Sprint confidently, without any staffing stumbles. Runn brings clarity to the strategic execution layer of Agile software development
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In Agile project management, Jira rules and for good reason. For managing tasks, it’s the GOAT. But when team leaders and operations managers need a bigger picture, Jira can’t easily deliver. That’s where a tool like Runn comes in.
Runn is a resource management platform that integrates with Jira. It provides tools, data, and visibility to enhance the strategic execution layer of Agile software development – think better insights into the effectiveness of your stories, epics, and initiatives.
If you’re considering resource management software for an Agile environment, you’ll want to know exactly how it maps to your methodology, and what benefits it brings to your business, right? If so, read on.
Runn fits in the strategic execution layer of the Agile project management. It’s not concerned with the zoomed-in view of tasks and tickets – that’s Jira’s job. Nor is it the big-picture product vision.
Runn sits in the middle, where managers need to make strategic resourcing decisions that impact customer satisfaction, delivery quality, and team productivity. Runn helps you manage initiatives, epics, and stories through a resource and capacity lens, so you can answer questions like:
With easy-to-use resource scheduling tools, visual overviews of team capacity, and reports into essential information like resource utilization, Runn helps you balance control with agility, to meet customer needs efficiently and profitably.
Keep reading: The Do's and Don'ts of Resource Planning in Agile Organizations ➡️
First things first, you want to know how Runn maps onto Agile methodologies in practice.
Runn was designed to be suitable for any project management methodology, so don’t worry if our language doesn't exactly match the Agile terminology you may be using in your organization. The platform is still a perfect fit for Agile’s strategic execution layer – specifically aspects 2 to 5 below.
This typically lives in product planning software like Aha!, where you can roadmap and capture client feedback. Runn isn’t designed for this level of zoomed-out view.
Runn starts mapping at the Outcomes level of Agile project management – those big business goals like reducing churn or increasing adoption. In Runn, you can use custom fields, tags, or clients to represent outcomes and attach them to work that supports them.
This makes them trackable and allows managers to run reports that show how much time, effort, and budget is being spent on work tied to each business goal. It also helps ensure alignment between delivery teams and strategic priorities, to check team energy is directed in the right places.
Initiatives are the large bodies of work that sit under each outcome. They can span multiple epics and teams, and take longer periods to complete, like a quarter or longer. Managers need to be able to group related work, see what initiatives are underway, who’s working on them, and how they’re progressing.
In Runn, you can track initiatives using custom fields or tags. This lets you run reports to answer questions like:
This visibility helps managers prioritize across competing initiatives, balance workloads, and make the case for additional resources if needed.
Further Reading: How Runn Helps You Identify Hiring Needs ➡️
Epics are mid-sized pieces of work, comprising multiple user stories across several sprints. Managers need to plan effort across time, assign the right people, and make sure the epic adheres to budget.
Epics map directly to Projects in Runn. Each project gets assigned to a team or cross-functional group of people (resources). You can scope it using effort (e.g. 100 hours over a fortnight), and track it using start/end dates and budget.
This lets you forecast resource needs, and identify resource conflicts or gaps early to keep sprints on track. It also lets you adjust plans confidently as priorities shift, because you can see and manage the impact of every change.
User stories are the building blocks of your epics – smaller packets of work that represent individual user needs, typically delivered in a single sprint.
In Runn, you can create stories as workstreams within a project. This gives you the visibility to assign hours and people at a sub-project level without getting into the granular detail of tickets or tasks.
Tasks and tickets are the jurisdiction of Jira. Runn doesn’t offer task-level tracking but it does have a seamless Jira integration that lets you sync time logged in Jira with planned allocations in Runn.
This means that Runn can update project progress and remaining capacity based on ticket-level work happening in Jira – without you having to manage it manually in two systems.
Take a look at our App Marketplace to see all of the integrations we currently offer ➡️
Of course, Agile isn’t just a methodology for managing projects. It’s a particular development mindset that is guided by foundational principles.
Customer-centricity, iterative development, and collaboration are at the heart of what it means to be an Agile software team – and it all contributes to your firm’s strategic objectives around efficiency, profitability, and positive reputation.
Here’s how Runn contributes to those goals as well.
Runn stands for many things – especially helping firms create people-positive practices that protect staff wellbeing. However, client satisfaction is one of our key pillars.
Client satisfaction means:
Runn helps Agile firms focus on customer satisfaction by helping managers find the appropriate resource for every story or epic – based on their skills, skill level, availability, and cost. This means you’re more likely to deliver great work on time and on budget.
Runn supports iterative development by helping operations managers and team leaders see the forest, not just the trees. A task or ticket focus in Jira is great for monitoring the minutiae of development work. But Runn lets you zoom out a little and plan your work cycles more effectively.
It gives you the visibility to see who has the skills and availability to work on the tasks at hand, and ensure that allocating them doesn’t negatively impact any other epics or stories.
Plus, it helps avoid over- or under-utilization, keeping workloads balanced and projects moving through iterative cycles.
You might think – with all our talk of planning, managing, and measuring – that using a tool like Runn will reduce your ability to react on the fly and quickly change track. But that’s the opposite of the reality. Runn is all about adaptability.
Unfit-for-purpose resource planning tools (like the ever-present spreadsheets that are no good for resource management, but have a strangehold on the sector regardless) absorb inordinate amounts of time to extract information and insights.
But Runn gives managers the ability to make quick, confident changes based on real-time data. You can:
With Runn, you can keep sprinting, without stumbling, even when the track changes.
Runn provides a centralized platform for everyone to understand what work is happening, who’s working on it, and when. You can build fully cross-functional teams, drawing on a central resource pool that spans every team. And different departments can see the same essential insights.
For example:
This visibility promotes better business alignment overall, supports smarter planning, and reduces the risk of data silos and duplication.
Agile teams use retrospectives to refine their processes and Runn supports that. When you use Runn to manage your epics and user stories, you’ll capture accurate information about who worked on what, how long it took, and whether there was budget or schedule variance.
That data is a goldmine for retros, helping you understand whether your plans were on point and improve forecasting for future work. This means you’re more likely to create realistic timeframes and budgets, which protect your people, project outcomes, and profit margins.
If you’re ready to see the big picture of your Agile environment, learn how Runn integrates with Jira for a zoomed-out strategic view of your outcomes, initiatives, epics, and stories.
