Agile Project Management

Install Agile Project Management from the application catalog. It adds Home, Work, Tasks and Configuration to the application sidebar. Demo data is optional; a normal installation starts with an empty project workspace.

Home brings together My Work, Blocked and All counts from the same task views, quick actions and the delivery dashboard in the shared Cockpit.

Start a project

Open Work, select New project, and enter a name, a short project key and an outcome. Choose Kanban for continuous delivery or Scrum for work in iterations. Both methods use the same work items and board. A project key is permanent after creation.

Create stories, tasks, bugs and spikes in the backlog. Use an epic to group related work around a larger outcome. Subtasks belong to a story, task, bug or spike. A work item’s parent, sprint, release and component must belong to the same project. Epics do not belong to sprints.

Work on the board

The board shows Ready, In progress, In review and Done, unless the selected board has columns of its own (see below). Drag a card from anywhere on it, its title included, to change its position or state. A plain click on the title still opens the card. The card moves when you drop it and saves in the background; you can keep working on other cards while it saves. The position is kept by FlowLakes, not by the page: a new item goes to the end of its project, and a drop places it between the cards around it. When two cards hold the same position, the drop puts the project’s order right again. A work item created through the API or an assistant cannot set its position; it goes to the end of the project too.

The Backlog view lists the work still in the Backlog state. Drag a row by its handle to change the order; the board uses the same order.

Work items are not service-desk records. They carry no response or resolution target, nothing breaches, and the record page shows no “Resolve within”, no caller to write to and no resolution code.

An item cannot be added under a parent that is done or cancelled, and a parent cannot be set to done or cancelled while an item under it is still open (subtasks under a story, stories under an epic). Finish or cancel those items first; the message names how many are open. A line shows where the card will land in another column. For keyboard operation, focus the handle, press Space, use the arrow keys, then press Space to drop. Escape cancels. The card’s action menu also offers the move to another column.

Give a board its own columns

Select a board in the Board filter, then select Columns. The button is shown to a person who may change boards (Agile Manager or Agile Admin) and holds Edit on the project.

A column groups work item states. It is not a state of its own: the states stay Backlog, Ready, In progress, In review, Done and Cancelled, and they still drive the rules and the reports. You give each column a name, put the columns in order, and choose one column for every state. For example, three columns: To do (Backlog, Ready), Doing (In progress, In review) and Closed (Done, Cancelled).

A card dropped into a column takes the first state of that column. A card moved inside its own column keeps its state.
Every state belongs to exactly one column, so no work item is ever without a column. A column can be removed once its states are moved to another column.
The columns belong to the board. Two boards of one project can group the states differently.
Use standard columns removes the board’s own columns. The board then shows Ready, In progress, In review and Done again.

The columns are saved together. A save that would leave a state without a column is refused and names the state. The change is recorded in the board’s history.

A column carries no limit. The two limits of a board, for In progress and In review, count by state as before. A column that groups both states shows both counts.

Assign work

Select the person icon on a card to assign it. Assign to me takes the card yourself, Assign to someone opens the people picker, and Remove assignee clears it. The same choices are in the card’s action menu and in the Assignee column of the backlog. You can also set the assignee when you create a work item.

Use the Assignee filter to show everyone’s work, your own, unassigned work, or the work of one person.

Open a card beside the board

Select a card, or a work item in the backlog, to open it beside the board. The panel shows the work item’s own record: its fields, comments, attachments and history. Select Edit, change what you need, and select Save. The board shows the change at once.

A save writes only the fields you changed. If someone changed one of those fields while you were editing, the save is refused and says so; refresh and make the change again. A field you did not touch is never written back.

Use the icon at the top of the panel to open the full record page. The page names the table Work items, and offers the actions a work item has: Edit and Assign to me. Resolve and On hold belong to tables that have those states, such as incidents. Clone and delete are on the full page. A person who may only view the project can read the panel and is not offered Edit.

