Manage an agile project

Fusion Online supports a range of project management approaches, including agile. Whether your entire project follows agile principles or you apply them to a portion of your work, Fusion Online provides flexible tools to help you plan, prioritize, and deliver iteratively.

This guide offers practical suggestions for agile-style planning and execution in Fusion Online. It is not a comprehensive agile methodology guide, but rather an adaptable framework based on what we’ve seen work well for teams using Fusion.

How Fusion Online supports agile practices

Fusion Online helps your team work in an agile way by enabling you to:

Manage frequent product releases
Limit active work to reduce multitasking and improve flow
Maintain virtual, global collaboration through accessible data and tools

Agile terms in Fusion Online context

Agile Concept

Fusion Equivalent

Product

A project with multiple releases

Release

A project endpoint

Agile Team

A Resource or Resource Group

Team Member

A User or Assignee

Backlog

Backlog tasks, not yet committed to a release

Subtasks

Checklist tasks

Getting started with agile in Fusion Online

Step 1: Create a project

Create a new project in Fusion Online, or upload one from Microsoft Project via Fusion Desktop.

Step 2: Add resources

Add resources via Project Resources or from Microsoft Project before uploading. To support agile scheduling, set the Units value based on the number of tasks your team can work on in parallel without multitasking.

Step 3: Define and prioritize releases

Create endpoints to represent your initial releases:

Go to the Endpoints view and click + create new endpoint.
The endpoint will default to Rebuffer on Next Update, which will generate a buffer during the next schedule update.
Enable the Prioritize toggle to drag-and-drop endpoints into delivery priority order.

Step 4: Input Your backlog

Create new backlog tasks for your project. These will remain backlog tasks until they are linked into the network (to an endpoint).

These steps—creating tasks, endpoints, and links—can also be done visually in the Network Diagram, which provides a fast, drag-and-drop interface for building your schedule structure.

Using agile tools in Fusion Online

Backlog management

Create tasks directly in Fusion to build your backlog
View backlog by creating a filtered task view (e.g., filter by "Is Backlog Task") or by clicking on the Backlog Tasks count in the Project Details > Statistics section
Assign backlog tasks to a team one-by-one or in bulk using Bulk Update to set resource assignments

Committing tasks to a release

Link backlog tasks to an endpoint via the Task Links view or in the Network Diagram
Tasks stay in the backlog until they are linked into the network
To remove a task from a release, delete its links to downstream endpoints

View and update team tasks

Create a filtered task view for the team’s resource name to monitor current work. Tasks can be updated from the view by clicking the Task State badge or duration field.

Managing releases and schedule updates

Add and prioritize new releases

Create new endpoints and arrange them by priority. Each new release should be flagged for buffering on the next schedule update.

Update the project schedule

Run a schedule update weekly to refresh buffer consumption, task projections, and project health indicators. This ensures your Fever Charts remain current.

Reschedule the project

If you’ve made major changes to the task network or buffer relevance has degraded, consider rescheduling the project. This recalculates all buffers and resets status points.

Rebuffer individual endpoints

To buffer a specific release without rescheduling the entire project:

Go to Endpoints
Open the action menu on the endpoint
Select Rebuffer on Next Update

Individuals and tasks

Encourage team members to update tasks regularly
Use Focus Task State to communicate what team members are currently working on
Create checklist tasks to break larger items into agile-style subtasks

Limitations and roadmap

Some agile features are not currently built into Fusion:

Sprints – Not yet supported. While useful for short-term planning, sprints introduce fixed durations that don’t align easily with buffer-driven scheduling.
Jira Integration – On the Fusion roadmap. Contact us if you're interested in future integration options.