Managing agile epics is like juggling bowling pins. Take your eyes off them, and you’ll mess up the entire act. But with enough practice and a robust toolset, project managers can easily master the art of completing epics in the shortest agile iterations. 🤹
If you’re already on the journey of doing so, fret not—we’re here to decode the secret key to harmonizing your agile epics with efficient project management!
This article provides comprehensive insights into the nature of agile epics, their place within the broader agile methodology, and their relationship with user stories and tasks. We’ll also list different approaches and their benefits alongside real-life agile epic examples to illustrate their practical application.
Let’s delve into the framework behind agile epics!
The Art of Agile Epics: Creating, Tracking, and Measuring Success
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Is an Agile Epic?
An agile epic is a collection of smaller and mutually connected tasks, also known as user stories, formatted as requirements that fulfill the end-user’s needs. These collections help development teams create a hierarchy of pending tasks and consistently deliver quality to their customers.
In most cases, agile epics are not composed of low-end tasks you can complete in one iteration. Think of epics as branches of a tree, with each leaf representing a user story—they’ll fall off one by one instead of all at the same time. 🍂
Still, you must maintain consistency throughout all epics—that’s where agile themes come along. Themes are the trunk of your agile tree and represent general directions of the development process without getting into too much detail. They help agile teams prioritize work and ensure it aligns with the larger project objectives.
With epics, you can detail the initial setting of the theme and turn a goal into a string of tasks.
Summarize this article for me pleaseThe Role of Agile Epics in Project Management
Agile epics are essential in detailing the general project objective and paving the road toward accomplishing client requirements. With a clear grasp of a theme’s context, teams lower the risk of being overwhelmed and steering away from their goal.
With that in mind, here’s how agile epics help ensure smooth project delivery:
- Providing a holistic view: Epics break down the initial general requirements and allow you to create specific user stories based on them. They provide a strategic roadmap for product development and guide the prioritization of work
- Simplifying resource allocation: Understanding the scope and size of epics helps project managers make informed decisions when allocating resources and ensure all tasks are completed within deadlines
- Backlog management: Epics are crucial in prioritizing work and managing the product backlog. Project managers, together with product owners and developers, prioritize epics based on factors such as urgency and customer needs
- Promoting collaboration: Cross-functional teams with different tasks may be part of the same epic, promoting cooperation and strengthening the internal dynamics. Further breaking down epics into smaller stories ensures dependencies are managed effectively
- Monitoring progress: Epics provide a framework for monitoring progress and tracking milestones. Project managers use epics to assess the trajectory of the project, identify risks and issues, and make adjustments as needed
Maintaining the set hierarchy can become challenging as your agile epics grow in number and size. If that happens, you can leverage project management templates—they provide pre-built frameworks and ensure consistency across the entire Scrum team.
Summarize this article for me pleaseBenefits of Using Agile Epics
One of the most notable benefits of agile epics is the refinement of Scrum project management. Epics provide a framework for managing project scope by breaking down large and complex requirements into smaller, more manageable components. This enables teams to prioritize work effectively and ensures that development efforts are focused on delivering value.
That’s only one of the reasons you should implement them in your processes. Let’s explore a few more! ⚙️
Customer-focused results
By breaking epics down into user stories, agile project management not only establishes clear dependencies but ensures that an epic addresses all the specific customer needs.
This helps your company prioritize customer feedback and make changes that align with current business goals, justifying the stakeholders’ resources. Once you establish a picture of what the end-user of your product truly needs, all teams will be able to address these needs effectively.
Flexibility
As your customer base evolves, so do market dynamics and, with them, general project requirements. This is where the agile framework makes a difference—epics promote flexibility and adaptability.
By strategically portioning the workload, you allow the developers and the entire Scrum or agile team to go back to a specific user story of any epic and adjust, refine, reprioritize, or even completely discard it.
Improved time management
Epics are time-boxed and naturally have start and end dates. This means you can:
- Manage them in multiple sprints instead of overwhelming developers
- Make clear estimates on when you’ll complete an epic
- Review the previous sprints to create more accurate predictions for future epics
While this may be a time-consuming process at first, once you become habitual in tracking all epics simultaneously, you’ll be able to optimize your current processes and make more accurate estimations.
