Agile Kanban is about focusing on your next action

It’s difficult to manage multiple projects, each with their multitude of tasks, documents, emails and other communications with regular changes of scope or priorities without going nuts. This is particularly challenging when anyone in the team may decide priorities.
How can you keep an eye on both the big picture and every detail, in each projects?

Agile Productivity Management (APM), is a light project management methodology. Typically Agile methodologies like Scrum, Kanban, XP, ... try to deliver continuously a single project, or one at a time in the best case. APM works very well for non software teams, as it focuses on delivering many projects, sometimes in parallel.
How does APM can help you?

1. Have an overview of all your projects, the top line.

2. Prioritize.

3. Make a list of actions with measure for success, the bottom line.

4. Focus on the tasks based on priorities.

5. Monitor progress

Sam9000 helps teams with multiple project to focus more on the big picture.
In many businesses things happens fast and we need new tools to cope with these constant adjustments.The software has been designed to help teams have a clear overview of projects and their status. In addition to this overview it offers the flexibility to easily rearrange priorities. These two elements become important allies to manage resources effectively and achieve success.

By accessing the Projects perspective, from the top toolbar, you will see a series of functions to get this overview.

Projects view: with this function you can quickly review all active Projects at a glance, see what is their status and have a quick access to the tasks and logs when you want to dig deeper into each project.
Priority stack : this function is actually inspired by the work of air traffic controllers and how they monitor and maintain a safe, orderly and efficient flow for airplanes. Decide on priorities by simply moving the different projects up and down in the stack either during a scrum meeting or individually depending. Do you work on different projects or work together on a same project?
Project Folders : organize your different projects as you like. You can then add memos, documentation relevant for this group of project and that will benefit the whole team.
Planning: see what has been scheduled for each member of the team.
Depending on the needs of the team and its different members, use these tools to accommodate different level of planning, from simple todos list to advanced scheduling.

Define actions going towards your goals
Inside each project, tasks and activities needed for the entire project or for the next phase can be defined. The priority and the time estimated to complete the task can be entered for advance scheduling. You may skip this information when precise scheduling is not required.

Depending on the task, the details and scope can be specified in many ways. You can enter a long description or attach one of more documents or have it linked to an email.

Focus on the next action
Once you have defined priorities for your projects and selected which tasks you would like to work on next by setting them to Soon, the system will generate time boxes for the coming day for entire team.

Tasks then will appear in each member’s dashboard for maximum clarity of focus.

Sam9000 is particularly suited to achieve this with self-managed teams. These are teams that do not rely on a project manager to plan and distributes the work. This gives back more power to each member of the team to bring their best effort to the success of each projects.

This can be accomplished very efficiently when everybody in the team has a clear overview of all ongoing projects and their status.

With all important communications accessible to everybody it is easy to avoid missing crucial new information. In the example of the client who changed her mind, simply attach her email to the project for everybody in team to see. You can then also attach tasks for yourself. Or assign it to the best person to handle this new change and voilà!

For each project you can then dig deeper and look at the different tasks for the projects and select which ones you will work on next.

With your software it is also easy to document what is happening and take notes on what works.These notes can then benefit the whole team. This is another important key to improving processes. A good Agile methodology should absolutely include constant improvements. This concept is fully supported with permanent history, notes and logs.

Conclusion
Sam9000 is a great solution for teams dealing with multiple projects with changing priorities. It will also offer flexibility when the scope evolves, and as projects progress. The entire team can now easily have an overview of what is happening and decide what to do next, based on the best priorities.