A project within Zoho Sprints is an entity that encompasses certain goals to be achieved. A product or business can have multiple streams and various sets of goals ahead. These goals can be grouped into projects with each having a definite or indefinite run time.
For example, a software building firm that specializes in developing applications for businesses will have multiple teams working on multiple apps for different customers. Each app building venture can be a separate project. Let's assume there is a requirement to create an appointment booking application for a hospital, an inventory management application for a warehouse, and a student profile management application for an educational institution. The firm needs to oversee resource allocation, time management, progress of tasks, and timely release of deliverables. Each application's scope can be different. Taking up each one as a separate project will help teams be better organized, set specific goals, define appropriate timelines, and manage them independently.
To create a project, you need to set up your Zoho Sprints workspace and form your project team.
The workspace owner or the admin must add users to the workspace so that they can be assigned to their respective projects.
Project Attributes
Project type - There're two supported project types: scrum and kanban. These are both agile based project management approaches that help structure and maintain your project.
Project owner - Project owner has a certain levels of permissions that the project user does not have. The project owner can add users to the project, assign roles and permissions to the users, and edit project details.
Project group - Project groups allow you to club projects based on similarities or common factors. Let's take the above-mentioned example of a software building firm. Each business vertical like hospitality, healthcare education, manufacturing, etc can be a group under which the projects are categorized.
Project layout - Layout refers to the composition of your project like the fields and details that it will include. Zoho Sprints has a standard in-built layout that is applied to the project by default. You can customize and create new layouts and apply them to your projects.
Project status - Each project, like the tasks in them, go through various stages until completion. You can mark the status in which a project is in.
Project prefix - Provide an identification to each project. This serves as a quick, visual aid to locate and access the project. All projects have default prefixes based on the project names. Let's say a project is a collection of work items and if you need to call a particular work item from a specific project, you can call the project using its prefix and the work items using the same prefix id.
If you name the project 'Categories', by default your prefix will be 'CAT'. This is used to name the work items in your project. For example, if you create a task titled 'Categorize according to the size', then the ID of the task is CAT - I1, and you create a bug titled 'Filter not working', then the ID of the bug is CAT - I2.
About estimation type
Every work item in your project is defined with estimation points. They are used to measure the size of the work items. Select a standard estimation point system in your project is vital to get analytical insights. Estimation type is defined either by the Admin or the Manager of the project.
Estimation as an assessment metric
Agile project management technique works more on the concept "Effort of your team". To define the effort of your team, Agile uses a standard estimation system. Before beginning the work, agile teams spend enough time to estimate the amount of effort and complexity involved in delivering the work been assigned. Estimating a work needs a system that helps team focus on a standard effort mechanism. This will help the teams to manage every work effectively. A project on the whole needs a standard effort mechanism to define every work that is added and hence estimation type is defined before the actual work starts.
What are estimation points?
Estimation points are based on the estimation type that you set while creating your project. It is the measure of effort that you set for every work item in your backlog or sprint. If the estimation points are bigger, then the effort required to finish the work item is more, and vice-versa. It's always better to estimate the work items based on the real effort that you require to complete them. Estimation points can be defined by the person who does the work. They can either be decided during the planning phase by the admin and the sprint owner or can be left to the members to decide on the effort required for the work they do. Learn how to
define estimation points.
Zoho Sprints has a whole lot of customizations available for your project. You can add custom item types, item status, priorities, etc in the Project Settings section.
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