Our latest releases: June, 2024

Mural makes Agile project management frictionless

Mural is an intuitive, visual collaboration environment that mirrors Agile principles‌: ‌flexibility, transparency, and continuous improvement.

That’s why Mural supports Agile, from learning to development — and all the way through shipping the next best thing. It does so by bringing together both the design and the development lifecycles in a single, visual platform — enabling closer collaboration at every level. 

As with all our platform updates, each additional feature is in service of the Mural System — our holistic approach that makes working with Agile teams better in every respect. In keeping with that sentiment, we’re excited to announce two new features that are built to make managing your Agile projects seamless across platforms. 

Whether it’s brainstorming, getting aligned, prioritizing your work, or reflecting on everything you just shipped, Mural offers a comprehensive solution that brings together not just technology, but also tools and techniques that make Agile teamwork…actually work. 

Jira and Azure DevOps two-way sync

Our Jira and Azure DevOps integrations are two of our most widely-used integrations. What better way to visualize your sprints, dependencies, and backlog than with Mural, amirite?  

Two-way sync, rolling out now for Enterprise accounts, enables teams to make updates to their Jira issues or ADO work items and their corresponding fields such as summary, status, and priority, and then send those changes to Jira and ADO (or vice-versa). 

These changes allow for team leads, scrum masters, or product managers to follow the progress of a sprint, or confidently run a stand-up knowing that their updates are accurate. 

Details please!? OK, easy now, we were just getting there — here’s how it works and why it’s such an important update for software development teams:

• Real-time updates: When users import Jira issues or ADO work items into a canvas, they can see the most up-to-date information from Mural. Updates made in Jira can be synced to Mural, and any changes made in Mural can be synced back to Jira, ensuring that teams are always working with the most current information.
• Make changes from Mural: Now, members can make changes to Jira issues directly from Mural. For example, during a project tracking review, members can change the status of a Jira issue from Mural. After the project review is completed, the user can sync those changes back to Jira.
• Efficient collaboration: Stop switching tabs! Teams can stay in their flow in Mural and eliminate the toggle tax that happens when teams need to bounce between Jira and Mural to know the most recent updates. Teams no longer have to re-import Jira issues to get the latest data from Jira into Mural.

Read more about Jira and ADO two-way sync.

Coming soon: Mural’s Smart Planner feature

Plan your next sprint review, PI planning, or retrospective using our upcoming Smart Planner feature. 

Say you’re building a planning board and assigning different statuses (like ‘backlog,’ ‘in progress,’ and ‘done’).

With Smart Planner, when you add tasks or tickets as sticky notes to each column, you can watch their status dynamically update as items are moved between columns. (In technical terms, that means the metadata from the sticky notes is automatically updated, because the Smart Planner recognizes that metadata and makes the updates for you.) 

Column names are completely customizable to fit your planning needs, so it could be “Now, Next, Later,” “To Do, In Progress, Blocked,” or “Rose, Bud, Thorn” — to name a couple more examples. 

When you couple this with the two-way sync noted above, it creates an even more effective way to plan. As sticky notes are moved between the columns, helpful information is captured on the info panel, which can then be pushed directly to Jira or ADO. 

Stay tuned for more information about Smart Planner — coming soon. 

How well does your team work? Take the Mural Teamwork Assessment 

Like we said above, all of our updates are made in service of our mission to improve teamwork across the enterprise. Ultimately, the Mural System is about creating an environment where teamwork can thrive. 

But tech alone isn't a cure-all. If you’d like to take your teamwork to the next level, the first step is to see where you stand right now. The Mural Teamwork Assessment is a quick, three-step process to help you quantify what is going well, and what areas need improvement for your team to realize its true potential, and score the championship-winning penalty shot against your arch-rivals, the Hawks. (Wait, sorry — that’s the plot of The Mighty Ducks. But you get my point.)

Take the Mural Teamwork Assessment now and get a pulse check on how we can help craft solutions tailored to your specific needs.

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