How to Make an Agile Project Management Plan (+ FREE SmartSuite Template)

In this video, I'm going to show you how to organize your Agile projects inside of SmartSuite's template. We're going to be going through all of the different pieces and how they work together and how you can apply them to your work management software. Make sure you use our affiliate link below to sign up for your SmartSuite account so you can follow along throughout this tutorial. Thank you SmartSuite, for sponsoring this video. But before we even go in to SmartSuite, I want to do a little sidebar here and make sure we're all on the same page as to what an Agile project really means when it comes to project management. There are two broad schools of thought Agile projects, which is what we're going to be talking about through our template today. And there's waterfall projects, waterfall planning. The main differences between Agile and waterfall is kind of how you approach the work. With an Agile project, we are going to be working in iterative cycles. We are going to be planning a little bit at a time, a small chunk, usually less than 30 days. We're going to be doing that work to see how exactly that works out. And then when we are done doing that work, we're going to sit back and evaluate how did that actually go? Pretend this is a person thinking, did we do a good job? Do we need to change our path? Was our approach correct? With Agile, we are really planning to exert effort over a period of time and where we're going to end up at the very end of our project, if we are doing a lot of this planning, doing, planning doing, we may not exactly know we're going to move a little, evaluate, move a little, evaluate taking things in smaller pieces. Each of these cycles or sprints, is something that we can view as a chunk of effort. And inside those sprints we do things in chunks called epics, stories and other pieces. These little chunks that we break things down into allows us to track how much we accomplish in a given project, helps us track what doesn't quite go to plan, helps and helps us plan for change. The whole Agile approach is really about expecting change, expecting new insights, and expecting to have to kind of adjust scope as things go along. These agile projects are perfect for any situation when you're not sure what the destination should be, meaning you don't exactly know how to solve that pain for the client. You just know you're going to solve it if you don't quite know what the perfect solution is and you're open to finding out new things along the way, like A murder mystery TV show, then you are probably looking at something a little bit more agile. Agile is also a strong choice if you're not sure the exact how. So for many of us, we might have repeatable services or productized things we do, and in those cases we know exactly what steps we need to do. There's no innovation or creativity or surprises along the way. But for many other situations, we're going out into a path and we may not know all the steps we need to take, all the resources we need to accomplish a given project. And if we don't know that, planning for that uncertainty with an Agile approach, once again could be a strong choice. The third situation where Agile might be a strong choice is in a, Let me see. Situation. In other words, when you're working on something and you have stakeholders who have a lot of opinions, or you just need to get their opinions and you want to make sure that they can review what you're working on regularly. You're not waiting until the end of the painting to show the client, here's what I painted instead. You, you're showing them the concept, you're showing them the sketch, you're showing them draft one. And if you need that constant feedback of your mini results you get at the end of each step, Agile project planning will probably work quite well for you because you can say, hey, you want to see what I'm working on? Sure. We'll do that at the end of every sprint, which you're going to be doing every one week, two weeks, four weeks, whatever that interval is. Agile kind of has some show and tell built in with the cyclical structure. Agile also works really well for folks who have a small, tight knit team where human memory is not going to be a limiting factor because so much is building on itself. Again, kind of like those murder mystery TV shows, the detective just remembers things from season one and that helps you solve the case because that's kind of how Agile works in the fact that you keep building on past experiences iteratively. It can be quite hard to throw somebody into an agile project in the middle because that historical context of what happened before is usually not very documented and more experiential. So if you're someone who kind of does things and then you memorize them and you learn from them and you've got this team of folks or right there alongside you, you might find this Agile approach works a bit better. Now, this approach right here, Agile, is what we're going to be demonstrating in the template today. But I do want to Contrast this just briefly with the other project management extreme, which is waterfall. Waterfall suggests sequential planning. So over here where we have plan, do, re, evaluate and kind of keep looping each sprint, so each sprint kind of takes us in a different direction until we reach our end destination of some kind of. Well, when it comes to waterfall, we don't quite take the same approach. Rather than each sprint taking us to a slightly different destination until we achieve our outcome. Waterfall assumes we know exactly what we need from day one. So we plan like this and then once we plan, we go ahead and we do and then we evaluate