When you take an Agile approach to your projects, workflows are key to managing your backlog, responding to issues, and providing quality control. Unlike traditional workflows — which can sometimes resemble flowcharts in their simplicity — an Agile workflow is cyclical and designed to cope when your requirements change mid-project.
There are plenty of posts out there on Agile project management generally (including Wrike’s Agile Guide). But in this post, we zoom in on Agile workflows. We’ll cover:
- The shape of an Agile workflow and how it differs from the flowchart approach
- The lifecycle of an Agile workflow and why this makes them so well suited to jobs like development.
- The key steps to building an Agile workflow for your team’s next project.
With this information, you can decide whether an Agile workflow will provide the right framework for your team and start to put the principles into practice.
At the end of this post, we’ll also share success stories from our users worldwide about how Wrike’s industry-leading features can help you monitor and refine your Agile projects.
What makes Agile workflows different?
Agile teams need repeatable workflows that can handle large volumes of tasks, encourage collaboration, and have opportunities for feedback baked in from the start. This creates workflows with a distinctive shape and pattern.
An Agile workflow can typically be mapped like this:
Agile workflows boil down to these key stages:
- A backlog box where upcoming tasks are collected and prioritized
- A sprint cycle of one to four weeks where a list of backlog tasks are tackled in a period of focused work with fixed goals
- Daily Scrum check-ins during the sprint to update other team members and report potential challenges
- A retrospective at the end of each sprint to gather feedback from team members and stakeholders and identify ways to make the next iteration of the workflow smoother and more productive
- The deliverables, which are reviewed continually during the sprint and sent to the client as soon as they’re ready
While a traditional Waterfall or critical path method has a series of predefined steps that have to be completed in a fixed order (almost like an assembly line), Agile workflows break projects down into tasks and sort the tasks into batches. Your workflow is no longer a straight line, but this is a far better reflection of the way most development teams (and even some creative teams) actually process their project work.
With an Agile workflow, you have scope to shuffle your tasks, add new ones, and plan your sprint cycles to deal with issues as they arise.
An Agile workflow offers plenty of benefits for teams that want to integrate their clients’ feedback early on and allow new ideas to influence the project.
Key benefits of an Agile workflow
If all of your projects and processes fit into a linear structure, you have a clearly defined outcome, and your clients take a hands-off approach, an Agile workflow could overcomplicate your process.
However, imagine you’re trying to squeeze complex requests into a traditional structure like this. In that case, you’ll become frustrated when the brief changes, blow your budget on reworking completed deliverables, and see your project timelines slip as the project goes on.
If the “production line” analogy doesn’t resonate with the tasks you’re taking on, Agile workflows offer a host of benefits.
- Speed: Agile workflows assign tasks to a fixed time frame in a focused sprint. This creates the right environment for turning “work in progress” tasks into “completed” ones.
- Adaptability: A changing brief — whether driven by a problem or a new idea — throws a traditional workflow off track. In contrast, the Agile backlog system means teams can respond by changing their approach to the next sprint (for example, by reprioritizing their tasks or bringing in new team members to build or review the work).
- Feedback: With an Agile process, you get continual, high-quality feedback in daily Scrums and at the end of each sprint cycle in the retrospective. You can use this to refine your processes over the whole lifecycle of your workflow (which we’ll discuss in the next section).
- Collaboration: The shape of an Agile workflow encourages team members to discuss issues and ask for the resources they need, and the team includes members whose job is to clear roadblocks. Plus, the short, repeatable cycle of sprints and completed deliverables creates continual “wins” that can boost morale in the project team.
- Client satisfaction: With an Agile workflow, customers and clients are more involved in the process, see their feedback responded to, and receive their deliverables in small, regular batches. For customers who want to be more engaged in the process, this builds trust and creates a far better experience than requesting changes in the final phases of a project.
Most of these benefits are rooted in the fact that Agile processes can be repeated (and refined) as many times as it takes to close a successful project. Because of this, these workflows have a fixed lifecycle, which runs from ideation to retirement.
It’s important to be aware of this lifecycle when considering whether an Agile workflow like the one we described above offers what your team needs.
