Task Board and Stand-up

I will pause for a minute now...and that's substantial progress.

Businesspeople planning tasks with sticky notes

Goal

Increasing transparency in progress and in the workload for the coming period.

Description

What is our team working on? Will we finish everything in time? With simple tools such as a task board, a wish list and a daily Stand-up meeting, you lay the foundation for answering these questions.

Results

Videos

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Beautiful alternative layout of a task board presented by busybusinesswomen.biz.

Video on Daily stand-up meetings by Siemens. Daily stand-up meetings keep team members informed and save them from long coordination threads! This video explains in a nutshell how the method can help you gaining speed in your project. Daily / regular meetings on all hierarchical levels to communicate: What did I accomplish? What do I plan to achieve until the next stand-up? What obstacles are impeding my progress?

Play Video

To Work

Create insight into the workload for the coming period

  1. Create a task board with the columns “Story” (optional), “To Do”, “Doing”, and “Done”.
  2. Collaboratively decide what is a good sprint length for your team. A sprint is a period of up to one month in which you deliver something of value as a team.
  3. Each team member writes on sticky-notes what tasks they are going to perform to contribute to this “What exactly are you going to do?” Make the tasks on the task board small enough so they can be completed by one person in no more than one day. Where necessary, split larger tasks into smaller ones. This may also be done during the sprint for tasks that you are not going to take on in the first few days.
  4. Hang these tasks notes on the task board in the “To Do” column and, if desired, group them by customer wish using the “Story” column. Perhaps some residual work remains in a group “Other”.
  5. Now that you see the workload, have a discussion on the feasibility for the upcoming period. If necessary, adjust the workload (number of customer wishes on the task board). Themes that do not fit this period are added to the wish list and become the workload for future periods.

Keep a finger on the pulse daily. A stand-up meeting is a quick status update for the team and lasts no more than 15 minutes.

  1. Agree on a time when you as a team will discuss progress on the task board daily.
  2. While performing work, each team member moves a task note to the “Doing” column as soon as they pick up a task and to “Done” as soon as the task is completed.
  3. During the stand-up, each team member briefly answers the following three questions:
  • What did I do yesterday that contributes to our goal?
  • What am I going to do today to contribute to our goal?
  • What impediments do I see for myself or the team that might keep us from reaching our goal?

Tip: if someone is doing something for which there is no task sheet on the task board, create a task sheet for this (e.g. in a different color). This creates insight into the work that was not planned.

Source

The task board (to visualize the work) and the daily stand-up come from Scrum, a lightweight framework to improve teamwork. In Lean (based on the Toyota way of working), they are called improvement board and day start, respectively. You’ll find a link to our summary of Scrum and the official Scrum guide below.

You find a more elaborate description of these techniques in section 5.1 Task Board & Stand-up Meeting in our book Connective Teamwork (EN, NL). The book helps you set your team in motion with a practical 5-step plan and 20 teamwork techniques.

You can learn more about and practice this technique in our Connective Team Coach Training Course.

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