Agile Sprint Planning with Orangescrum

Developing a product or a service your customers will love, requires exquisite planning and management of the product and engineering teams. Requirement sign-offs as well as the agreed timelines by the customer are critical success factors.

Once you are set to begin execution, it is important to have the project phases, user stories, sprints, and tasks aligned. Furthermore, ensure that your teams understand what is to be delivered as part of each Sprint without losing sight of the overall deliverables.

The focus should always be that of ONE SPRINT at a time.

“Quick & Dirty” or a “Good Enough on time” deliverable has always been preferred over that elusive delayed yet “perfect” result. 

This is where the agile way of doing things scores the most. It is incremental & iterative. Our clients today are obsessed with quick results. What better way than Sprints to satisfy them!

They always want things delivered yesterday!

Not only that, an agile offer us the flexibility of making changes at the right time rather than at an end stage which is detrimental to the project and all involved.

And this where having well-planned Sprints come in handy.

You time-box your Sprints, lay out the tasks involved, have the team ready to execute and monitor results as you make progress. 

And if you look at it from an IT Service Provider standpoint, it gives you greater control over your projects, prevents them from being overrun by unwanted scope creeps & delays and lastly from running out of the budget.

In this short article, I will explain how you can plan and manage your sprints in OrangeScrum.

With OrangeScrum’s sprint planning, you can have the full clarity on your sprint plans, milestones, sprint launch dates, backlogs and all the progress in one place.

As we all know Sprint is a set period of time during which specific work has to be completed and made ready for review.

Sprint review and Daily Stand-ups are easier and far less time consuming with Orangescrum!

Read full article at Orangescrum Blog

Orangescrum Update - Task Linking is here!

Hi There! OrangeScrum is back with a slew of new important features to enable efficient task management. This time the focus is to make task management robust and further enable agile and scrum project management.

Task Linking and New Task Types have been launched to enable greater sync across tasks and apt categorization so that your project plans do not go off track.

Let us see the “How to” now :)

What is Task Linking? 

Now with OrangeScrum, you can link any two tasks in a project to show their relationship. Though we do have Gantt Chart to create the dependencies but it is slightly different from Gantt Chart's task linking. It is nothing but a task reference only. One task can have linking with multiple tasks of the project.

How to create Task Linking? 

You can create task linking in two ways.

1. Create or edit task page
2. Task detail page

How to link a task in Create Task? 

Before you link a task to another, you should know the following:

Relates To: It has three categories. It defines the type of linking.

• Relates to: This shows the intended task is related to the following linked tasks.
• Duplicated by: This shows the intended task is a duplicated task of the linking task.
• Derived from: This shows the intended task is derived with reference from the linking task.

Linking Task: These are the tasks linked to the main (parent) task. You can see them on your task detail page.

Read full article at Orangescrum Blog

Why Productivity is the Real Badge of Honor

Employees working for long hours and badging themselves as “I am busy” is not uncommon these days. Researchers show that a busy and overworked lifestyle has become an aspirational status symbol instead of productivity.

This leads to some obvious consequences such as improper work-life balance, staying unhealthy and unhappy frequently and finally decreasing your Productivity at the workplace.

Effective and successful businesses understand the importance of workplace productivity.

If your employees are happy, their productivity will increase, and that’s exactly what you need to help your business grow.

To be happy, you need to have proper work-life-balance which becomes easy with but also with proficient task and time management and a little hard work.

How do we strike that perfect balance?

What can we do to become organized and results driven without creating a ruckus?

Let us take a look at some proven tips to be productive at our workplace:-

Read full article at Orangescrum Blog

OrangeScrum Gets Awarded for Customer's Choice and Great User Experience by SoftwareSuggest

OrangeScrum – the project management and task management software has been awarded with two prestigious awards by SoftwareSuggest the best B2B product and customer review directory.

OrangeScrum has received the “Customer’s Choice for 2018” and “Great User Experience Award for 2018” among the top Project Management Softwares.

SoftwareSuggest is a business software discovery and recommendation platform. Software Suggest evaluates by:

• Shortlisting the features any business owner requires.
• Comparing those features with multiple software.
• Asking for quotations from vendors.
• And finally presenting the perfect report of evaluation.

OrangeScrum is simple Project Management and Task Management Software that brings all your teams on a single platform with dedicated support in SaaS and open source versions.

It facilitates quick task management, time tracking and end to end project planning. With transparency and visibility to multiple projects helps to boost the team performance with helpful features such as – Kanban view, Gantt chart, Executive Dashboard, In-App chat, Time Management, Resource Management and Invoicing.

Read full article at Orangescrum Blog

How to increase your wellbeing as a project manager – Guest Post by Susanne Madsen

I have previously written about stress and I have also shared my own story about how I managed to free myself from stress. I know from the feedback I have received, and the work I do with project managers, that feeling confident and at ease is an on-going challenge. We work in hectic environments and are at times just getting by – trying to keep the client happy, staying on top of our inbox and avoiding conflict. Wellbeing is not the word that springs to mind when we think of project management. Wellbeing is something we may focus on in our spare time to recover and get back to balance.

But what would it take if we really wanted to feel better whilst working on our projects? Scientists claim that wellbeing is a skill we can all learn and that the effects can be observed in the mind. All it takes is practice. The more we practice the more we will strengthen those circuits in the brain that promote higher levels of wellbeing.

Let’s examine the four ingredients that lead to wellbeing.

Resilience

The first ingredient, resilience, is the ability to bounce back and recover from stress and adversity. In other words, it’s the speed at which we recover from unexpected changes and difficult situations. Some people recover slowly and other people recover more quickly. It turns out that scientists can measure the time it takes for our brain to bounce back and that this time span is critical for understanding resilience. Individuals who show a more rapid recovery have higher levels of wellbeing. They are in many ways protected from stress and the many unexpected events that happen on a project.

To strengthen your resilience, train yourself to see the opportunities in every situation. Projects are dynamic with risks and issues popping up on a daily basis. The more you resist and fight against them the more prolonged your stress response will be. Instead, accept that changes and problems are inevitable, even with the best risk management approach. When a problem occurs, do what you can to resolve it without getting caught up in a negative emotional spiral. Reframe the situation and see the positive angles. There are always opportunities to grow and learn from adversity, we just need to train ourselves to see it. Some of my biggest personal transformations came from the biggest challenges on my project.

To bounce back and recover from an unpleasant piece of news, first become aware of the physical impact on your body. Your heart rate will increase and your palms may get sweaty. At this moment, don’t panic or start to give orders. Instead, pause and take a deep breath. In fact, take three deep breaths and let go of the negativity and the urge to react. From that place not only will you feel better, you will also be in a better position to make rational and intelligent choices about how to resolve the situation.

Read full article at Orangescrum Blog

Everything You Need To Know About Self-Hosted OrangeScrum

OrangeScrum offers 2 Self-Hosted solutions. One is the Self-Hosted of the Cloud Edition and the other is the Enterprise On-Premise solution.

Self Hosted has the same features as seen in the cloud and you can signup for our 30-day free cloud trial before purchasing the self-hosted edition.

For Enterprise On-Premise solution, you can request a demo and you can check the complete details of OrangeScrum Enterprise here.

The below Infographic shows you the complete guide to our Self-Hosted solutions.

 Read full article at Orangescrum Blog