How to make agile project management more interactive with Klaxoon

Less figures and more simplicity. The requirements of business users of the internal tool deployed by Yannick Chemin and his colleagues couldn't be clearer. Yannick is a product owner at Vinci Energies, working in the Information Systems (IS) teams. To adapt the above-mentioned IT tool,which consists in displaying business tracking screens, to the needs of the operational managers who are using it on a daily basis, he had no choice but to redesign it entirely.

The challenge: organize agile, hybrid and interactive meetings

To do this, Yannick has scheduled three regular meetings, based on agile methods: a monthly business review with the members of the French and foreign operational teams, a daily meeting and a monthly retrospective with the project team, consisting of six people spread over several sites.

During the very first business review, Yannick and his colleagues met in a room with about fifteen members of the business teams. Using sticky notes, they explained the tool’s features to them before collecting their feedback and discussing areas of improvement. This meant Yannick had to retype a considerable amount of information, so he started looking for a tool that he could use to collect the ideas and sort and extract them easily, for both asynchronous and hybrid work.

This collaboration tool, which places great emphasis on collective intelligence, is none other than Klaxoon’s visual platform.

The solution: agile project management with Klaxoon

More specifically, Yannick adopted Board, Klaxoon's online whiteboard. He uses it as a project management tool, both for gathering feedback from business teams and for keeping his team in sync.

Creating a tracking Board to stay in sync

Yannick’s project team created its own agile project management tool with the Klaxoon digital whiteboard, a Scrum Board which he can use on a daily basis to track the progress of user stories – descriptions of the needs expressed by the users, created from feedback from operational teams.

On this table, user stories are listed according to a color code, depending on whether they are bugs (in red), evolutions (in green), performance analyzes (in blue) or releases (in purple).

Each user story corresponds to several tasks to be completed, assigned to team members using customizable dimensions, which enables ideas to be classified. The different stages appear in a column: To Do, In Progress, To Test, Completed and Blocked.

From Monday to Friday, Yannick and his team meet on this Scrum Board to update the table. At this daily sync-up meeting, each team member reports their progress or stumbling blocks and, together, everyone participates and moves the project forward, even remotely.

Collaborating, in meetings and asynchronously

Every third Friday of the month, it’s time for Yannick and his colleagues to present the latest updates to the operational teams in France and abroad. After this hybrid meeting, these teams have until the following Tuesday to test the tool asynchronously.

On Tuesday, the monthly business review takes place and opens with an icebreaker to take the team's pulse and start the workshop off on the right foot. It is organized in two stages. First, a sequenced and interactive presentation using the Session tool, where questions are asked live to get the first round of feedback, screen by screen: did you use screen X? Does it meet your needs? Can it go into production? Can we delete the old screen?

Then, the project team invites participants to join a whiteboard to post their ideas about any missing elements and other stumbling blocks. In one click, Yannick can extract all the answers to the questions along with the results of the brainstorming session, using the automated reports feature. A great way to draw up a precise action plan for the project team's next sprint.

The result: deadlines are met and there is much more interaction

For Yannick, it’s a no-brainer. Once you try Klaxoon, you end up adopting it. And now, he couldn’t live without it: "For me there's no going back, Klaxoon has become absolutely vital for the team."

By using a hybrid format, the project team can invite more international staff to its monthly business reviews. Only after a few months, they were no longer 15, but 40 people meeting remotely. These meetings are not only more fruitful, but more interactive too. "In face-to-face meetings, some people were monopolizing the conversation, while others were remaining silent, due to shyness," says Yannick. There are considerable time savings for him as the product owner too. Dozens or hundreds of sticky notes glued to the walls of the meeting room no longer need to be retyped online: everything is available on Board.

As for the daily sync-up meetings, Yannick and his team have discovered the power of visual management, replacing an Excel table with a customized Scrum Board. With Board, they can meet deadlines, track project progress and get an overview, right from the start, while increasing interaction. For Yannick, Klaxoon has quite simply become "the team’s portal".