Chapter 8
Visualize Your Work with a Board

If you’ve worked on any project, people have asked you these kinds of questions: When will you start this thing? When will you be done? Who’s working on this? You may have pointed people to a project dashboard, or shown them some other graphical representation of the status data.

I used yellow-sticky, rolling-wave, deliverable-based scheduling in my projects before I knew about agile approaches. I found it helpful to be able to show people the current view of the schedule. (See Manage It! [Rot07] for more information.)

In agile approaches, we have multiple tools for explaining the project’s plans and current state. (See ​Plan at Several Levels​.) The big-picture roadmap helps people see a larger view of the proposed deliverables, the larger plan. The rolling wave–style, shorter roadmaps help people see what the product owner has planned for the near term. The project board helps the team and other people see what’s happening now—the current state.

Boards help teams visualize their work, their bottlenecks, and their delays. The idea is that the team members can see—at a glance—where they are with all the work on the board. At the very least, the board tracks the state of the work: is it ready, is it in some sort of progress state, or is it done?

Your team board helps the entire team see what’s going on. First, let’s discuss how to start creating your board.