Barb is the Customer Support Specialist at Workast. Barb ensures our customers are happy and assists them in using Workast, troubleshooting, finding bugs and reporting issues.
Sprints are a common way for product and engineering teams to work, as they help keep production flowing in a timely manner. The idea of using "sprints" or "iterations" is to have a concrete, time-boxed, period in which to complete a project. Whether it is a prototype, website launch, draft, or a deliverable of any type, using sprints creates a level of accountability and teamwork to deliver results on time.
Using Workast for your sprints can help them keep moving instead of slowing to a crawl, as you can manage and keep track of your sprint tasks and milestones all in one place. Manage your daily scrums, sprint scrums, and sprint reviews all in one place.
Sprints are typically where the bulk of the work happens. In the sprinting stage, you are focused on the execution, rather than planning or evaluating results. To streamline the work process and get better results during your sprint, you will want to organize your tasks and projects.
The first step is to create a space for your sprint.
A space in Workast is where your tasks live. They are your project, your task list, the event. You can learn how to create a space here. Once you've named and created your space for your scrum you are ready to move on to the next step.
The next step is to invite your team members. Make sure to add anyone that is working on the project or has an interest in the project. If someone else ends up working on the project in the future, don't worry, you can always add more users to the space later.
The third step is to create your lists for your sprint. Lists are essentially mini-projects under your over-arching sprint or space. Under your lists, you will create individual tasks that roll up into each list.
Think-through about the flow of your project and how you'd like your lists to be set up. Managing tasks in lists helps to organize and label them effectively. Your lists could be certain milestones in your sprint, backlog items, certain deliverables, or whatever makes the most sense for your team.
Creating and using tasks in your sprint space
Once your space is organized, you can start creating tasks for your sprint plan. (Don't worry, you can always add a list or edit lists later on.) Tasks are the bite-sized portions of the lists under the project that pull the projects together.
Under each task, you can insert details, add files, create tags, insert due dates, and more. The more information you put into each task the more likely you won't have to answer questions or clear up any misunderstandings. We recommend adding as much information as you can into each task to save you time in the long run. Details are always helpful.
Some notes:
For more involved tasks, you can use subtasks to help break down one task into several steps. This allows you to easily be able to segment chunks of work.
Labeling your tasks using tags gives your team easy visual information. We use tags like "High Priority," "Bug Report," etc to give us a good frame of what each type of task is and what the priority levels are.
You can easily move tasks from one list to another by dragging and dropping them.
Don't forget to add some integrations like Github or Bitbucket to help manage pull requests.
If you want to track the time spent on tasks, you can also use our time tracker app.
Once your sprint is set up, you're ready to dive into the work and track your progress. You can easily view where your team is at along each step of the process. You can also create reports to track actions and have real-time updates on specific action items falling under your sprint. You can learn more about using reports here to follow your Sprints in real-time.
If you have your space integrated with Slack you will also have real-time notifications come through Slack alerting you as individual tasks get completed. And if anything else comes up while your team is working through your sprint, it's simple and easy to create new tasks using Slack or the Workast app directly.
No matter what sprint you and your team are working on, Workast can help. By streamlining your workflow, organizing, and documenting your processes - your business will be that much more efficient. Your dev team will thank you later, and so you will your new scrum master skills.
If you use Workast for your sprints, we'd love to hear your story! Send us a tweet @workast or drop us a line - we'd love to feature your organization skills and tell your story!
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