Mark a card blocked with a reason; blocking preserves its current delivery stage.

Search and the Assignee filter narrow the visible cards. The board and sprint selectors scope the project. Work-in-progress limits are advisory. When a named board has a limit, its indicator counts the selected board and sprint even when a filter hides some cards. A failed save displays an error and reloads the server’s records.

Plan delivery

In Backlog, open a work item to estimate it in story points, and use the sprint selector to assign it to an iteration. Estimates are optional; zero is a valid estimate. The allowed range comes from the story points field itself (0 to 100 as shipped), so an administrator who changes the range changes the create form too. Time entries record actual hours separately.

The Sprints tab creates iterations with a goal and start and end dates. Open a sprint’s board to focus on its work. New work cannot be added to a completed or cancelled sprint. The Releases tab groups work around a delivery target independently of sprint planning. A new release starts as Planned; choose Released to record one that already shipped, which needs a Released on date.

When the server refuses a create, for example a sprint whose end date is before its start date, the reason appears under the field it concerns.

Start and complete a sprint

On the Sprints tab, select Start sprint on a planned sprint. A project has one active sprint: while one is active, the other planned sprints show which sprint to complete first.

Select Complete sprint on the active sprint. The dialog says how much of its work is finished and how much is not, and asks where the unfinished work goes:

Backlog: the work leaves the sprint and waits in the backlog.
Planned sprint: the work moves to a planned sprint of the same project that you choose.

Nothing is chosen for you. Done and cancelled work stays in the sprint that delivered it, and the state of a work item does not change. The sprint is completed and the work is moved together: if the move cannot be done, the sprint stays active and no work item moves. The history of the sprint names what was carried over, and the history of each moved work item shows its new sprint.

Starting and completing need an Agile Manager or Agile Admin who holds Edit on the project. The sprint record itself refuses the status Completed while the sprint holds unfinished work, so that the choice is always made. Automations on work items do not run for the carry-over.

Use Tasks for the shared My Work, Blocked and All lists. These lists also provide the full record experience for larger datasets. The board loads at most 5,000 records per project table and reports an error if the scope is larger; it does not display partial totals as complete.

By default, every project is visible to everyone who holds an Agile role, and that role gives them Edit on it. The project owner can narrow this: open a project and select Share, then choose Only members. From that point, only the owner, an Agile administrator and the people and groups you add can open the project.

To add a person or a group, select Share, pick User or Group, choose a level, and select Add. Three levels are available:

View: open the project and its work, with no changes.
Edit: also change work items, sprints, releases and the project’s own fields.
Manage: also share the project, and remove someone else’s access.

The project owner and an Agile administrator always hold Manage, so a project can be recovered when its owner leaves. An Agile manager holds no special access of its own; it sees and manages only the projects it is added to, so an Agile manager no longer sees every project by default.

The workspace header shows who a project is shared with as a row of avatars, the owner first, with a group drawn as a group rather than a person. Only a person who holds Manage sees the Share button; the header shows a short message instead when the list cannot be read.

The Only members choice is part of the Agile 1.2.0 application update. On an installation still on an earlier version, the workspace says so and leaves visibility as it is until the application is updated.

Configure the application

Configuration links to projects, named boards, components, dependencies and time entries. Named boards can narrow work to a team and set limits for In progress and In review. Teams and people remain FlowLakes groups and users. Application roles are Agile Admin, Agile Manager, Agile Contributor and Agile Viewer; an administrator assigns them through the existing access management tools.

The application appears in the app rail for people who hold one of these roles, and for the tenant’s administrators. Inside a project, what a person may do also depends on their level on that project: a member who may only view sees the board and is not offered New work item.

This first release provides delivery planning and current-state reporting. Historical velocity, burndown, cross-project moves, swimlanes, limits per column and concurrent ordering conflict resolution are separate future increments. The existing Project Management application is unchanged.