This post was written by Kelly Taylor – @ktinboulder from PR Newswire
I am the Product Owner on a 10 person development team building tools to help our PR, Marketing and Investor Relations Communicators teams find insights in the social web and traditional media then distribute their text or multimedia content to targeted audiences. We are using Ruby on Rails, jQuery, MongoDB and many APIs in our web applications.
Our team was using an enterprise ALM tool for a year which was wonderful for Product Owners and Executives as the user interface was very conducive to planning Sprints and Releases. Backlog management was great and Stories could be well elaborated. However, the development team hated using the tool and it was a constant source of frustration.
We decided to try AgileZen using a very minimalist approach and a commitment from the team to use the Kanban Board. Our team also uses Campfire, GitHub and Jenkins in our workflow and have leveraged APIs to post updates automatically to Campfire. The frustration ceased and we have never looked back.
Being part of an enterprise, we struggle with large team collaboration and consolidating portfolio roadmaps. We have leveraged AgileZen’s multiple boards feature to have high level portfolio planning boards for management as well as our day to day development team board. The ability for each team or group of stakeholders to define their own workflow for a board has been key to the success of AgileZen for us.
When your development team is empowered to use the tools that optimize their workflow, consistent delivery of quality software will follow.
