The current offerings in the Agile project management software are currently focusing exclusively on Micro project management, or Macro project management. Before going forward, let’s have a look at these two terms:

micro & Macro Project Management

1. Micro Project Management

When we say Micro project management, we are referring to the practice of keeping track of and analyzing the progress of a single project. With this approach, the key factors that are being studied are:

  • Visualization of change in data from the beginning of the process to the end.
  • Emphasis on data visibility.  

2. Macro Project Management

The opposite of this is what we call Macro project management, which refers to the process of keeping track of and analysing multiple projects spanning over a period of time, tackled by the same team. This process aims to look at the bigger picture. In this manner, managers can deduce various variables that represent their teams performance, such as the velocity. Doing this enables them to look at the performance of their team based on their performance on multiple projects. However, the drawback of this method is that various smaller variables that occur on a single project level may be ignored.

3. What is being done to address this need?

As stated before, the current offerings in the market are either choosing to focus on micro level analysis or macro level analysis. This creates a need for a tool that offers the capabilities of analysis on both levels. Yodiz aims to address these shortcomings.

4. Micro Management in Yodiz

With Yodiz, you get advanced micro level analysis capabilities. You gain a greater insight of data because you are able to view detailed history of each item. This includes date on which item was created, and dates on which the item has changed statuses. Similarly, an activity log is kept for all users working on a project. This log keeps track of actions made by the user since the beginning, e.g. which User Stories they have worked on, and when they have changed the status of those User Stories. Yodiz also offers custom filters capability which allows you to make comprehensive searches on the data according to any criteria that you deem fit. Data is further categorised in the system according to priority and severity measures, which allows for increased control over data at the micro level. The ability to assign and manage Story Points along with an Effort log allows managers to keep track of how much work, specific team members, are putting in and what their output is over the span of the project. This also serves to increase visibility of changes in data on the micro level.

5. Macro Management in Yodiz

On the macro level front, Yodiz has also included some advanced capabilities.  The Company Pulse page can be used to gather the Velocity of the team. The Velocity is in simple words a determinant of the pace of progress of an Agile team. It is a measure of work completed by an agile team in a specific iteration (sprint). Work completed could be in different units such as Story points, Tasks or hours. Most commonly used unit is Story Point. The Global Search option allows you to perform searches spanning over all projects that you have undertaken using Yodiz. This gives you great control over your data. Similarly, the feature of Global tag search allows you to perform searches for all items associated to a tag on a global level. The Planning board area allows you to plan projects while keeping in mind the scope of multiple projects. A To Do list can be generated for every employee if they are working on multiple projects.

6. Conclusion

Having the complete capability in a tool for Micro and Macro management can be a really powerful tool in the right hands. Having the ability to both analyze a team on a microscopic level as well as from a birds eye view can give managers unique insights into their work processes. This can lead to realizations that result in drastic improvements in performance for the team. This can result in increases in efficiency and output of the team for the current project as well as for future projects.