![]() ![]() ![]() Rather than attacking our whole task list each day, we decided to start each week by considering priorities for that week and pulling an achievable number of tasks into a specific task list for the week. We chose a one-week period as our sprint period. While much of process doesn’t look like agile development, we grabbed this element to deal with the schedule management challenges we had. This information can be extrapolated to get an understanding of how realistic larger project milestones and deadlines are. The rate at which these tasks are ticked off is measured (the ‘burndown rate’) and this allows the team to get an understanding of how quickly work is being achieved and how accurate estimates are. A reasonable number of small tasks are then allocated to a person or team over a period of time (a ‘sprint’). Key concepts in agile project management methodology include the breaking down of large tasks into small tasks and assigning each small task a time estimate. When renegotiating the project timeline with the client, it’s important to know that the new milestones don’t stretch the team too thin on any given week. When one project is delayed, it can be hard to evaluate the knock-on impact. True agile methodology deals with this by removing hard promises on what will be delivered, but this didn’t fit well with our approach of speccing things out clearly. It’s hard to know how much you can achieve in a week. Task lists can be overwhelming and priority systems are very hard to implement across multiple projects with different project managers pushing their agenda. So, we chose to manage time in Teamwork Projects, but this resulted in some challenges we had to wrestle with: We are working on too many projects simultaneously for this to work and it felt overly prescriptive. There are loads of tools out there for managing schedules, but we found that none of them really worked for us because we don’t allocate the team’s time neatly by half days. It didn’t fit with our ethos to push this issue on to our staff. How do you promise lots of things to lots of clients and then deliver your promise without burning out your team? We’ve never seen overtime as an option. However, the big challenge for us has always been managing workload. If you aren’t doing that, you should definitely check out Teamwork Projects and you’ll find loads of ways to build efficiencies into your organisation just by getting all the ideas out into a shared system and organising them well. We’ve always been sold on the value of having some central system for managing tasks. ![]() The crux of the matter: how to manage workload Each milestone is aligned with a week, and within this week we focus on delivering the best stuff we can for the deadlines scheduled for that week. What we emerged with is a very structured project timeline with dated milestones from start to end. We love the lean startup methodology too and this influences our overall company strategy, though we’ve not found it so helpful for day-to-day projects because we aren’t building brand new systems. We use all terminology loosely, but have found something that works by hacking together some of the old waterfall approaches with agile thinking. Over the years, the most helpful approach we found for delivering multiple medium-sized web projects simultaneously was a broad rigid structure of milestones and then, within each milestone, a more flexible approach. When you are managing a small team spread thinly across multiple projects that each span several months, with dramatic peaks and troughs of activity, this approach is very powerful. We’ve used loads of project management methodologies over the years and one of the most effective has been weekly sprint planning using Teamwork Projects. He is sharing how he and his team use Teamwork Projects in a unique way to cater to their bespoke blend of agile and sprint methodologies in their workload.Īt White Fuse, we build websites for charities. Today, we’re sharing a guest post by Andy Pearson, Managing Director of White Fuse. ![]()
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