Finding the right Agile practice for your team can mean long hours and rigorous research. That’s why after finally deciding on a way to go most teams want to get the implementation over with as soon as possible. No matter what you will have to go through the adjustment period and make sure the new practice sticks, but there is no such thing as this process having to be difficult and we at Eylean believe at making it easy.
As you already know or will find out now, Eylean Board is created for your ease of use and convenience. Our scrumban board is no exception and we made sure that you can start your iterations as soon as the software is installed. This means that after going through the initial setup, you will be able to start working with your team immediately. Curious to see how the Scrumban process works with Eylean? Here are the 7 steps to kickstart your project.
Set Up Your Workspace
The first thing you will need for any project is the task board. It has to be clean and simple while at the same time holding enough information for your team to know what to do next.
I believe that Eylean offers just that with a predesigned Scrumban task board that allows you to start working from the get go. And if you have a more complex structure that needs to be represented, you can always modify or create a board from scratch. Add as many columns and rows as you need to replicate your process and enjoy visual information on the task cards. With Eylean there is no need to read long e-mails or additional information as all the task related information, documents, files, etc is stored right in the task details. You can also choose to add WIP limits, have parent-child columns and more. It is completely up to you and your team how simple or intricate your task board will be.
Plan The Future
After successfully setting up your workspace, you will need too think about what has to be done. Planning buckets will help you prioritize plans and get management and the performing teams on the same track.
Eylean Board is ready to accommodate the planning bucket technique by providing the ability to use several task boards in one workspace. Meaning, you can set up a separate board to use as a planning space or even have individual boards for every planning bucket – 3, 6 months and a year. Once you are ready to move the tasks from one bucket into another, all you will have to do is drag and drop. All your planning, information and every other detail will stay within the task card. So forget loosing important information in the never ending e-mail chain – everything is in one place and accessible by the whole team for once.
Pick What’s Next and Prioritize
Once the board and the plans are ready, you will most likely be eager to start working on them. Picking your next tasks from the 3 month bucket and deciding on their priorities is what comes next in most Scrumban implementations.
As mentioned above, Eylean lets you easily drag and drop tasks from one board onto another without loosing any of the important information. So as soon as you know which tasks should be completed next, you can pick them up and let your team know. If there were information, documents or anything else attached to the task, it will become visible for the whole project team. And to make their efforts easier, you can use Kanban priority columns to define which of the selected tasks are the most important and which can wait. This way ensuring the most valuable tasks get completed first.
Run An Iteration
As everything is ready for the take off, the next thing you will do is start the first iteration. This means actually completing the tasks at hand and seeing the team in action.
Eylean Scrumban board structure will allow you to easily track the tasks as they move through the process columns and discuss progress with your team. Visual notifications, such as a block or a passed due date will identify bottlenecks and you will be able to discuss and eliminate them more quickly. While having a visual and documented view at the process will also create a better tool to present what has been done to your customers. Enabling a more open and trusting dialogue needed to complete your tasks.
Once the iteration is done, you can quickly see what has worked and what did not before you jump onto the next one.
Set Up a Planning Trigger
Sometime between your first few iterations, you will most likely see at what pace the team is completing the tasks at hand. That is when you will want to think about setting up a planning trigger.
The planning trigger is crucial to make sure your team always has tasks to complete and is not wasting time by sitting idle. In most cases you will want to hold the next planning session as the team still has one full iteration ahead of them. This way allowing you enough time to prepare for the next phase. And with Eylean you can easily track how much of planned work, either by task number, working hours or story points there is still left to do. Once that goes down to 1 iteration worth, hold the meeting and reshuffle those planning buckets.
Repeat
With everything in place, you are ready to run the rest of your project. According to the planning buckets and iterations you will be completing what you set out to do.
Eylean board enables you to easily run the project as well as keeping the tabs on what has been done so far. You can create a new row on the board for each new iteration or keep the completed tasks according to the iterations, thus documenting your progress. And if you ever need any information from a previous cycle, it is right there on the board. Making it easy to track what has been done and move forward with all the necessary details at hand.
Freeze and Triage
As your projects nears its end, you will likely encounter a freeze and triage situation. Where either time or money has nearly run out and you need to think on what can be completed and what will stay unfinished.
Our tool will let you know when this point is coming by monitoring the task due dates. You will start to see more and more dates closer together before the end of the project. And by having all the information in one visual task board, you will have everything that is needed to decide what gets completed and what does not. Delivering only the most valuable tasks to your customer.
Do you run Scrumban projects? What other features would you like to see in a project management tool?