Understanding the Agile workflow lifecycle
Agile workflows repeat until they become redundant (for example, because a new product release ends work on the old one).
When you’re planning and managing the workflow, it’s important to be aware of the six distinct stages you’ll move through as you set up your workflow, use it to deliver your tasks, and then retire it to move on to your next project:
- Ideation: This phase creates a plan for the way you’ll approach your work. While this won’t be as clear as a fixed sequence of dependent tasks, it’s important to get a sense of your project scope, the types of tasks that will land in your backlog box, and how you’ll structure your sprints.
- Inception: At this stage, you share your project plan with the people on your sprint team. You can start assigning the first tasks based on their skill sets and hear feedback about your initial plan for the time frame, goals, sprint length, and frequency you laid out in the first step.
- Iteration: During this stage, your team uses the workflow to power their work. You sort and delegate the items in the backlog, assign them to sprints, hear feedback, and start delivering results to your client.
- Release: As you work with your Agile plan, you’ll also go through a release for each iteration. A release is a handover — you send your deliverables to your client or your end users. This is the most important opportunity for feedback, with comments from stakeholders, your sprint team, and anyone else involved in quality control. You can use the information you gather during the release phase to inform the next iteration.
- Production: When all the requirements are met and the product is tested, it can move fully into the production phase. At this point, your team’s role might shift to training people to use the product or monitoring the results, or you might adjust your workflow so you’re adding support tickets and bug reports to your backlog as you support the initial users.
- Retirement: When the product is made redundant or the project ends, the workflow is retired. It’s important to document your process before you close it for good. This helps you evaluate what worked well and find the lessons you can apply to your next project.
While Agile workflows are designed to evolve, they can get off to the strongest start if you’re aware of these lifecycle stages from the beginning.
In the next section, we’ll show you how to consider them as you build an Agile workflow from the ground up.
How to build an Agile workflow for your team
1. Learn the Agile process and concepts
Shifting to an Agile workflow for a new project can involve some big adjustments. While you don’t have to qualify as an Agile expert to run a workflow based on the key principles, it’s important you can clearly explain the reasons why Agile is a good choice for your shared process.
Learning the key concepts of Agile can help you to:
- Articulate the rationale behind the shape of the workflow, so your team can use it efficiently and effectively
- Clarify the benefits of implementing a new system, so you get a higher level of buy-in from your team and see more of the potential benefits
- Set expectations with your clients and other stakeholders when you discuss the project work, so you can deliver a better experience for them throughout the project
Tip: Start researching the principles and key methodologies of an Agile workflow here: Agile Methodology Basics.
Agile prioritizes individual needs, idea sharing, and responding to change over following and documenting a fixed project roadmap. This can be a big shift for teams used to a more linear approach, so it’s also important to prepare to manage the changes you’ll notice.
Depending on your current process, you might have to prepare for significant changes in:
- The amount and nature of the feedback your team members receive
- The level of communication and collaboration you have with your clients and the methods you use for sharing with your team
- The flexibility of the timeline and a new way of assigning deadlines
This first stage of research and evaluation is vital because it shows you whether an Agile workflow is the best choice for your upcoming project work before you have to make these significant changes.
If you encounter pushback you can’t overcome by adjusting your team or restructuring your sprint cycle plan, it might be worth investigating another method of project management.
Tip: For more options for workflows that differ from Agile, see our post: Project Management Methodologies.
2. Build and visualize a workflow framework
Remember, all Agile workflows move tasks from a backlog into repeatable sprint cycles punctuated by daily Scrums, evaluate the success of the cycle, and restart the process with a new set of backlog tasks.
This being said, there’s a lot of variety within this overarching shape. As teams use different methods to assign tasks to their sprints, structure their teams, receive feedback, and prioritize their tasks, they might start to favor a different type of Agile workflow.
Any one of these philosophies could help you create a more detailed plan for your Agile workflow:
- The Kanban workflow is ubiquitous. This method breaks a project into tasks and subtasks to be assigned. The tasks are tracked through the workflow in a series of columns that represent their current stage. Crucially, true Kanban limits the work in progress so the team can make sure their tasks are being completed and handed to the client or users consistently.