Summarize this article for me pleasePractical Example of Agile Epics
While the term epics originated in the settings of agile software development, it’s easily applicable to any process that can be broken down into more manageable pieces. To explain the term further, let’s draw an analogy and see a real-life agile epic example. ⏸️
Example: Constructing an enclosed garden
Imagine you’re constructing an enclosed garden—a tranquil oasis where people can relax and reconnect with nature. Let’s break down this project using agile principles.
In the context of our garden, epics represent broad categories of work that align with the project’s objectives. Here are some potential epics:
- Landscaping: Designing the layout, selecting plants, and creating pathways
- Infrastructure: Building a fence, installing a gate, and setting up an irrigation system
- Comforts: Adding benches, installing lighting, and incorporating decorative features
User stories represent specific features or functionalities of the garden from the perspective of the end-user. They help break down epics into actionable tasks. If we take the infrastructure epic as an example, one user story could be:
As a gardener, I want a sturdy fence to protect the garden from wildlife and maintain privacy.
Each user story point comprises various tasks with a defined timeframe for completion. For instance, to complete the user story above, we’ll finish tasks like purchasing materials for building the fence and gate, installing irrigation pipes, and testing the system for efficiency.
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow to Create and Track Agile Epics
To create epics properly, ensure each aligns with current business goals or objectives and key results (OKRs). Brainstorming, writing, and tracking epics may be an elaborate process, but with the right tool, you can master it in no time. 🛠️
To do so, use a holistic project management software like ClickUp! The ClickUp Agile Suite helps you expedite creating epics with industry-specific AI prompts, track each epic with burndown charts and SMART goals, and collaborate with your entire agile team simultaneously!
Step 1: Define the user persona for the epic
Before jumping into the epics, delineate the project’s target customer. Ask yourself:
- Whose perspective will the user stories address?
- What does the target audience truly care about?
- How can the product enhance their experience?
The answers to these questions will set the base for writing user stories that satisfy customer requirements. Whether attracting new leads or improving the current experience, ensure that you target the customer’s pain points and create relevant user stories that will guide the development team.
To get a head start on the process, use ClickUp’s User Persona Template. Product owners can easily create different personas depending on gender, age, and interests using Custom Fields. Multiple views also help you group these personas to get a larger picture and visualize how each interacts with the product by identifying common behavior patterns.
To make company-specific adjustments to the defined user persona, use ClickUp Whiteboards. These virtual canvases allow you to connect ideas and collaborate with the Scrum team to recognize different behavior patterns in real time.
Step 2: Set your goals and define epics
Once you’ve established the project requirements, it’s time to set clear goals across different epics. Epics should be broad enough to encapsulate significant areas of work but specific enough to provide actionable guidance to the team.
To easily establish each agile epic, try your hand at ClickUp Goals. Create to-the-point targets and assign them to the person in charge. As the development gains traction, you can visualize the progress at a glance with percentage tracking—you’ll instantly know how close you are to reaching the goal. 🎯
Use ClickUp’s Chat View to discuss your goals and any changes you want your agile members to make behind the scenes. Create meeting groups and give members access or assign comments to quickly delegate tasks.
For total clarity on the objectives, ensure each epic is SMART:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Time-bound
This approach removes ambiguity and ensures every team member understands the predefined expectations. The ClickUp’s Weekly Scorecard Template facilitates the setup of clear, shared weekly goals that directly contribute to primary objectives.
Step 3: Break down epics into user stories
Once epics are defined and prioritized, break them into smaller, more detailed user stories and actionable tasks. Epics with more detailed user stories that require multiple sprints can be visually structured using a Gantt chart for enhanced clarity.
With ClickUp’s Gantt Charts, you can use different colors to reflect all your user stories and tasks or sort all tasks depending on their:
- Deadlines
- Priority
- Status
Get an instant update on any task’s progress by hovering your cursor over it to receive a visual percentage of the completion rate. Add dependencies to automatically reschedule tasks and use smart dependency-path tracking to identify user stories that can potentially move at a slower pace than intended. This, in turn, boosts your team’s project management capabilities.
