager to update the Product Backlog and to ensure that all items have a clear description, and are assigned a proper "priority" according to the "business value". The Product Backlog should be visible to all project participants and users. The Product Backlog should be kept updated, as long as the product is alive as it contains the current wish list for the product. The product backlog is dynamic because it reflects the product knowledge at any given time.

The input to the product backlog can come from a variety of sources. Users and customers can suggest changes, new features as well as - add BUGS. The internal organization may propose security and other system properties. Marketing may make suggestions based on competing products and market knowledge. Bug reports can come from many places.

Based on the process the team follows, you may need to manage different types of backlog like product backlogs, release backlogs and sprint backlogs. In Agile-Team™ you can freely choose your strategies for backlogs, you may have a shared backlog between multiple projects, and you might have separate or combined backlogs for features and bugs.

Adding new entries are quick and easy. If you are working with a ranked backlog, then you can simply drag and drop items to change priorities or use keyboard shortcuts to move items up and down in the sorted list.

Also you can sort and group the backlog items as example on Originator, Part or Component, Customer, Business value or Business value divides by effort etc. to ensure that the backlog are well prioritized.

Agile-Team™ can handle the groupings you have in your organization, so you can easily inspect the tasks for any group across multiple projects; or assign tasks to a group. Also it is possible to manage skills and assign tasks to, for example, an "SQL specialist" if your project needs such a resource in your project.

Agile-Team™ has a resource calendar handling with definition of daily working hours and holidays. Working three days a week, having 3 weeks of vacation, Christmas holidays, in any country - all this can be modelled for each person, and will be used for scheduling and convenient time reporting.

Agile-Team™ has a unique and powerful concept of representing the agreements about how Resources are allocated to projects. This makes it possible for a resource to specify for example that the work in one project must be completed before working on other projects, or 10 hours per week is planned for maintenance, or from February the resource will shift to a new project - or spend 100 hours supporting another project - or even having a 2 week holiday etc.

After you have created your project of work items with priorities and estimates and assigned these to either groups or specific resources, then Agile-Team™ can automatically calculate a schedule.

The scheduling will take people calendars into account, as well as the resource allocations to projects and the prioritizations between the projects. This means that you don't need to do tedious hand-made calculations with the risk of forgetting holidays and vacancies etc. - just let the scheduling engine do the work for you.

The schedule can be shown in a Gantt view, which will indicate if any milestones cannot be completed in time.

The updated plan is visible to all parties in the project, enabling them to make decisions based on the most up-to-date view, which reflects the current status.

For Agile development, only phases and priorities are used to control the schedule, but the Agile-Team™ planning can support predecessors and specific start and finish time for individual tasks - thus if you really need this in your project - then you have the support for this.

'Burn charts'' have become a favorite way to measure a project's progress. They are extremely simple and astonishingly powerful. They show the progress made against the estimates, and are a good basis for discussions about whether to cut scope or to extend the schedule.

In Agile-Team™, "Burn down" charts are automatically generated based on time reported and updated estimates. Everybody can see the team's progress, how much work is left and the trend for the completion of the work.

''Burn charts'' can be generated on multiple levels like Project, Releases or Iterations(Sprints).

With the task board, work items are represented by note cards which are organized into columns that represent the status of the items. The Task Board can provide a good overview of the status, and by using a large screen or a projector, it can facilitate a great planning tool for the team.

Using the task board, team members can simply pick a work item from the "Pending" column to select the next item to work on. Status can be updated by dragging cards from one column to another, or assigned to resources by dragging from one row to another.

By using filters, the Task Board can show just "My Issues" even across multiple projects, or all issues for a given customer, all urgent bugs etc.

For projects that follow the Kanban method, constraints can be specified to identify bottlenecks and eliminate wasted effort.

Rules checking assists the project manager to spot changes and problems in the project.

Each person can create a customized "My Task" view for seeing the assigned tasks in the most convenient way. The tasks can contain a detailed description about the work to be done.

Knowledge is scattered everywhere. In emails threads, Intranets, on network folders or even on people's local hard drives.

Agile-Team™ folders can provide a structured searchable repository of your team's guidelines, procedures, etc. You can use MS Word or rich text editors for editing the documents.

A fundamental concept in Agile-Team™ is a possibility to handle and consider projects and work items from multiple dimensions.

Agile-Team™ allows you to see, plan, operate and report in your preferred structure.

There are predefined Dimensions such as: Work Breakdown Structure, Parts, Phases, Resources, but you have a possibility to define as many custom Dimensions as you want.

As example if you are using an Agile process with backlogs and a number of releases and iterations, then it is convenient to be able to structure all the work items according to the components structure of your application.

New dimensions can for example be: contracts, departments, customers, countries, work type etc. The dimensions makes it easy to see all Issues/bugs/tasks as example for all projects in a single contract, in a given release of the software, for a given customer etc. Plans can be inspected and managed in any groupings.