- A Scrum workflow is another popular option for Agile teams. It uses a board similar to a Kanban board to group tasks into columns describing their progress. The difference is that Scrum breaks the project into sprints and is hyperfocused on one iteration at a time.
- An Extreme Programming (XP) workflow is designed for software development and prioritizes flexibility. The goal is to continuously receive customer feedback and use it to develop the product.
- A Feature-Driven Development (FDD) framework creates new software models every two weeks to prioritize developing new features in response to customer demand. Teams build workflows to help them develop a feature list and then plan, design, and build to satisfy customer demand and resolve common issues as quickly as possible.
- An Agile Crystal workflow will differ depending on the size of your team. It’s essentially a system of grouping different Agile methodologies and tools to suit the number of people available to work on a project.
When you’re designing your workflow, it’s also important to think of the visual representation you’ll provide for your team and stakeholders. A central “map” of your workflow, with the latest information on where your tasks sit, will keep everyone up to date, help them prioritize their tasks, and create a shared point of reference that can boost collaboration in your team.
Even if they don’t follow all the principles of Kanban project management, for example, many Agile teams use a Kanban board to visualize their workflow.
These interactive boards give you an up-to-date overview of your project or your sprint. By viewing the way your tasks are flowing or bunching together, you can identify bottlenecks, make informed decisions about the best way to support your team, and identify areas where a change to your workflow could make your next sprint smoother.
For example, Wrike’s Kanban boards update automatically to display your team’s tasks at their latest stage. You can use color-coded statuses, display the team or team member responsible for each task, and automate your Kanban board to notify the next team member when a new task needs their attention.
3. Define roles and responsibilities
Before you kick off your Agile workflow, you’ll need to assign roles and define responsibilities. This clarity helps your work run more efficiently, and can help make sure all feedback is heard and taken into account.
To use an Agile workflow effectively, you’ll need:
- A team lead. Agile teams should be non-hierarchical, but you’ll need a team lead to coordinate the team members and keep the project moving forward. The team lead will review and organize incoming requests, monitor the workflow, and host meetings.
- The Scrum master. The scrum master leads the daily Scrum meetings and focuses on removing reported roadblocks during a sprint. If your team is smaller or you lean away from the true Scrum methodology, this role is often combined with the team lead.
- The product owner. This person represents the client’s needs. They’ll clearly outline the requirements and ensure these needs stay central even as the workflow and project scope evolve. Alongside the team lead, this person plays a key role in deciding which tasks, features, or deliverables to prioritize during sprints.
When you plan your workflow, you’ll also need to define the team members who will be working on the project. These are the people or job roles you’ll assign the backlog tasks to and hear from during scrums once the workflow is in motion.
In larger or more specialized teams, you might also designate independent testers, enterprise architects, system integrators, and subject matter experts to help with different stages of your Agile workflow.
When you run your Agile workflows in Wrike, it’s easy to create and assign tasks to individual team members or job roles. You can build project boards to display this information in the way that makes most sense for your team, and instantly drill down to find out more information about your team’s progress, time tracking, workload, and capacity.
4. Launch the Agile workflow
Once you’ve kicked your team off on the new workflow and added tasks to your backlog, you can assign tasks to your first sprint and begin your project work.
Typically, tasks in an Agile workflow move through statuses like:
- To do (normally a status for tasks in the backlog)
- In progress
- Blocked (when work isn’t possible because the task depends on one which is still pending)
- In review
- Completed
You can adapt these statuses to suit your project work. For example, if your work needs to be tested and reviewed more thoroughly, you can add additional workflow stages and Kanban columns to reflect the complex approval process.
During your sprints, you’ll hold daily meetings where your team can share their work and ask for the support they need. This is a time to report on progress, flag developing issues or bottlenecks, and decide how to allocate resources so you can meet your goals for the sprint.
When you manage your Agile workflow in Wrike, you can use features like real-time task tracking to give you an up-to-the-minute overview of your progress.
By creating and managing your tasks in Wrike, you also provide a central source of truth for your team, which is automatically updated to reflect your current status. With this information, your meetings become more efficient and everyone has access to the detailed progress overview they need.
