Scrum Master and Non-Intrusive Team driven Task Board Management

Let’s begin with initial understanding of task board: Task board is tool to give a quick view of the status of each items of the sprint backlog.

Each task is represented by a card and area on the task board represents the status of the card like ‘To Do’, ’In-Process’ and ‘Done’.

Task board in combination with sprint backlog is an excellent information radiator where at a glance team can get a view of how they are moving collectively towards the sprint goal.

Now, a very important point is that sprint backlog is owned by the ‘Team’ and team need to be self-organize to complete the work of sprint backlog, And  Scrum master is responsible to create self organize team.

Scrum Master Plays the role of ‘Coach’ during the execution of sprint to ensure team is fully functional and productive and able to pull the work from sprint backlog with the help of task board. Task board helps the team take self-decision in pulling the work.

So in conclusion:

As sprint backlog is owned by the team, this conclusion automatically reciprocate that task board management responsibility lies with the Team and an intrusive management of task board from Scrum Master is not recommended.

A famous quote I would to mention here: “Responsibility comes from Authority” so if sprint backlog is owned by the team then only and only team members should be allowed to manage the current status of all the items of sprint backlog.

Scrum Master is just a passerby for the Task Board and never ever touches the task board until unless a particular team member requested to do so.

Task Board is the most important information radiator for the team that needs to be managed and need a Self-Organized team as a pre-requisite.

Task Board is a recommended artifact of Kanban, where there is no indication of iterations and work flows between stages and there is WIP i.e. ‘Work in Progress’ limit defined for each stage.

 In Scrum Methodology we can use variation of Task Board where a task board could be defined for each sprint, may be called as Scrum Board.

Task Board as an Information Radiator:

During the sprint, Task Board is a vital information radiator and helps the team to achieve their sprint goal.

An ideal team space always in need of a physical task board as it helps the passersby to have acquaintance about what is going on? It exposes current flow of work and a great tool for transparency that is necessary for Inspection and Adaptation of an empirical process.

Physical task board reflects vivid picture of the achievements of a team to the passerby, and a compelling picture of the challenges the team has undertaken.

When task board is clubbed with Product Vision, Sprint Goal, Burn Down Chart, Release Burn Down Chart, Sprint Backlog, and if all of these are possess the property of ‘Transient’ and ‘Current’, gives a complete quick picture of project and how team is moving towards the Sprint Goal and hence towards Product Vision, so ultimately it gives the how team is align with the product outcome.

It is like a self-organized team saying the world openly - Give us goal, compelling stories to get there, and we will sign up in a rhythm of stories and tasks. And you all are welcome to see our achievements and for that you are not in need to disturb us.

‘Dear Stakeholders,

We want to work towards sprint goal and we have an alternate arrangement to satisfy your need to see our achievements and challenges, kindly don’t disturb us during the sprint’

Task Board reflect the nature of work, so anybody walking to the workspace, information simply hit to their mind about what challenges team is undertaking like:

1.       Stories that team just have started stories that have been in progress and in relation to goal.

2.       Stories that need additional resources and assistance.

3.       Stories for which acceptance test have been developed and ready for code.

So task board make people want to work so it’s good to take time to make task board to tell a compelling story.

Task Board for Distributed Team

It is common problem when team members are not co-located then we need to search for a solution to get the necessary transparency in artifacts and for that an electronic task comes into picture.

Sometime team is co-located but we need an electronic task board as Customer is not co-located with the team and we need transparent system for all the stakeholders.

But few problems are identified with an electronic task board like:

Electronic task board is less transparent and sometime hiding of information introduced and makes the electronic task board that is not current, sometime team members sign up to the task without updating task board and they tend to update when they again sign-in later.

Physical task board encourage team member to work and when they move to update the current flow, sometime healthy interaction between team members may get initiated by visualizing challenges towards sprint goal and they collaborate in person to achieve the goal

Then what is the solution?

We can think a combination of physical task board and electronic one. It is not redundancy of work as our task board is simple and updating it just takes few seconds and benefits are huge.

It is Scrum Master duty to encourage the team to achieve a synchronization between electronic and physical task board. S/he can put a flag over physical task board to communicate that electronic task board is not updated and once updated this flag is removed.

Daily Scrum meeting also help to see any deviation in the synchronization and team can come out to maintain the synchronization and all it happen automatically when they do the daily scrum and they just feel the deviation. Daily Scrum is not a problem solving meeting.

Alternatively a technology could be introduced where a dedicated TV is installed at team work apace to radiate the information, so electronic task board reflect the benefits of physical task board. So an ideal team space should be with information radiators, if electronic can serve the purpose, then it is also an alternative.

Task Board Development Process:

A simplest task board could be like stories that have selected from the product backlog, task associated with stories and ideal hours remaining with each task, assigned team member to the task and any changes to this assignment.

Anytime when a engineering task is added, team create a card and put it on task board and area on the board represent status like “To-Do”, “In-Process”, “Test Ready” and “Done”

Other information radiator is clubbed with task board as described earlier to provide the complete transparency.

Different colours could be used for stories and tasks to differentiate, alternatively we can use different colour for ‘Must Have’ ‘Should Have” and ‘Could Have’ stories and associated task may have also the same colour. Low priority task could be moved around to help the team to balance the load when they need to give priority to time constraint tasks, for example there is a task which needs to be completed fast as lot of other tasks are dependent on that, physical task board is very helpful especially when all of the team members are standing around it, during daily scrum and synchronize their work using face to face conversation for next 24 hours.

Management of Task Board when team is not self organized

Task Board management is very difficult when team is not self-organized, in this case team is at ‘shu’ stage and it is the responsibility of Scrum Master to analyze the level of conflict and may use the ‘Reveal’ conflict resolution strategy to bring conflict level down to ‘Problem to Solve’ and get the problem resolved.

Task Board management is not possible without self-organizing team and first responsibility of Scrum Master is to create self-organizing team while adhering to agile values and principles and Scrum values and practices as well.

So in conclusion, task board is a tool to bring transparency in the system and owned by a self organized team, there should not be intrusive management of task board from the Scrum Master. S/he touches the task board only when any team members request due to any specific circumstance. If Scrum Master touches the task board, it is like snatching their pride of work and deteriorates the self-organization with the team.

Task Board is an important input for daily scrum meeting and helps the team to move towards sprint goal during the sprint.

If team is self-organized then team may also opt to choose to break the rule of kanban where task board is not defined iteration wise. It may be re-initiated for every sprint. If team is at ‘ha’ stage then team is mature enough to break the rule to maintain the rationale of goal.