and that's it. There is no looping, there is no cyclical process. We do step one, we do step two, we do step three, and so on. Picture yourself in a barrel. On an actual waterfall, you are in that water flow and when the water starts taking you down the river, you're going down the river. You're not going in a side direction. There's no side adventures here. You're going in one direction only. If plans change in waterfall, if we find out while doing, oh no, we forgot to plan for this task, we forgot to include this person. Oops. We can sometimes make small modifications to the scope, but. But if we find that there's a drastic change in how the project is organized, we need to basically kill our entire plan and build a new one to incorporate that new endeavor. Waterfall is perfect. When you have a known what a very known destination that you're trying to get to. You've probably been there before. For example, if you have a traditional productized service like we talk about in this video, having a waterfall approach to planning, that will probably make a lot of sense since you can anticipate pretty much anything that will happen related to having a known destination. If you have a known path that you will not deviate from, think of it like an assembly line. You know exactly what needs to happen in what order. Well then waterfall will probably make a lot of sense because you can outline all of those steps in advance and really measure their efficiency. When you do waterfall planning, meaning planning everything out in advance, the last reason waterfall might be perfect for you, if you are a planner. This is kind of a double edged sword here in some ways. But if you are someone who has a process or, or a pipeline that needs to be fully predictable, you need to be able to see what is going to be due. And on your task list two months out, waterfall is going to give you it to you. You'll be able to have exactly what's going to happen Assuming nothing changes, you'll be able to see what's going to be happening in 2 months, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months by having the entire project outlined. When we think of things like construction projects, really sophisticated projects that many, many, many people are working on, we typically see this kind of waterfall approach because there's just so many moving parts that being a little heavy handed typically helps people feel more in control and be able to predict things like cost and timelines more accurately than the agile approach of saying hey, we're just going to keep investigating until we solve it. That doesn't always go over the best with clients, especially on multi million dollar clients. But at the end of the day, both agile and waterfall are extremes of the spectrum. Most projects and most clients I've ever worked with falls somewhere in the middle. They use a little bit of agile, but they like to pre plan a bit. They pre plan a lot, but they have room for innovation and change as things change. But if you find yourself here somewhere in the middle of the agile and waterfall spectrum of project management, you're not a purist. You don't have the certified leader guiding you in either approach. How do you go about organizing your projects? Well, my suggestion would be for anybody in the middle who's willing to chunk their work. That's the big caveat. I would actually suggest you lean towards organizing your work in an agile way. It's going to be a lot easier for you to use an agile structure inside your project management tool and make it a little waterfall than going the opposite direction. If you start off with a waterfall project management structure such as the one we talk about up here, that'll be great, but it won't work very well if you try to do any agile elements. Whereas if you use an agile template like the one we have on the screen here, and you want to make it a little bit waterfall y by bleeding over some of the principles you like about the pre planning approach, then you can usually do that just by tweaking a few fields. So moral of the story Regardless of whether you take things iteratively or you like to preplan everything, any project you're looking to organize can be organized inside of SmartSuite. When you just pull in the right structure, the right template for the workflow you're choosing to do, let's flip over and start talking through the agile template that exists here. If you find yourself someone on the extreme of only doing pre planned things and you have no interest in agile, well thank you for watching the first half of this Video. You can head up to this one to learn more about waterfall planning and kind of typical project lists in SmartSuite. But for the rest of you, let's dive right in. If we sign into SmartSuite, we'll be able to head into our homepage. On the homepage, we're going to click on add a new solution, start with template, and we are going to choose Template Agile from the dropdown. You'll notice there are actually a bunch of results here that show up when I type in Agile because we've got some specialized versions of this template for your particular use case. These are all pretty darn powerful. But we're going to start with just the basic one today because it shares a lot of elements that you'll see in all other versions. When you install this template into your account, you're going to see something like this, which is our basic Agile projects setup. The first thing you'll notice inside the Agile Projects area is the Sprints app. This is the app where we track each of those cyclical cycles we talked about earlier in this video. Think of sprints almost like running in a sprint. You run for a little bit, you stop. You run for a little bit, you