Competition in the world of business is fierce. Every day a new competitor jumps into the fray with new ideas and a better way to manage projects, teams, clients, and workflows. That new company is agile. They’re flexible and fast. If your business can’t keep up with the new playing field, you’ll fall behind. And when that happens, the journey back to relevancy will be a major challenge.
Because of that, you must do everything you can to keep your business agile.
But what does it mean to be agile? Simply put, being agile is the ability to adapt quickly to market changes. Those changes must be able to happen both internally and externally. Your business needs to be able to make quick pivots, based on how the market and trends shift, without hesitation, and without having to hold endless meetings.
What makes agility complicated is keeping your teams always at the ready. Those teams are busy building, testing, and deploying systems, so they might not be prepared for shifts which will lead to big delays.
Fortunately, there are tools you can employ to help make such agile shifts a reality. Let’s take a look at some of these tools.
Mindmeister
You’ve probably heard of mind mapping software. These are applications or platforms that make it easy to visually map and collaborate on ideas. With each idea, you add objects to the map that represent things like functionality, supply chain, sources, audience, processes, languages, frameworks, UX, and dependencies. Among the countless mind mapping software available, Mindmeister is best suited for business decisions.
Not only can you create brilliant mind maps of your ideas, but you can also export them to presentations to be used in tools like Google Slides or into a task management platform (such as MeisterTask).
One of the great things about a mind mapping tool is that it allows you to very quickly shift an idea, based on any external influence. Quickly shift your idea from a typical networking tool to a cloud-native platform in your mind map and you’ll know exactly what must be done to make the change.
Mindmeister allows you to visualize, collaborate, manage, and share your ideas, making the process of creating easy but also helping you to quickly pivot those ideas without having to waste precious time.
LeanKit
LeanKit takes Trello to the next level for enterprise kanban. At its core, LeanKit is still a project kanban board, but it goes further by adding enterprise-specific features such as a private cloud option (for those who need more security) and integration with over 300 apps and services.
LeanKit helps businesses to experience agility with process and work visualizations, online kanban boards, real-time work statuses, identification of risks to delivery, cross-team work connections, process limits, work planning, and delivery, kanban templates, visible process policies, contextual collaboration, lean and agile metrics, advanced reporting, targeted notifications, and custom security.
If your business needs a start-to-finish project management solution that places agility front and center, LeanKit is the tool for you.
Slack
No business can be agile without the ability to effectively communicate. And when you have teams for every task or project, communication becomes even more crucial.
The de facto standard of business communication and collaboration is Slack. With Slack, your team members can more efficiently communicate via DMs, threads, keyword notifications, file sharing, customizations, integrations, and bots.
Another very important feature to Slack is the new Screenhero integration, which allows collaborators to easily share their screen from within the Slack client itself. And Slack is always building in new features and integrations that are perfectly suited to help businesses become (and remain) agile.
GitHub
If you want to empower your developers to be as agile as possible, they need to be working with GitHub. GitHub is not just a code repository that also serves as a version control system: It can also be integrated into numerous automation systems that can help your company migrate to the world of DevOps. With DevOps at the heart of your software lifecycle, you’ll deliver faster and more reliably and you’ll also be able to quickly shift what is being delivered and how it’s delivered.
GitScrum
Speaking of Git, when you have a team of developers that need the best collaboration and project management tools available, scrum should be at the top of the list of considerations. GitScrum combines kanban boards with Gantt Chart views to create a platform that makes it possible to view a project’s progress with both boards and timelines.
GitScrum also includes a sprint feature, which is absolutely essential for agile businesses. Within the realm of development, a sprint is a defined period during which specific work must be completed and made ready for review. GitScrum makes it very easy to organize and manage these sprints.
You can define sprint deliverables and track the time spent on specific tasks and overall progress for the project. And with the included burndown chart, you can easily measure the number of completed items in each sprint and assign points to each task, based on difficulty.
Conclusion
There are a plethora of tools within the business world to help you make the shift to an agile existence and keep your company running smoothly as it pivots according to market trends. Your company will probably have to make use of more than one tool listed here.
As you begin to deploy these pieces to the puzzle, make sure to give your teams enough time to fit them into their workflow. Becoming agile won’t happen overnight, but it will certainly make overnight pivots possible.
