Physical Task Board

So is a physical task board required for implementation of Scrum? No. But it helps.


One of the things not mentioned in Scrum is the visualization of workflows. That's where the physical task board comes in. In my experience the team usually loves a physical board. It allows rapid estimation, tracking, and gives the team a sense of accomplishment when tasks are moved to "done".


It addition, they work as great "information radiators". In my current company, nobody was using a physical board even though Scrum was supposedly the methodology of record. I immediately put up a multi-sprint task board and within literally days the entire company knew what the project was, who was on the team, and could track value that we were delivering, sprint by sprint.


Now there is tons of stuff you can do with a board, I won't go into that now. And of course, there are other challenges as well. What about distributed teams? I will go into those aspects later, but for now take a look at a typical board design that I am currently using in my projects...

I will go into design, details, and how-to-use in upcoming posts.