stop. Physical sprinting like that is not so dissimilar to an agile sprint. These sprints are just units of time that we number sequentially so we can keep track of them that contain things that we want to accomplish, things we want to work on. So in this case, if I look at Sprint number one right here, I can see what I've got going on. I can see what dates this Sprint is going to have. I can see the status of the Sprint, currently the name of the Sprint, in this case a number. I can see whether this is kind of like an emergency hotfix sprint. I can see any notes and I can see what we're working on, which are the two other areas here. I can see what stories we're working on and what bugs we are working on. Now, this part of Agile does skew a little bit software developy, but let's just translate it to general business for the sake of our brains here Today, when we are thinking of stories, we. We just want to have kind of mini results, things that impact our end user in units that we can really evaluate and understand, kind of just chunks of work. So I'll just put that definition there just so we can keep it straight. On the other hand, we have bugs. Now, this is probably something you are already familiar with, but in this case we're referring to bugs as chunks of problems, chunks of problem that impact our end user that we want to resolve. So very similar to Stories, except in this case we're talking about negative things that we want to kind of eliminate in some way. If you dive deeper into Agile methodology, you'll probably find that there's more nuance in how different people manage these bugs versus stories versus feature requests versus whatever. But for now, let's just leave it at this basic definition of things that add value in chunks that we can see and things that are taking away value in chunks that we can see. So that's what we've got here. You'll notice that these are related through a linked Record field to other apps we have in place. And we have a count field right here summarizing the number so we can see them at a quick glance when we head to the overview area right here. So it says three stories. If I click on it, look, I can see the three stories, which is the same thing we saw when we opened the Sprint itself and looked at stories. Got it, Got it. If we were running an agile project, we would take the time to either automatically using an automation or manually create new sprints for each chunk we decided to plan. So if we're doing it every two weeks, we do it every two weeks. If we're doing it every month, we'd create one for each month. We create the Sprint containers, the empty boxes in advance and when the Sprint actually arrived, we do whatever kickoff and wrap up steps we do, as well as work on the given Sprint stories and bugs that we've identified. Now, skipping over from Sprints, I'm going to go over to stories and issues. This is the same thing that we saw over in the other field through that relationship, but now we're viewing it in its own place here we can see some of these stories, the chunks of value that our users want or could benefit from. We can see the statuses that they have of in progress, quality assurance complete. And if we click on one of them, we can see what sprints we are putting energy towards creating this value. So if I scroll on down inside this particular record here, I can see the Sprint one that we just looked at at the other page is connected to this story. So that's that two way linked record field working its magic. But clearly that's not the only thing on this record here. There's a lot of other stuff going on, so let's just give that a quick peek inside the story itself. We want to take some time and space using the fields available inside of SmartSuite to define what the story is. And in this case, you know, the word story actually is a really nice one because we want to think about it like a story. What is the beginning, the end of bringing this thing to life? What kind of value is this going to provide? Why is this valuable? What does it need to have included in order for it to be valuable? We want to write out that story for the story inside the record here to help us define our parameters for success. Because we're doing an agile project, we may not always know all of the details, but as we discover it through each sprint, we could write notes here, keep track of our progress, our feedback that we get, and so on. That's what this overview section is. It's essentially us progressively scoping out what we are trying to accomplish. Beyond overview, we have estimation. And this is one of those things that gets a little bit tricky for folks, but it's not as hard as it sounds. What we've got going on here in estimation is where we start to predict how much effort we need to put in to this given story. So inside the estimation area, the first thing we have is a question to evaluate whether or not we can estimate it yet. Remember, with Agile, we're kind of looking at things as we go. So if we have an idea that we might do sometime next year, we're not going to estimate that yet. We're going to wait. And when we actually get into it and start to understand how big the thing is, we can go in and start estimating it. When we get to that point and we say, yes, this is ready for estimation. We estimate things with Agile using points as opposed to time or days or any other fixed parameter. Leave it to say that human beings are not so great at estimating time. We're really not. But we can generally say, is this bigger or smaller than other things I've worked on? These story points end up kind of working as a relative scale of complexity to reflect the impact and effort that would go into creating this story. Based