There might be various ways of managing a project in an organization, but the most relevant and successful nowadays has been the agile approach. In project management, the agile approach is a fundamental way of managing projects by dividing them into different phases.
It doesn’t matter which type of agile framework you are using; you always have to focus on constant collaboration with all the stakeholders. In addition to this, you also need the help of many different tools for agile transformation, but have you ever thought about what can go wrong with agile tools?
Many people still don’t believe that using the wrong tools used for tracking work and communicating can derail the agile transformation. But it’s a bitter truth that you have to accept. Indeed, choosing the wrong tool isn’t the only factor that leads to agile transformations astray, but it should always be an easy choice.
So, to make things easier for you, we have come up with some common tool-related mistakes that people make during agile transformation.
Using the already used tool
This is undoubtedly one of the most common mistakes that people or businesses make during agile transformation. Many firms always prefer to stick with only those tools that they have been using in non-agile work. And the logic given by such businesses is ‘since agile transformation requires many changes, we shouldn’t change the tool. Well, this is entirely a baseless reason given by firms using the same tool again and again.
New tools such as the Kanban method used for an agile transformation encourage new habits. It is the feature and the excitement of the new tool that promotes new communication methods while reinforcing the Agile values in the entire organization. So, instead of putting new wine in an old bottle, use new tools during your Kanban Agile transformation.
Using tools that are alien to the world of agile
Agile is a popular project management approach used by many firms, regardless of their size and industry, and even tool vendors are aware of this. For many decades, various tools used in different sectors have incorporated agile into their marketing copy, or features built for ticket-based systems have been baked right into those tools.
In the ticket-based system, the user opens a trouble ticket whenever a person faces a problem. In addition to general use, the ticket-based system is quite popular among software developers since it is used to track new bugs and feature requests.
But the ticket-based system brings along the check box system mentality among the users. This means that the user of the ticket-based system always hesitates before opening a ticket since he knows that the ticket is not going to close anytime soon. There is an added pressure of keeping the closing ratio high. There are instances wherein the user tries to close the ticket for the sake of a high closing ratio when the ticket is not resolved.
You should also understand that ticket-based systems were not a visualization tool. Many tools indeed use status fields to create a Kanban-like effect, but it’s not that effective.
Using tools designed for software development
In many firms, the IT, sales, and marketing teams are asked to use the software development teams’ exact software solutions. The thinking goes like ‘the company already has a licensed copy of an agile tool, and therefore, it’s not necessary to invest in another agile tool for other departments. And other companies think that they can improve communication between different departments by using the same tool.
This is one of the biggest mistakes that you can make during Kanban agile transformation. Different departments of your firm have different needs, and the same goes for their agile needs. Using the same tool for all the departments, you will never improve communication or save money; instead, you will only make the situation worse.
For example, other departments of your firm don’t share a backlog, just like software developers. They don’t even share user stories. In such a situation, using the same tools means making the department suffer because of the lack of specific features required by that department.
Choosing the right tool for agile transformation is not rocket science since all that you need to do is stay away from the mistakes mentioned in this blog post. Invest in a new tool, don’t let all the departments use the same tool, and make sure that the tool you are introducing is ideal for your organization.
