From ‘Scrumfall’ (the love child of Scrum and Waterfall) to pure agile, I’ve worked in a few different environments, each with their own take on Agile. One thing I must say from experience is that it’s important as a Scrum Master to get things working best for your team. Needless to say, Agile is not a ‘one size fits all’ methodology.
I’ve always found it rather amusing when it comes to dealing with The Board. Notice how I used capital letters there? Yup, it’s that important – The Board.
What is The Board?
Now this is no textbook definition by any means but simply my take on what The Board is. In its simplest, The Board is a view on how the sprint is going. This can be a physical wall with post-its or index cards stuck on, or a big TV screen showing a Jira wallboard. The implementation of it doesn’t matter.
Why is it important?
The Board allows for a sense of progression and to give a status indicator on how the sprint is going. It’s used in daily stand ups if you follow Scrum, or even by stakeholders to get a more detailed view of how things are going if they wish. I don’t see anything wrong in a stakeholder walking past and being curious with the project and seeing how things are ticking along. They are a stakeholder after all!
It also flags blockers, issues or waste. This is visually apparent when stories are not progressing through the swim lanes for quite some time. By having it visible on The Board, it creates transparency and open communication with the team in resolving the issue.
How should it be?
Let the team decide. Trust them. That would be the best way to get things started and decide how The Board should be set up.
There can be a lot of other factors too: physical space limitations, equipment limitations or issues, etc. All of these will need to be considered as well, and can be fed back to the team openly so together the team can come up with what works best for them. After all, the idea is that the team will use this the most every day. If they want to physically move post-it notes or index cards in different swim lanes, then so be it. If they would rather just update Jira and let that be displayed on a TV screen, then so be it.