Digital Agile Boards – Agile Trello Board

Digital Agile Boards

Physical boards are great, if it’s an individual board, or you are working with your team in the same location. Boards were originally used by developers who were all co-located in the same office, so a physical board was a viable option for visualising work at a core level. The tactile nature of a physical board helps to bring a team together and help make virtual work visible.

However, there are some limitations to physical boards:

• Calculating metrics such as work rate, and reporting can be challenging and time consuming, whereas digital tools can calculate these for you automatically.
• Having a shared board, and sharing the board with others if you are not co-located.
• Allowing others to collaborate on your board and add or amend items on it themselves.
• Updating your board if you are away from it.

The development of digital solutions has brought with it many benefits, especially helping remote teams to communicate and collaborate.

There are now a wide variety of agile software applications and tools for you to use. From the larger solutions such as Jira, a complex and integrated software development solution primarily used by software development teams, to Simple solutions such as Trello or Asana offering easy to use board templates.

Many business software solution providers have integrated agile tools such as agile boards into it’s features such as Monday and PipeDrive, check for agile add-ons available on your current software solutions.

There are some great online Collaborative whiteboard tools too such as Miro where you can insert template boards and add virtual sticky notes to them, these are great for group sessions where you can map out ideas collectively and then migrate them later onto your digital board.

Many agile digital solutions integrate with other software solutions such as popular business management systems, data storage solutions and communications platforms too helping you to keep things in sync.

There is no one solution we would recommend, it really depends what suits you. A good starting point though is to start with one of the simpler applications such as Trello.

We will use Trello in this course for a few simple reasons:

• You can join for free and create up to 10 boards to share with others so you can get started straight away.
• It’s a simple solution but has lots of add-ons and integrations you can explore further.
• It’s one of the most popular options and is well supported and updated.

Exercise : Tool : Digital Boards – Create a Digital Agile Canvas with Trello

Digital Agile Boards have become very popular over the past few years. Teams moving away from physical boards onto digital boards for a number of benefits, such as sharing with others, automatic reporting, accessibility and more.

There are a growing number of options for agile software, in this session we will look at one of the most popular, and easy to use packages, Trello.

You can create up to 10 boards for free, share them with others, and access a variety of add-ons and integrations so it’s an easy option to test out digital versions of agile boards.

You can sign up to Trello using this link https://trello.com/belindawaldock1/recommend

Once you have created a new board, you can add lists, as we are creating a digital version of the Being Agile Canvas we have added the headings from the Canvas to our board.

Guide to the Being Agile Method and Planning Canvas

Inbox, Future Work, To do, Doing, Waiting, Feedback, Done.

Then we can add our items to our board. Here we have Blue labels for planned work, and orange for new work. Each work item has been given a due date.

The board shows a sprint in progress. This sprint covers the month of January. Items to be completed in January have been selected for the sprint.

Inbox items are considered using the Important/Urgent matrix, some items are prioritised into the sprint, others placed in Future Work for future sprints

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We can move items around on the board, and we can add additional information. Items that have been selected to work on have been tagged with the relevant member of the board to show they are working on it. You can also add check lists, attachments, links and further information to each item.

Now you have your own digital version of the Being Agile Canvas, there are some great guides online to learn more about Trello (and other packages).

Quick Trello Tips

• A great feature in Trello is you can email work items to your board that automatically copy details from the email into a new card on the board, you can set these to be placed into your inbox.
• You can add others to your board, to view or to collaborate with you.
• Create template cards that can be easily recreated.
• Its useful to create a new ‘done’ column each sprint, this way you have a log of the work you have completed each sprint to review, and you don’t end up with a huge done column.
• If you use your board to manage a piece of work, run a project, build something that is going to be repeated, you can duplicate your board and use it as a template for next time.
• Avoid big upfront planning your board in too much detail! Start by adding your most immediate known tasks and use it! Add more to it as you think of them, don’t get caught in a planning loop trying to get your board ‘complete’ before you start your first sprint, build it as you go.

Agile Guides & Resources

The Being Agile Method

Agile Introduction & Applying Agile Team Workshop Programme