If you don’t like assembling user stories the old-fashioned way, you can instantly create them using ClickUp’s AI and leverage 100+ industry-specific prompts. Simply instruct the tool to create user stories based on your provided data and adjust the result if needed.
Centralize all user stories and share them with relevant stakeholders while live co-editing with peers using ClickUp Docs—the project manager may need extra assistance from other agile members!
Step 4: Define timeframes and track each epic
Strive for a balanced time limit for your agile epics—not excessively lengthy or overly brief. Typically, aim for dedicating 1–4 months per epic, accommodating multiple sprints.
Give your agile epics a clear timeline and resource management boost with ClickUp’s Time Estimates. When assigning a task, simply click on the estimate time option to give your agile development teams a timeframe to lean on. Once you provide reasonable estimates, you can plan how long it will take to complete one user story.
This also enables you to give stakeholders a better estimate of when they can expect a new feature addition or improvement.
Pro tip: Give your team a hand when meeting deadlines by introducing them to ClickUp’s Project Time Tracking feature! This way, you’ll gather valuable information about processes that hold back your project.
An easy way to refine your estimates is by employing ClickUp’s Sprint Burndown Chart Template. Use the template to instantly locate:
- Completed individual tasks of user stories
- Tasks that are in progress
- Tasks that have been pending for too long
An effective burn chart tracks actual versus estimated work over time, with the x-axis representing time and the y-axis reflecting stories or setbacks your team encounters.
Alongside burn charts, Kanban boards offer a visual representation of ongoing tasks and stages. They enable multiple teams to monitor the advancement of epics and user stories, find gaps, and regulate work-in-progress thresholds.
ClickUp’s Kanban Boards are the perfect tool for that—you can seamlessly browse user story tasks based on dates, assignees, status, priority, and due dates. Feel like something’s misplaced? Quickly move around board cards with an intuitive drag-and-drop feature. 🖱️
Step 5: Integrate customer feedback loops
At different stages of a single epic, actively seek client input and incorporate their suggestions into the project. Modifications help refine the user stories to better align with user needs and client expectations.
You can incorporate agile process improvement methodologies and record client feedback. Start by using ClickUp’s Form view to create customizable forms—you can convert any response into a trackable task to have your team work on it immediately and avoid backlogging. Besides that, you can:
- Add mandatory or optional questions
- Change the priority of any response
- Set trigger-activated rules to automate the processes
To get a comprehensive view of each converted feedback, give ClickUp’s Table view a try and edit 15+ Custom Field types that let you keep all data organized.
Summarize this article for me pleaseBest Practices for Mastering Agile Epics
Mastering agile epics requires a combination of strategic thinking, effective communication, and adaptability. Here are some best practices to help your agile teams excel in managing them:
- Provide sufficient context: Ensure your team clearly understands the user stories behind their tasks and the bigger picture of the theme. This will help them create solutions in line with the broader objectives
- Ensure team engagement: Actively collaborate with stakeholders, product owners, and team members during the definition and refinement of epics. This ensures you consider diverse perspectives 👫
- Adjust time and effort estimates: Review initial estimations and compare them with the time and effort needed to complete an epic. Once you refine your processes, you’ll be able to prioritize with more accuracy
- Manage dependencies effectively: Identify and manage dependencies between epics and other project elements. This will help you prevent bottlenecks and delays. To ensure smooth collaboration, regularly communicate with relevant teams
- Iterate and adapt: Regularly review and reflect on the progress of epics, receive feedback from stakeholders, and adjust your approach based on lessons learned
Summarize this article for me pleaseDominate Your Agile Epics with ClickUp
Now that you know all about creating agile epics effectively, you can prioritize work, manage dependencies, and deliver value throughout the project lifecycle.
Luckily, you don’t have to develop these processes manually—ClickUp has got your back. Leverage the platform’s agile project management tools like AI, Custom Fields, Whiteboards, Dashboards, and feedback forms to create, measure, and track your agile epics seamlessly.
Sign up for ClickUp and let your team focus on what really matters—successful project development. 🥇
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