Zoho Sprints:
Zoho Sprints – The Best Agile Tool for Project Management Teams:
As each agile project has its own uncertainties, you need to be able to adapt your planning accordingly if you want it completed quickly and effectively. These strategies can vary according to the size and nature of the project and some may require more attention than others when it comes to quick progression and completion.
This task becomes quite difficult for teams to handle when projects start getting piled up leaving them little to no time to focus on the crucial needs of each project. They might require some external help to keep up with the workflow of their business.
This is where online project management software and tools come in, they provide solutions to businesses and teams to help them complete even the most time-consuming tasks in the quickest ways. That way, your primary focus always stays over the quality of your projects while leaving all the other worries to these platforms.
Now there are a lot of online platforms that are providing these services but it can be a difficult task picking one out of the many but don’t worry as we are about to make that task easy for you by discussing one such platform that completes every task perfectly and we believe it is the right pick for you.
Introduction:
Zoho Sprints is a cloud-based software solution for project management that has been designed for the purpose of helping agile teams complete their projects. It takes care of all the steps in an agile workflow – planning, tracking progress, release management, recording timesheets, monitoring the status of the tasks, meeting preparations, analyzing reports, and online collaboration.
It follows other Zoho products when it comes to innovating different means in order to help the business flourish. This is the reason that it is capable of easily integrating with all the other applications from Zoho in different fields such as sales, marketing, customer support, accounting, etc. all through a piece of single login information.
Below we are going to discuss the two powerful solutions that Zoho sprints provide to their customers in brief detail.
Why should you choose Zoho Sprints?
Now you might be wondering what makes Zoho Sprints different from others. Below we are going to discuss what features Zoho Sprints provides to its users and why you should choose it for helping your team in dealing with their projects.
- Accommodate Change: It allows you to plan and integrate feedbacks into your journey so that you can keep up with the moving world and be agile in it. Besides this, it also offers other features.s
- Utilize the backlogs and feedbacks to make sure you don’t repeat your mistakes and are always headed in the right direction
- Fully customize your work status and scrum boards because they play an important role in improving your work speed
- Get a perfectly clear picture of your work by structuring it into Epics and then breaking them into sprints to make use of the hierarchy
- Utilize labels and checklists to make you work smarter and faster.
- Agile Reports: Convert your raw data into insights that can be used to improve your team with each sprint.
- Improve the performance of your sprints by making use of the velocity, burndown, and burnup charts.
- Use the key agile reports like cumulative flow diagram and status timeline to locate bottlenecks in your projects.
- Zoom out to get a new and wide range of perspectives on your progress using the view for cross-projects.
- Analyze and balance each of your users by providing them their personal dashboard that keeps track of their capabilities.
- Conversations Matter: Brainstorm and hold discussions to get innovative ideas by creating a learning environment for your team.
- Utilize the agile meetings to hold face-to-face discussions to improve communication within the team.
- Use the feeds to create a space for constructive criticism and ideation so that you can receive quick feedback.
- Personalizing your Projects: Personalize all of your projects that are according to your needs.
- Create custom fields and layouts to make sure all of your work-related items are as detailed as possible.
- Create custom views for your work so that you don’t get tired of running into the same filter time and time again.
- Save your time by making use of existing templates that you have created for your past projects.
- Categorize your work items based on your projects by creating new item types
- Management of Timesheets: Keep track and manage your billable and non-billable log hours.
- It gives you timesheets that help you in estimating when you will be needed for the next sprint based on the time that you spent in the previous sprint.
- Keep track of where your team is spending their time through the continuous reports of your timesheet.
- Integrations: Extend the power of your sprints by utilizing both the native application and the extensibility features.
- It gives you a comprehensive solution by allowing you to use your existing tools by integrating them with Sprints
- The API is capable of pushing and pulling the data from Sprints to the other third-party applications.
- Faster than Ever: Always stay ahead of the curve by planning your releases and tracking their progress through the release reports. Their integrations will make sure everything works perfectly and nothing misses from the radar.
- Release management for planning and tracking your releases
- Tracking all of your release reports directly from Sprints by setting up the CD/CI workflow in Jenkins.
