In the contemporary business world, project management necessitates aligning project vision with goals, returns and outcomes apart from managing constraints, resources and deadlines. OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is a simple yet effective process to increase productivity, transparency and alignment in projects. OKR is a collaborative goal-setting technique that project managers may use to develop tough, ambitious goals with measurable outcomes.

From pitching new ideas for new products or features and getting stakeholder alignment on prioritizing them, to working with different teams in order to bring those ideas to life and ensuring that the product ultimately caters to the needs of its target customers, product managers play a crucial role in each and every step of the product life cycle. They take care of the changing demands of the business for newer capabilities and technologies and maintain the product roadmap that ultimately helps the business meet its market and business objectives. In a nutshell, product managers are responsible for managing the entire Product Vision for an organization.

Project and work management practices that were once standard are slowly being replaced by modern solutions. New and transformative technologies entering the modern workplace are enabling businesses to innovate and thrive in the digital/ hybrid world. The key to their success, however, lies in the effective implementation of a digital workplace strategy that helps teams and leadership truly adapt to the new world.

2021 is coming to an end, teaching us a lot about recovering from the challenging times we all have gone through. This year, while working remotely, we came out with new releases of SwiftEnterprise, completed 10 successful years of SwiftKanban, and also sponsored multiple events across the world including Kanban Brazil, FlowConf Turkey, and Kanban India.

AI and Machine Learning are becoming a big part of Digital Transformation initiatives in enterprises across the world. Businesses are looking to catapult to higher levels of engagement and effective communication with their customers/users with website-based chatbots becoming a popular method to do so. Chatbots can exchange text messages or employ speech synthesis and speech analysis, and act as self-service tools while also assisting real people with handling multiple conversations.

These days, there aren’t too many organizations that are not implementing a Lean or Agile initiative! Usually, most of them implement a mix or a combination of Scrum, Kanban and XP at the team level, or a scaled agile method such as SAFe or LeSS on a larger scale. It is essential that they find the right fit, as each method has its proponents as well as detractors. Depending on the nature of the business, leadership style and culture, etc., teams may find some methods better suited than others for their organization.

Achieving Flow in your teams’ work - and in fact the overall organization - has been gaining ground over the last several years. Adopting Lean and Flow principles has become integral to using the Kanban Method, Value Stream Management as well as in Scaled Agile methods such as SAFe, and is being seen clearly as a significant catalyst to achieving Organizational/ Business Agility. With the recent 5.1 release, SAFe(R) has fully integrated Flow metrics which have long been espoused by the Kanban community.

It’s a month of celebration at Digité, as SwiftKanban turns 10! Exactly a decade ago, SwiftKanban, a project very dear to everyone at Digité, made a small, yet inspired entry to the field of Kanban software. For the past decade, we have strived to make SwiftKanban a better experience for you, and continue to do so. In this month’s newsletter, we speak exclusively about SwiftKanban - how the journey has been, and what’s new for you, among other things!

The importance of Agile ceremonies, whether you are doing Scrum or and Kanban cannot be overemphasized. By facilitating regular and frequent communication amongst team members and stakeholders, these ceremonies ensure effective collaboration and improved feedback loops, and are critical for truly becoming agile. Some of the common ceremonies are Backlog Refinement, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Replenishment, Retrospectives and other such meetings. In this month’s newsletter, we take a closer look at some of these. Do let us know which of these have been crucial in your agile journey!