5. Monitor and refine the workflow
Teams often choose an Agile workflow when they expect the scope and requirements of their project to change. As your work progresses, it’s important to adapt your workflow and prioritize your backlog based on the feedback you’re hearing from your stakeholders, end users, and team.
This means the sprint retrospective is a crucial aspect of any Agile workflow. This is where you’ll describe the lessons learned and come up with a plan to integrate them into your process for your next project.
All your team members should attend retrospectives (remotely, if necessary). Everyone’s experiences and opinions are valid, and your shared goal is to find specific points you can improve on or action for your next iteration.
For example, if the feature you were developing was almost delayed when you uncovered a bug in the final days, you would use the retrospective to thank the team members who got the process back on track, look into why the issue was only uncovered at the last minute, and suggest ways to provide more of a cushion of time at the end of the next sprint.
Wrike’s reporting features filter your project data to provide the reports you need instantly. Display granular data on time tracking, goals achieved, overall project progress, and risks to your success in clear, easy-to-read, automatically generated reports, which are easy to share with your team and stakeholders.
We also offer a sprint retrospective template to help build this functionality into your workspace.
The Wrike features that empower Agile teams
Agile projects and processes flow best when they’re managed with powerful workflow software like Wrike.
Wrike is a full-service work management platform with unbeatable automation, task tracking, and reporting features that can be customized to fit your Agile project management style and empower your teams.
With Wrike, you have a suite of powerful tools at your fingertips at every stage of your workflow. This includes:
- Crystal-clear, real-time workflow visualizations: View Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and team overviews tailored to your team, then drill down to see granular details on your task’s progress in just a few clicks.
- Tailored task backlogs: Create custom item types for the jobs that commonly fall to your team and describe the detailed workflows they need to pass through before they’re handed to your client. Then, set your sprint goals and assign tasks effortlessly with a comprehensive overview of your jobs to be done.
- Automated task intake: Set up custom request forms to capture details about tasks like bugs, support tickets, or requests for creative assets. These tasks will be automatically added to your backlog, with all the information you need to assign them, plan for them, and collaborate effectively with your clients.
- Intelligent reporting: Slash the amount of time you spend analyzing project data for Scrums and retrospectives by generating regular custom reports on your latest team capacity and task tracking.
- Effortless collaboration. From real-time editing, @mentions, and automated reminders and notifications within your team, to stakeholder snapshots and integrations with tools like Slack, Wrike makes it easier to share ideas and feedback. When it’s this easy to work together, you can develop a seamless Agile workflow and deliver a great experience for everyone involved in your project.
Build your Agile workflows with Wrike
As you now know, Wrike’s Agile workflow management features give you all the tools and data you need to provide a great experience for your team and your clients.
With Wrike, you can build an Agile workflow that fits your tasks and your style of working, from automated backlog intake and detailed Kanban boards to live editing and feedback threads to move tasks through your workflow faster.
Plus, you can use Wrike to gather all the detailed insights you need to optimize your process for your next iteration, keeping your work flowing throughout the project's lifecycle.
Companies across the globe use Wrike to manage workflows with Agile frameworks or techniques. With Wrike’s flexibility and customization, you can build a workflow that gives every team member and stakeholder the focus and confidence they need.
- Wearable health tech company Fitbit prioritizes customer feedback and reviews. By streamlining workflows, building timelines, and generating reports with Wrike, Fitbit saves over 400 hours in feedback meetings per year with reports and timelines.
- Staffing and recruiting firm Aerotek has streamlined its processes, boosted visibility, and reduced the number of internal emails sent by up to 90% — by simply using @mentions and notifications instead.
- The creative teams at The Estée Lauder Companies use Wrike to ensure consistency and create detailed reports across teams representing 30 brands. Wrike keeps the team on track across regions and time zones, even when priorities shift.
- Social media management platform Hootsuite uses Wrike to track and monitor its projects in one place. Updates that used to be complex to piece together can now be generated in 30 seconds with Wrike.
Find out how Wrike can power your Agile workflows and project management today.
