An Introduction to Zoho Sprints

Managing a business is no easy feat and requires detailed planning and implementation. If you own a business then you would know the importance of project management.

Carrying out project management in a seamless manner is majorly linked to having the right tools for organizing team members, tracking various responsibilities, and gathering insight on how the team members contribute to the completion of tasks.

Keeping this well in mind, Zoho has come up with Zoho Sprints, which is one of the agile project management tools designed to manage software sprints and help the team members overcome all their hurdles.

Using the Zoho Sprints integrations, one can build right and ship quickly. It is a tool that helps in embracing agility and building products that the customers really need. It is possible to gather requirements from the engineering teams, track progress, partner with the internal and external stakeholders, and get things done quickly with the use of Zoho Sprints.

What is Zoho Sprints?

Zoho Sprints is a free online tool that is used for agile planning and tracking. It helps in creating effective user stories, scheduling agile meetings, using timesheets, and adding estimation points for tracking the work hours.

The main purpose of Zoho Sprints is to bring agility to the project development lifecycle. Being agile is actually a project management method that helps in building an iterative process where teams can quickly react to changes. This is an approach that is entirely different from the traditional waterfall model which is much more focused on testing only after the final product is built.

As opposed to this approach, an agile team focuses on delivering products in iterative cycles called Sprints which essentially means that the product is tested and delivered to customers for feedback regularly. One periodic cycle in the agile project management methodology for building projects is termed as Sprints.

Zoho Sprints integration helps in focusing on the team’s capacity for meeting the deadlines while empowering the project remarkably. Some of the most important benefits of Zoho Sprints are:

1. Overview with Dashboard

Using Zoho Sprints enables the team members to take a quick look at the big picture with the help of Sprints Dashboard. It becomes possible to track the team member engagement, knowing more about all the backlog metrics, and understanding the competition levels of all your sprints.

These dashboards have the capability to make sure that you divide the work in an effective manner and work on increasing the team member’s efficiency. Even after a member is done working on the Zoho Sprints, one can always look at the bigger picture with a simple to read and understand overview.

2. Effective Time Management

Zoho Sprints is one of the agile project management tools that help in managing and tracking time effectively. Zoho Sprints has a tab called Timesheets that is used for tracking log hours while differentiating billable and nonbillable hours for the Sprints.

Anytime a team member is logging in the time, they can start the timer from anywhere in Sprints. In addition, the Meetings tab also enables a person to schedule meetings, set clear agendas, and effectively choose participants.

The meeting reminders and the ability to search meetings take out all the pain of planning and logistics. In essence, Zoho Sprints can be considered as a perfect tool for managing time efficiently and considering time as money.

3. Analytics

Zoho Sprints present many benefits such as Velocity Charts, Burn-up Charts, Burn-down Charts, and Cumulative flow diagrams that can be used to stay at the top of data. It is software that offers analytics updates in real-time and it is these updates that help in making predictions, probable changes, and identifying bottlenecks.

In addition, with the help of release reporting, one can also take a good look at the closed sprints that were used by the team resources. The reports on Zoho Sprints help in taking a business to the next level by turning important data into insights that are considered worthy of taking action.

4. Tracking the Team

The Scrum Board in Zoho Sprints also helps in seeing where a team stands. One can personalize a board by creating custom statuses, sorting, and viewing.

In addition, it is also possible to monitor the sprint activity with the help of graphs that are based on task status. This helps in not getting the tasks lost in cracks. With the help of the Scrum Board, a clear view of projects can be obtained very easily.

5. Customizing Projects

Zoho Sprints is an agile project management tool that enables you to make a project entirely your own. Since each project has a different personality, custom fields can be used for giving a better context to almost every project. The tool leaves no room for any kind of doubt and helps in building layouts that ensure the detailing of work items.

By creating custom views for work, one can get quick access to important work items. It is also possible to minimize the time spent on mundane tasks by using existing templates or creating entirely new ones for the recurring projects.

One can also create new item types for categorizing work items based on a project that is being worked on. The custom item types such as bug fixes, minor changes, or enhancements can be used at any place where they are applicable.

6. Accommodating Change

Zoho Sprints help in planning and implementing changes for efficiently keeping up with changes that an agile journey mostly includes. With the use of Backlog, it is possible to use feedback from the last sprint and plant the next one. This always ensures that a product is moving ahead in the right direction.

The feature of Epics helps in structuring your work effectively. It is possible to break down Epics into sprints and use an established understanding to gain a better understanding. Lastly, with work item management, streamlining the sprint planning and working smartly around the tasks becomes possible using labels and checklists.

7. Collaboration

With the Zoho Sprints integration, the remote teams can be brought much closer. It is a tool that helps the distributed teams to brainstorm, collaborate and work together from any place or on any kind of device.

The social feed notifies team members at the time of all important events. Team members can then comment on the code changes and also carry out useful deliberations.

8. Release Management

An effective process of release management involves collaborating with multiple teams, and tools. Hence, Zoho Sprints brings everything together on one platform.

It is possible to sync all the code repositories, integrate effectively with the CI/CD tools, and also get contextual reports for all the releases.

Beginning With Zoho Sprints

If someone asks, “What is Zoho Sprints?” then in simple language, it is a tool that makes project management agile. It helps in getting a team agile while making a workspace much more vibrant.

Below we will gain a quick understanding of the way in which Zoho Sprints actually works by taking an example. Let’s take a person “X” as a marketing manager in a company, “Y”. If the person “X” is new to Zoho Sprints, he/she will go about managing it in the following way:

1. Create Projects: The person “X” might begin by creating a marketing project where the main task will be managing all work items related to promotion, marketing, and events. After this, the person will invite all team members in the marketing department for collaborating together.

Some team members will be given managerial roles and some executive. Finally, person “X” will be defining the estimation type of the project which will then help the team in clearly understanding estimation points of work items.

2. Building Backlog: This person “X” along with the team members will be noting down all requirements on a project in the Backlog. These items might include carrying out tasks such as social media promotions, writing blogs, shooting promotional videos, conducting events, etc.

The person “X” will then create Sprints in the project. A sprint with the name of Social Media can include managing Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  and a sprint with the name of Online Blogs can include the list of all blogs that are to be written in a month.

The person “X” will assign the managers as Sprint owners so that it becomes the responsibility of these owners to prioritize the items and move them from backlog to sprint. Either the person “X” or the sprint owner can start the sprint and complete it.

3. Working Around Board: Just as the sprint begins, the team moves all work items across different statuses on the board. As and when the status of a task keeps changing, the project keeps on progressing.

When the different items in the sprint tab are finally closed, the sprint gets completed successfully and a part of the project is completely ready for delivery. All that the team members need to do is move the work status over different statuses so that as and when everything is completed, it is easy to track progress and get desired results.

The above mentioned steps explain clearly the way in which Zoho Sprints functions and makes the job much easier.

Conclusion

Zoho Sprints is the best software to plan, track and manage results in one place. With just a simple login and a simple to read dashboard, it helps the team members collaborate seamlessly. As one of the best agile project management tools built for modern workspace, it is the tool that all organizations need for easy project management.

In case you need any assistance in the implementation of Zoho Sprints, then an expert Zoho consultant can be of utmost support to you. Get in touch today to get things going and succeed in project management.