Employing an Agile Approach to your Development Process with OneDesk
At the intersection of philosophy and practice, Agile at once reflects a unified organizational ideal with a wide array of approaches for its day-to-day application. While no two teams employ the Agile approach in precisely the same manner, the driving belief in its core values produces a decidedly more human, iterative, collaborative and indeed social approach to building products.
OneDesk provides a simple, intuitive and flexible application of the Agile approach within a unified cross-functional collaborative environment.
Here is an overview of the OneDesk approach, and how the key concepts come into play and the powerful benefits of using OneDesk as a solution to your Agile approach. You will see how you can immediately apply this flexible solution to meet the needs of your organization and team.
TERMINOLOGY
OneDesk does not employ standard Agile terminology out-of-the-box, but allows each company to customize the solution to align with its own unique Agile lexicon.
By maintaining a flexible container architecture, OneDesk allows organizations to implement Agile according to their unique recipe, while enabling the kinds of direct inputs and outputs that build and maintain momentum around a shared vision and real market drivers. To see how this happens in action, we’ll take a walk-through of some basic concepts.
Terms you need to know to use OneDesk for your Agile approach
Sprints & Backlog = Projects (editable)
User Story = Requirement (editable)
USER STORIES
At OneDesk, we believe that the best user stories come from the users themselves. By allowing you to invite customers to the table and directly provide their feedback (see: “INVITING CUSTOMERS”), you can directly access Feedback and seamlessly integrate their voice into your User Stories.
CREATING A USER STORY
- In the Stories (Requirements) view of your Project, click Create
- Enter your stories and their details; attach any supporting documents
- Stories can be moved from Backlog to Sprints as required
- Tasks can be created and assigned from Stories with a single click
SPRINTS & BACKLOGS
Among the core building blocks in Agile, Sprints and Backlogs represent the current and shelved projects underway. In OneDesk, Sprints are labelled Projects out-of-the-box. Of course you can freely re-label them based on your own terms and criteria.
TRY THIS:
- Start a ‘Sprint’ by creating a Project that contains Feedback, Tasks and Stories-> name it “Sprint 1”
- Create a Backlog by making a Project that contains only Requirements -> name it “Backlog”
- Plan your Sprint by moving some high priority stories from Backlog to Sprint 1 and create some tasks from them
INVITING CUSTOMERS
- In OneDesk you can freely invite customers to submit their feedback or ideas
- In the Customers View, you can create a new customer and send them and email invitation
- Customer will then receive an e-mail with a link to register and start contributing
BURNDOWN CHARTS
Agile Burndown Charts provide a critical ongoing read of the progress of your Sprints. OneDesk provides a quick and easy way to view a Sprint’s progress over time.
VIEW A BURNDOWN CHART FOR A SPRINT
- Go to your Project’s Dashboard.
- In the Issues/Tasks widget, choose Status over Time.
- This chart allows you to see the tasks in the Project that have been completed, are in progress, or yet to be started.
Why OneDesk Agile May be Just the Right Solution for You
OneDesk provides a uniquely flexible environment to manage your Agile teams and projects. But that’s just the beginning. While supporting all key functions from User Stories to Sprints, Backlogs and Burndown Charts, OneDesk provides a comprehensive Product Development Platform with integrated, data-driven roadmaps, detailed worklogs, business case analysis and seamless collaboration.
Because OneDesk is a social business environment, it also allows you to maintain a direct link to the customer, their critical Feedback and the genesis for your User Stories. While allowing your teams to work collaboratively, in real-time, OneDesk provides visibility into each stage of the development process, from initial customer feedback, to the stories and iterations that move the product forward in a truly market-aligned vision.
Was this post helpful? You can download a PDF version of this document here: Getting Agile with OneDesk