Best practices for using scrum boards
For any type of team, whether it is in-house, remote, or distributed one it is important to have an ability to create, assign and track tasks, monitor the progress and see how successful the employees are. Modern company culture and collaboration have moved outside the boundaries of a physical location. All communication happens virtually through corporate messengers and special boards are used to monitor tasks and measure employees' efficiency. Without doubts this type of workspace setup makes it possible to hire best talents all over the globe.
Still, there are challenges which managers face and one of them is a necessity to create, assign and track tasks. Using scrum boards is the best way to solve this problem, keep track of team's success and see the status of tasks and issues. In this blog post we will talk about best practices for using scrum boards and explain why your team needs them.
What is a Scrum Board?
Scrum board is a visual representation of a task's process for the whole team to share. It can be useful not only for teams of developers that work on complex agile projects but also for all distributed, remote and in-house teams which have a necessity to assign and monitor tasks.
Scrum board can be either physical or virtual. In this post we will talk about virtual scrum boards since they are definitely more efficient and can be used by any type of team.
Scrum boards are used to:
- visualize the items in a list of tasks
- monitor the progress of tasks
- show items which are to be completed for a current sprint or time period
- check task assigners and assignees
- arrange tasks by specific groups
Why does my team need a Scrum Board?
Scrum approach helps to facilitate all processes by dividing them into smaller parts, so called sprints. A scrum board is essential part of the scrum process. It visualizes sprint activities and helps to track progress. Basically, we can divide it into three parts: "to do", "doing" and "done".
This is an ideal way to know what each team member is doing and to plan further activities based on the load. We can compare a scrum board to a physical white board in the office, when all team members gather around it discussing current progress and making brainstorms.
However, modern scrum boards have a lot of advantages over simple office white boards:
- they are customizable, users can use filters and view whatever they need
- users get notifications and can track the progress
- the process of planning and forecasting becomes easier
- they make the whole interactions process more transparent
What is the best way to use a Scrum Board?
There are a lot of recommendations, tips and tricks for taking the most out of scrum boards. However, the best way to do this is to analyze your working process and use the scrum board depending on your current needs. Just keep in mind that the main task of this board is visualization of your team progress.
Online scrum board is the best choice for distributed teams working from different corners of the globe. It allows staying in touch with all team members, tracking their progress and monitoring what each employee is working on. This, in turn, helps to organize the workflow more efficiently, make forecasts and distribute the tasks equally among team members.
How to get the most out of Virola Scrum Board?
Virola collaboration tool will meet not only communication needs of your team but also will help to organize your scrum environment. Besides rich set of features for communication such as topic-based chats, video and audio conferencing and screen sharing, you can use Virola scrum board to facilitate and improve the collaboration process of your distributed teams.
To create a task and add it to the scrum board you just need to:
- type a message in the text input area
- set the type "issue" for it
- assign the task
- set the priority
- choose the queue
- press "enter" or "send message" button
- after this the task will appear on the Virola scrum board
The scrum board in Virola is quite simple though powerful tool which will help you keep track of your team activity, give tasks and monitor their progress.
Virola scrum board can be customized with help of filters:
- by the chat room where the task was created: it can be both private and group chat room
- by status: there are 6 possible statuses for Virola tasks – backlog, to do, in progress, to verify, done, declined
- by type
- by assignee
- by reporter
For project managers and scrum masters this is an ideal way to create a scrum environment with help of a single tool which can be customized according to the project and team needs.