Board Meeting.

I wanted to share another article and blog with you today, one that I go to for inspiration and ideas both for my day to day work life and for new topics for my blog.

5-Minute Board Test by Pawel Brodzinski  of Pawel Brodzinski on Software Project Management

This particular piece is about Kanban and more specifically about designing a well functioning visual board to track your team’s progress. Like I mentioned previously, I am a big fan of visual management and display of information, but as Pawel rightly points out, team boards, whether for Kanban or Scrum, are only really effective if they are simple enough to be (almost) self-explanatory.

How good is your board?

 

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Scrumban.

At the moment, I am helping out on a slightly different team on my project as an “adhoc PO”. While the rest of our project is pretty much scrum all the way, this team works a bit differently. They are not strictly setup as a scrum team with one scrum master and one product owner, as well as development and QA teams. In this case, because of the size of the backlog, we have a pretty large development team that makes it difficult if not impossible to support with just the one product owner.

The main focus for this team is our backlog of “next-in-line-but-not-necessarily-vital” items AKA product maintenance. All of the pieces on this particular backlog are important, relevant and need to get done, but they don’t or didn’t quite fit in any of our scrum lane work over the past few releases. The tricky thing is that all of these items are not as obviously related or structured as the rest of our backlog, hence making it much harder to properly prioritize and stack rank for the PO on the team.

Also, since this team is also responsible for supporting and fixing any new enhancements or bugs that user report or request, the backlog is nowhere near as complete or static as the rest of our scrum lane backlogs. Planning a backlog on shifting sand as it where, meant that our project leadership decided that perhaps scrum wasn’t quite the right model for this team, although they were very keen on continuing down the agile road.

Enter Kanban – a model out of the lean toolbox that is often adopted on the factory shop floor and at it’s most basic form features a just-in-time and off-the-top-of-the-pile approach to development. In essence, the backlog is prioritized and stack ranked and as soon as any developer has an opening, either because they finished their current story or because they have some idle time while working on another story, they pick up the next item from the top of the backlog queue.

Because of this model, stack ranking in Kanban is possibly even more important than in scrum, to ensure that the flow of work doesn’t stop and the production line never breaks. And this is exactly why we decided to not only assign more than one product owner to this team, but also went for the slightly unusual approach of having “adhoc POs” – such as myself – to lend a hand and help groom the backlog to make sure we can maximize the team’s capacity and effectiveness.

I really am looking forward to getting a little more immersed and learn more about Kanban vs Scrum – so far, it’s an interesting new perspective.

 

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Visual Aid.

When I am writing User Stories and Acceptance Criteria, sometimes I really do wonder how my poor developer teammate is supposed to understand the garbled descriptions and instructions I put together. Sure, sometimes it so obvious, there is no danger of mis-communication, but more often than not, my stories are complex and complicated and convoluted.

Personally, I am a big fan of visual representation of what I would like to achieve. Actually, truth be told, I almost always draw a plan or flowchart of whatever it is I need to then put in writing. Not sure why, but when I can follow the flow of an arrow, I’m much more likely to find gaps in my thoughts, than trying to read through a script. Likewise, when trying to imagine changes in our UI, I prefer to create a few mockups instead of writing descriptions.

The downside for me is, that it usually takes longer to create a mockup or flowchart. Simply writing down what I want is absolutely quicker, but then again, more often than not, writing doesn’t accurately convey what I was trying to explain, so I end up having to go back and forth to explain anyway. After all, there must be a reason people say a “picture is worth a thousand words”.

Naturally, it usually pays to not rely only on my drawings or scribbles and I pretty much always write up everything, but I absolutely think that nothing beats a good visual aid.

 

The post Visual Aid first appeared on Agile, Now What?