Last Thursday I tried out for the first time my session proposal for Agile 2009, thanks to my friends at iLean who invited me to give their free monthly iLearn session in Kontich (near Antwerp). In this workshop participants are divided into teams and challenged to come up with the “ultimate taskboard” for the newly appointed CEO of their company. After a first iteration where basic boards are built, the work is criticized by the CEO and then it’s back to the drawing board as more requirements are added.
Asides from the basic “who’s doing what”, teams are expected to come up with creative, visual ways of showing daily project issues such as “a team member’s hard drive crashed and he spent all day reinstalling his PC” or “a team member is sick”.
Thanks to all the people who participated! Workshop pictures follow.
Red team building their board
Green team building their board
Blue team presenting their board
The jury is out on this one…
Final Red team board
Final Green team board
Final Blue team board (click for large version)
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Hey Xavier, nice post again. I am pleased to see that you still are looking for improvements for your task boards. I also believe that it can always improve.
Based on the photos, I see some things I like and some that I don’t like, compared to the boards we use today:I like:
– The separate ‘impediment’ section. It gives a clear view on the unplanned things that occupy the team.
– The separate ‘urgent’ and ‘issues’ section. Currently we have something similar called ‘unplanned’ but it doesn’t emphasize the importance of these tasks. Renaming it to ‘urgent’ and ‘issues’ would make it much easier to understand for everyone (also non team members).I don’t like:
– The time/effort indication on the different tasks. We are also asked to do that today. I think it results in tasks getting bigger and bigger every sprint and you don’t see a daily team progress any more. According to me, a task should represent more or less 1 day of work.
– The ‘To test’-column. Testing a task is part of the work that is needed to succesfully deliver a story by the end of a sprint. I think it belongs to the ‘In progress’-column. -
Congratulations on running the workshop. It looks like a lot of fun with some good output. As always, the pictures really enhance the content of the post. You are visual indeed
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