A Scrum board is a visual tool that helps you organize and track the progress of your Scrum project. It shows the tasks, stages, and responsibilities of your team in a simple and clear way. In this article, you will learn how to use a Scrum board to improve project progress by following these steps.
The first step is to create a Scrum board that suits your project needs and preferences. You can use a physical board — such as a whiteboard or a corkboard — or a digital tool, such as Trello or Jira. The basic structure of a Scrum board consists of three columns: To Do, In Progress, and Done. Each column represents a stage of your project workflow. You can also add more columns or sub-columns to reflect your specific process, such as Testing, Reviewing, or Blocked. The next step is to populate your board with tasks, which are usually written on sticky notes or cards. Each task should be small, specific, and measurable, and should correspond to a user story or a feature in your product backlog. You can also assign a priority, an estimate, and a responsible person to each task.
Update your Scrum board regularly to reflect the current status of your project. You should move the tasks from one column to another as they progress through the workflow. Add, remove, or modify tasks as needed, based on the feedback and changes that occur during your project. Updating your Scrum board regularly helps you keep track of your project progress, identify and resolve issues, and avoid confusion and duplication. It also helps you prepare for your daily Scrum meetings, where you can report on what you have done, what you are working on, and what challenges you are facing.
Updating the scrum board promotes commitment, focus, openness from among the scrum values. It is usually a good idea to try and complete user stories in a top to bottom, left to right manner with as parallel execution from the team's side as possible. This helps with delivering done stories at the end of the iteration, and enforces agile principles like 'working software is the primary measure of progress'. There is no partial credit in scrum. If there are only few items to update that can indicate impediments or too big chunks of work which progress slowly and thereby hinder transparency.
Use your Scrum board for communication and collaboration with your team and stakeholders. Your Scrum board should be visible and accessible to everyone involved in your project, so they can see the big picture and the details of your project. Also use your Scrum board to facilitate discussions, feedback, and decision-making during your Scrum events, such as sprint planning, sprint review, and sprint retrospective. Using your Scrum board for communication and collaboration helps you align your team and stakeholders on the goals, expectations, and outcomes of your project. It also helps you foster a culture of transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Scrum Boards are used to visualize and manage user stories or tasks that are planned for a specific sprint with a fixed duration, usually 1 to 4 weeks.
Review and improve your Scrum board based on your project performance and feedback. Evaluate how well your Scrum board is serving your project needs and preferences, and how it can be improved to support your project progress. You can use metrics — such as velocity, burndown, and throughput — to measure your project progress and identify areas of improvement. You can also use feedback from your team and stakeholders to identify what is working well and what is not, and to suggest changes or enhancements. Reviewing and improving your Scrum board helps you optimize your project workflow, quality, and efficiency. It also helps you adapt to changing requirements, expectations, and challenges.
You can also consider incorporating some elements from Kanban boards, which is another visual management tool associated with the Kanban agile framework that emphasizes continuous delivery and smooth flow of work items by setting WIP (work in progress) limits in each column to prevent overloading team members and a pull-based system. This combination of both approaches is often referred to as "Scrumban."