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Adopting agile ways of working using monday.com

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Access Social Care provide free legal advice and support to people in England to get the care they are entitled to.

Use this Guide if you’d like to try using the Agile project management methodology. Agile is an approach that encourages teams to quickly start a digital service or process, then test and improve it. This Guide is not about what agile is. It is about how to help your organisation start using it.

Jump to steps
Key software:
monday.com
How they set it up:
Used free support from the software company or internet research
Setup costs:
Staff time using monday.com's free plan.
Ongoing costs:
Free for up to 10 users in a non-profit organisation. Then £17/year per user (including 70% non-profit discount).
Guide in use since:
October 2022

Steps to using agile to manage projects

Agile methods are different to traditional project management methods. Some methods might not make sense at first. For example, sharing work before it is completely finished, and embracing failure. Some of their ideas may be unfamiliar to your staff. Agile terms such as ‘sprint’, ‘user stories’ and ‘acceptance criteria’ can be confusing.

Introduce these new ideas before you start using agile. Explain why you would like to use agile ways of working at your organisation. Give your team a chance to ask questions.

Access Social Care offer free legal advice to help people get the care they are entitled to. Their advice helpline was under a lot of pressure. So they developed a website chatbot to help people find answers to common questions. It can also direct them to further support if they need it.

Now they are working with six pilot organisations to test the chatbot on their websites too.

To do this, the digital team at Access Social Care needed to introduce agile methods and a ‘product culture’. That meant supporting their staff to adopt approaches such as:

  • choosing what to do based on data rather than un-evidenced opinion

  • responding to user needs

  • creating a roadmap for future development

  • thinking about a product ‘lifecycle’.

The team started the project by presenting their plans at an all-staff meeting. They also met with individual teams to talk about how they would be involved and to answer their questions.

Use a collaboration tool to make a shared workspace. This can help turn ideas about Agile into processes that are easy to follow and understand. Popular tools include Trello, Airtable, Basecamp, and Notion, as well as monday.com.

Set up your workspace to reflect an agile framework. For example you can organise your workspace into epics (large chunks of work), stories (small chunks of work), and sprints (short periods of time where stories are worked on in a prioritised way. You can build in a backlog (potential tasks and features), and add review points.

Assign tasks to your team so that everyone can see what they need to work on. Make sure that everyone can see the tasks that other people are working on too.

Encourage your team to keep the workspace up to date so that you can track progress. Try and keep all the information you need inside the workspace so that it is available to everyone all the time.

 Tasks making up a sprint on Access Social Care's monday.com dashboard

Access Social Care decided to use monday.com to manage their digital project. They already owned a non-profit subscription and some people were already using it. The team also liked that it was:

  • easy to use
  • flexible
  • suitable for a large, complex project
  • good for tracking progress.

They organised the workspace into epics and sprints, which helped people to visualise the work ahead.

As your project continues, share updates about your progress with the wider organisation. Use these opportunities to explain agile methods and use examples.

Invite more people to contribute to the project and explain where their tasks fit into a larger process.

Example of a user story, using a more detailed view than the sprint view

At Access Social Care the digital team shared regular updates and invited feedback. They recorded a podcast episode explaining why and how they developed the chatbot.

Over time, more staff have become involved in creating content for the chatbot. This has proved to be a good opportunity to introduce them to agile ways of working. Content creators have found that following an agile process has many advantages, including:

  • getting a clear brief, word count, and deadline

  • focusing on what chatbot users really need

  • seeing how their work fits into the rest of the project.

Agile is a framework for you to build on. Pay attention to what works well and what doesn’t when you apply it. Think about anywhere that your processes seem to get stuck or slow down. Notice if there are terms or concepts which people still find confusing. If something isn’t working, try a different approach.

 Labels showing effort needed to complete a task as T-shirt sizes.

Access Social Care have adapted agile methods to fit the organisation’s needs. Some digital teams use ‘story points’ to estimate how much effort or work they need to do to complete a task or story. The Access Social Care team use T-shirt sizing instead. For example: XS, S, M, L, XL. They have found that T-shirt sizes are more intuitive.

Agile ways of working have helped the team to keep improving the way they work. They noticed that tasks were often taking longer than estimated. So, they decided to spend more time understanding a task before making an estimate. This has helped them to make more accurate estimates.

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