A good way to know if your team is using their taskboard to really manage their work is to look at their daily standup meeting.
Does it look like this:
or like this?
A team that is using visual management to manage their work will always do their daily standup against the board. During the daily standup you update your team members on your work. Both work finished the day before and work still in progress should be clearly indicated on the board. It only makes sense to go over the board as you talk. This is both easier for you and easier for team members. It also helps to visually place what you are talking about in context.
If you are using the DONE tag, nametags, status tags and the three columns; then there is a very simple guideline to make sure you don’t forget to talk about anything important every day: do the daily standup against the board, and make sure all tasks in the middle column (“in progress”) are talked about.
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I’m tending to agree. Need to get around to updating the paper…
Good stuff as always, Xavier.
Pingback from Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog » Management Improvement Carnival #64 on May 21, 2009 at 11:14 pm
This sounds like it leads into the “Talking Cards” concept… I who it was talking about that, though… maybe Brian Marick?
Hi Eric,
I’ve been googling around and was unable to find any references to “Talking Cards” applied to Agile or Scrum except for a presentation from Tim Mackinnon at Agile 2008 where he mentions it on a slide. If anybody has any further references about this, I would appreciate it.
Xavier
Pingback from Daily Scrum Cause Focus on the Sprint Backlog « Customer Oriented Software Development on August 6, 2009 at 4:25 pm
http://www.exampler.com/blog/2007/11/06/latour-3-anthrax-and-standups/
Pingback from La ciencia trás la gestión visual | Aplicando Scrum on September 18, 2009 at 7:31 pm
The idea of standing in a circle and facing each other comes from the fact that one feels guilty/uncomfortable in facing his/her teammates when they have not done the task that was supposed to be done the previous day.
Similary, there is a pride associated with the work you do when you have done it in time, and you love to see your teammates appreciate it. This in turn generates more energy to the entire team as everyone loves to be appreciated.
Talking against a board will remove the above two greatest advantages of a Daily Stand-up meeting.
Pingback from Sprint tracking using a task board. « Perigee Consulting on November 9, 2010 at 4:39 am