on other stories we've done in the past, you can see we're using a Fibonacci sequence inside a single select field inside of SmartSuite to track this value in a story point. And all we're going to do is find the number that reflects how big and chunky this particular story is. Most teams will find themselves using only up to the number 13 or even the number 8. But we do have the full sequence here in case you like to track really big projects altogether. However, conventional wisdom is that when you have large projects up here in like the infinity category, you might want to break it down into smaller chunks. Otherwise we won't be able to complete it in one of those sprints. So I'm going to go ahead and choose an estimate and, and we can also include some additional context here. Who's responsible? And then we get to epics. And this is the last kind of unique feel we have for this story. What epics are, are kind of like in, you know, the narrative sense. So we know stories and epics in, you know, literature. It's kind of the same thing here. A story is a little story. It's a contained plot point, it's a contained experience, and a epic is a collection of those stories that all fulfill maybe an arc of the character. An epic is kind of like a container for broader accomplishments we'd like to achieve that are made up of many, many, many little stories that all add together into one epic. For some folks, they will choose to plan their work around accomplishing one epic first before they work on another. For other folks, they just like to have the epics in order to keep track of where we're at on overall progress, but they're actually planning their work at the story level, meaning they are focus on executing one story at a time, planning stories into their sprints, and that's what they like to do. Practitioners of agile will have very firm opinions for you as to which way you need to organize things. But again, given most folks watching this channel use an agile with an asterisk approach to how they organize their work, it really is going to depend on what you prefer to do. This template here though, is built in by default to plan things by story. So we've got our sprint here. So we've got stories and bugs. That's it. So that's the way that this comes out of the box, modified to fit your needs. If you'd rather plan at the bigger picture level, which again gets you a little bit more waterfall Y. Those epics that we saw connected back to stories live in their own app over here where we can track those overall goals. We are working towards what pieces are involved in them and what bugs are related to them as well. If we open up one of these example epics, you can see how an epic contains many different stories and pieces that all work together, together towards a major feature set, a major revelation, a major accomplishment of some kind. For folks who are used to working in waterfall, it wouldn't be terrible to think of Epics almost like milestones in that sense. Now, beyond epics, we have issues and this is one thing we've already talked about. In the other area, we saw this connected as bugs. Well, here is where those bugs live. We can see all the bugs we've got going on. When we are actually ready to work on these issues, we connect them to those sprints just like we saw before using the linked record field. Now, notice this linked record field looks a little different than the other linked records we have seen before. That's just because SmartSuite allows us to style our linked records to look at them a little bit different depending on our preferences. In this case, we've got a very simple standard display, but we've got other options and that's what we've seen in other use cases. So. So that's our issues, our bug tracking area. You can see how we connect them to our work sessions and we also connect them back to the epic. So we know, hey, in accomplishing this major feature, this major epic, these are all the bugs we squashed along the way. That's how this all connects together. Inside of issues, we have some prioritization going on of how important it is, how severe it is, and notes on our problem solving rate there. A lot of folks will look at this issues area and think, oh, I'm not developing software, I could never do that. Do reconsider if there's nothing else you steal from the agile approach. I really do think every small business should steal this area. Actually talk about it more in this video. But issues and tracking bugs that come up in your business is an instrumental way to figure out where your business is, maybe not performing where it could. If you track every time an invoice link is broken, a client complains, a new hire has to ask for access to something they should have had access to. If you track those issues by creating them inside an app in SmartSuite or whatever your tool is of choice, maybe just a whiteboard, then you can reflect on what those issues or bugs were and learn from them. Otherwise you just operate off of this firefighter mentality of issue must solve, issue must solve. And your memory is the only thing that's helping us track that which isn't the most helpful. So if there's nothing else you take away from today, and if you're like, oh my gosh, this template is so powerful, it's too much for me, maybe consider just this one app right here of issues and move that into your own. Go to solution for task management or project Management, so you can at least track this piece for your organization as a whole, because it can really make a big difference. But anyway, beyond Issues, we've got two more apps to look at, which are Ideas and Team Meetings. Now, ideas is one that also I do think would be beneficial for just about every