Time Reports can be the basis of creating reports or bills to customers, but it is also very valuable for learning from the past about how much time you spent on what to improve your process (and estimates) for the future.

Agile-Team™ supports that people can quickly and easily report what time have been spent on. Specialized views give convenient ways to enter the time reports. A Monthly view shows the accumulated time spend for the month to see if you are over or under the agreed working hours.

Work items in Agile-Team™ can contain a time estimate, and combined with the time reporting and the scheduling engine this can give an overview of the completion of projects, as well as automatic generation of "Burn Down" charts.

Drill Down to any level - gain insight - know the details - improve!

The Agile-Team™ explorer with its reporting and charting facilities enables the project data for your organization to be analyzed and visualized at any level from any point of view.

• What is the current status of a project?
• What have we done for this customer, and what are we doing now?
• How much time do we spend on bug fixing compared to new functionality?
• What problems and issues are known in any given version?
• What have the team spent how much time at for the last 6 months across projects?
• Which months do employs normally take how much holiday?

Full project visibility to real-time data!

The Agile-Team™ Helpdesk customer portal gives a structured way to communicate with customers about Bugs, Issues, and Change Requests so each message is remembered, prioritized and have a clear status and responsibility. The customers can follow the workflow state from the moment a bug is reported until it is finally solved in a new release of the software.

Agile-Team™ Helpdesk can give customers the possibility to see what are the know problems in exactly their version of your product.

The Agile-Team™ Helpdesk can also generate release notes from one version of the product to a new version, it can be seen which bugs are fixed, and what new features are implemented.

Also, the Agile-Team™ Helpdesk can support handling paid support for incidents.

The Agile-Team™ Helpdesk is designed for business to business(B2B) use, which means, that you will create logins for your customers, and have full control over what they can see and access.

If you are developing software, you will have to deal with bugs, no matter how good your testing and quality assurance procedures are.

Agile-Team™ is a flexible and powerful tool for easy and efficient tracking and managing of bugs. You can choose to maintain you bug lists in separate folders, or combine bugs, features, issues in same folders and projects.

Customers can report bugs through the Helpdesk portal, and follow the workflow until the bug is finally solved in a new release of the software.

Agile-Team™ is highly customizable to adjust to your projects, processes, organization and needs.

• Create new filters,
• Customize views,
• Create new dimensions,
• Change layout of the dialogs.

Each team can create their own layout for dialogs, their own views to the projects, their own reports to support their style of working.

For some projects, it is important to keep track about what has been done in each version of the software product. Agile-Team™ has a built in dimension for representing the versions. By coupling the work items to versions, a number of views, queries and information will then be possible, like:

See the history of released versions for a product.

• For bugs - in which version did they appear - in which version are they solved?
• For Tasks - in which version are they done?
• Release Notes - what was done in each version?
• Knowledge Base - what are known issues in each product version?

Agile-Team™ can relate versions to the source control system, and even handle versions in the complex situations with braches of the software.

Most areas and operations in Agile-Team™ can be controlled by permissions, and it is possible to grant permissions to individuals as well as groups.

So if you log external consultants into your projects management system, you can grant them access to only the projects they are working at.

The Agile-Team™ client is deployed by the ClickOnce technology. ClickOnce-deployed applications are considered "low impact", as they are installed per-user, not per-machine. No administrator privileges are required. Each ClickOnce application is isolated from the others. This means one ClickOnce application is not able to "break" another.

Agile-Team™ uses MS SQL Server or a free SQL Express to store project databases, provide customer support via Helpdesk, etc.

Your customers can connect to the system via a web based Helpdesk (Customer portal).

You can choose to install the Agile-Team™ server on your own hardware in your own network or let us host the Agile-Team™ server in our reliable hosting center with blade servers and do upgrades of the database, when there will be new releases of Agile-Team™.

1. Hosted Solution (Agile-Team™ Cloud)

In the Agile-Team™ Cloud Solution your data are hosted centrally at SQL servers in our hosting center and are typically accessed by users using Agile-Team™ client applications in accordance with a popular "Software as a service" (SaaS) delivery model.

Benefits

• minimal upfront costs;
• quick start;
• no hardware to buy;
• no SQL server to install;
• no database management (security, backing up, etc.)
• automatic updates;
• you can concentrate on your projects rather than on supporting the system.

1. Intranet Solution (Agile-Team™ OnSite)

Intranet installation gives certain benefits if the supporting infrastructure  already exists in your organization. The OnSite Solution is the same application as the Hosted (SaaS) Solution, except deploying the application on your own server. You take care of all the database management (security, monitoring, updates, etc.).

Benefits

• the highest level of security;
• full control when and how updates are run;
• no Internet connection is necessary.