Enterprises often struggle to find the right tooling to manage agile workflows, no matter what their agile maturity level is. Although a whiteboard with sticky notes may be a great starting point, sooner or later the need arises to digitize such boards. The choice for such tooling is often made without the long term in mind, which can result in bottlenecks later on.
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The tool at hand A lot of enterprises have to deal with legacies that are a result of choosing tooling for agile working that couldn’t keep up with the demands of the business. To be fair, there are a lot of useful tools out there that can help teams to make progress. But none of them succeed in bundling all data, information and functionality that scaled agile or DevOps teams need. Also, in an enterprise environment, the incompatibility of different tools often leads to needlessly complex solutions, with a real risk of losing information or data.
Ideally, an app for boards in an enterprise environment is able to handle different types of agile workflows. Whether its scrum or kanban, the app should be able to combine and visualize these workflows. In addition, it should be easy to mark priorities, incidents and other variables, and it should provide features to plan for the long term such as epics and stories. Last but not least, all work that is represented in the board should have a single source of information to avoid errors caused by duplication or incomplete workflow overviews.
The right board in the right place Since members of agile teams often also belong to other agile teams, they have to be able to quickly gain an overview of what their teams are working in. Especially when it comes to Enterprise DevOps, keeping a close eye on workflows is essential to be able to quickly develop and deploy new code. Given the wide range of types of work agile and DevOps teams have to deal with, a flexible solution that can present the information needed in an orderly way at any given moment would be ideal.
To tackle this, Boards4U draws upon the possibilities ServiceNow offers to work from a single source of information. It adds to that flexibility and a UI that provides a comprehensive overview of stories, epics, changes and incidents. DevOps and agile teams are free to create and customize their own boards to visualize their workflows, while the Now platform ensures this data is handled in a uniform way.
Since ServiceNow at its core is an ITSM platform, it is also extremely well-suited to incorporate change management and incident handling in workflows represented by Boards4U. Users can be provided with updates, integrations can be started, stories can be branched in source control systems and everything can be documented from one ServiceNow app. And, since a lot of enterprises already use ServiceNow for other purposes, its very easy to implement Boards4U.
So, to make (scaled) agile and DevOps in enterprise environments work, digitized boards are preferable and workflows that are managed through these boards should be easily presentable. On a daily basis, teams and team members should not have any trouble to gain insight in their workflows, or run into any limitations of the boards they use at all.
Want to know more about Boards4U? Watch the video of our on demand webinar or get in touch: info@plat4mation.com
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