team. Similar to Issues and all this is is a place for us to put things that maybe we could do in the future. And we keep them quarantined here in their own little thinking area, incubation zone. Anytime we have a potential feature or an EPIC or a concept that we're kind of brewing on that we think could be really cool for the business, we can put that into this ideas area here. And we do have a few layouts here, depending on how you like to see information. But what this allows us to do is have a dumping zone for all of our ideas so we don't inaccurately assume all of our ideas are great ideas that we have to do. That's just not the case. By having this ideas area, we can put all of our ideas in here, use the vote feature in SmartSuite to actually allow our team members to vote for what they would like to see and not see in terms of features. And we can see that show up right here and use this to inform what tasks we take on in the next sprint, what we add as our future epics. This ideas area is a great place for you to share thoughts, share, you know, half baked ideas with collaborators so you can figure out what your team finds to be the most transformative piece to add into your platform, into your service, into your business. Just like with Issues, I think every single business needs to have an ideas area. If you don't already have one, steal it from this. Right? Get your SmartSuite account set up using our affiliate link below. Move this app into your project management tool of choice if you're not using the whole setup, and start tracking ideas for your business. When your team member suggests that you change your branding, put it here. When you think about starting a podcast, put it here. And then you have this kind of playground that you can let ideas mature before you start taking action on them and potentially start spending time on things that aren't the highest use of your time. All right, now our last app, and one that we've kind of already touched on on the channel in the past, is the Team Meetings and Standups app. This is an app where we track meetings. If we click on one of these, you can see the default structure. So you can kind of steal this for your own project management setup as to what you'd like to track. We can see that this field uses a function title, and all that really means is it's auto generated. The title of this record is generated based on. And we can actually look at this here, the owner of the meeting and the date of the meeting. This is an auto generated title, one of those really cool finer details in SmartSuite. Beyond that title generated from these two fields, which I can change out should I want to. But beyond these fields we also have a status for the meeting itself. We have the type of meeting, what are we discussing exactly? And we've got kind of our standup pieces. This is kind of our standard content we could have for any standup meeting. And if we modify these field settings, we can change these defaults to whatever questions we want to ask on a recurring basis for our collaborators in our particular business. Just like with ideas and issue tracking, a centralized meeting agenda area, just like this is a staple for every team we work with here at ProcessDriven. 1700 teams and counting. Make sure that all of them have some kind of way of tracking each of these three things. And this is something I would definitely recommend you add into your account. Whether you are waterfall, agile or like most people, agile ish. That's an official terminology, by the way, Agile ish. Having this kind of meeting tracking for whatever your meetings are is a fabulous way to make sure your notes are not lost and everything is centralized. How you use these meetings to ensure that your sprints go through smoothly and that your ideas are evaluated evenly, that is going to be something that you'll want to navigate for your team itself. But the way SmartSuite enables you to organize all of this in one cohesive spot for all of your projects potentially is a really powerful way to leverage the platform to help your team collaborate more efficiently. This entire solution that you see here is something that's available to you on the free plan of SmartSuite. You can get started on this today for free using the link in the description. And once you have this installed, all you need to do is go in here, click delete it, delete the demo data in one, click super easy, and add your own information. This will now be a blank template where you can add your own epics, your big projects, your own stories or chunks of value, your own issues, because I know we all got some issues and put them all in one place. So you can get that sense of relief by no longer having your memory run, your business or your agile projects. Or hell, just your projects because as we have said so many times in this video, I've met almost no businesses that actually run agile. Most of us are agile ish and this kind of template will work perfectly for anyone in that spectrum of project management. If you'd like to see us do a deeper dive of Agile on this channel, if you'd like to see me butcher more frameworks with weird metaphors, go ahead and write Agile in the comments below to let me know you'd like to see more on this topic. However, if you are someone who's like I'd rather be chasing waterfalls, yes that is a song reference and you aren't so interested in this Agile side of things, check out this video next where I talk about a more traditional approach to project management and what features in SmartSuite can really help folks who have a more due date and assignee driven approach to organizing projects. Thanks so much for watching and until next time enjoy the process.