Key Solutions of Zoho Sprints:
1- The Hybrid Project Management:
Zoho Sprints lets you have the taste of both worlds by utilizing a collaborative method that lets your classic and agile teams come together to form a hybrid model capable of dealing with all of your projects by making use of the newest integrations of Zoho Projects and Zoho Sprints. If the approach of your teams varies then this hybrid strategy might be the best pick for you. In this model Zoho Sprints provides the following benefits:
- Budget of Projects – Agile budgeting and forecasting help all large organizations in adapting to what their customers and market need in the most timeless ways. It helps your project managers in tracking all the planned expenses against their actual cost and then visualize a forecast that can help you in breaking down the costs associated with each project.
- Automation of Tasks – Zoho sprints make it extremely easy for you to scale your projects even in huge organizations. It helps your teams in mapping all of their processes into a blueprint by making use of the task automation builder that works on the principle of drag and drop. The teams are given the abilities to effortlessly manage backlogs, source codes, and integrations so that their workflow is always smooth & without any delays.
- Dependency of Tasks – The collaboration between Projects and Sprints relieves the teams from all of their worries when it comes to broken links. All the information about your projects is synced with different platforms in real-time and covers all details including the estimation points and the dependencies. This helps in providing more context to the cross-functional teams making it easier for them to collaborate.
- Portfolio Reports – Utilizing the portfolio reports keeps you up to date with the schedule of your projects and the progress of your sprints. The managers for the portfolio get access to a zoomed-out view to keep track of how each of the projects is progressing. The agile teams on the other hand get access to a zoomed-in view that provides crucial details such as cumulative flow diagrams, burnup, and burndown reports, velocity charts along much more.
- Status Timeline – Zoho Sprints help your team in making constant improvements in their quality and delivery speed. They provide your status timeline which can be used to locate bottlenecks that are occurring in each part of the process by calculating the time spent on a work item. This improves the transparency of your organization.
2- AgileDesk:
The AgileDesk lets you bring your development and support team closer so that they can get a better picture and context when it comes to each other’s workplace. This collaboration helps you in fixing the problems faster such as customer support tickets, customer requests being bounced between different departments, etc. In this model Zoho Sprints provides the following features and benefits:
- Filing Tickets and Bugs – The AgileDesk allows your support agents to file a ticket as soon as a bug is reported or a feature is requested by a customer. The filing can be done in the form of a ticket or a user story. They are also allowed to attach the details along with the ticket so that the project backlog of the associated project can get a clear image.
- Eympathizing with Context – To make sure that there is no room for error or misunderstanding the support agents are allowed to provide context regarding the details of the ticket such as subject and descriptions to the scrum teams by pinning them to their work items.
- Facilitation of Cross-Functional Collaboration – It lets you enjoy the cross-functional collaborations so that it becomes easier for your support agents and scrum teams to do their job efficiently. Your testers and developers can directly tag your agents to get a clearer picture when they are debugging. If a ticket is currently dependent on a sprint, your agent can check on its status and then inform your customers of its progression accordingly.
- Customization – The AgileDesk is completely open to customization and completely understands that delivering changes even in small portions can play an important role in agile processes. It lets you customize the columns of your scrum boards so that you can easily improve the speed of your process and ship products that your customers will always appreciate.
Pros:
- Clean and easy UI experience
- It is rich with quality features
- The in-app reports and charts have a great variety
- It can be easily integrated with other Zoho products
- The free trial is available for users to test its capabilities
Cons:
- It can be short on integrations
- No other cons have been found as of yet.
Zoho Sprints Pricing Plan:
The pricing plan for Zoho Sprints is as follows:
Type of Subscriptions:
There is only one type of subscription plan having monthly and yearly payment plans when it comes to Zoho Sprints. It provides the same set of features in both plans but gives a considerable discount in case of choosing the annual plan.
Conclusion:
After reading the whole review you should have a better understanding of what Zoho Sprints has to offer. A cloud-based agile project management tool can prove to be a great asset for your team as it always ensures that all of your projects are being delivered on time without any bottlenecks and delays.
This will reduce the stress of your team and in return make them more focused and quality-oriented. We would definitely recommend you give the free trial a shot and see where you can go from there. Speaking from research and experience you may become a paid customer after seeing the benefits first-hand.
We hope that our review has made it easier for you to make a decision. As we have tried our best to bring all the necessary information to you related to Zoho Sprints. Our team wishes you the best!
