I really like overviews, but more than overviews I like to see progress and things getting done.

I like done-ticks and the feeling really to build things: concepts, finding solutions, making a plan or coaching teams… Only to have an overview about “what I should do”, is frustrating me. I don’t want to see those things until I have time for it or I have to do them.

The sense of an overview is to make a snapshot, the reality of now at this exact moment. And this can really be helpful. But I don’t like to have a snapshot of the reality every day, and especially not with a couple of people together, a group or a team. I think that is wasted time with no effect and no satisfaction. This happens with team stand ups: A bunch of people are standing around, talking, listening and they are bored. The result is the opposite of what we wanted to achieve: It makes us unhappy and frustrated, to see every day the same things that I or we should do.

The idea of Kanban and agile teams is to find out, how we are doing (‘we’ means those teams which I am coaching). The idea is to improve the satisfying and efficient flow. The idea is to find out what is the best path for us to reach our goals, to be productive. We want to get things done. We want to plan, to make concepts, to handle big stories. Let the team find the right process to feel the flow and be happy and have fun.

What can we do to make sure that the team boards for agile teams are efficient?

• Take care that the content of the cards are the actual important tasks for the team members — no edge cases or additional work you wish to do. Focus.
• Play with the work in progress (WIP) limit, so that you can be sure that it will hurt if the team doesn’t work together to have knowledge transfer and the better quality that comes with more than one brain.
• Once in a while do a grooming on all cards / topics, which are waiting to enter the “soon” queue. That’s for the feeling “we didn’t forget something“. And that is a helpful overview then, but has nothing to to with the team “in progress” board.
• Don’t waste time in long discussions, for example: Is that topic good enough to write a card, for example: “prepare the results of a workshop to present them”. Just write the card and hang it on the board, if it will take team working time. Try it out to see if it’s useful.
• Don’t waste time in discussing if a card is ready. Just hang it in the “done” column and write new cards which are clarifying what else to do. An even better way is to define the “Definition of Done in general” or try it out with acceptance criteria “Definition of Done for that card”.

(There are only some levers, depending which methodology (Kanban, Scrum, a mixture,…) you are using.)

This is, all in all, only a hint — a wake up call to think about what you are doing. Sometimes, even for myself, I am trying to practice a methodology, because I think I should. Sometimes it’s better to quit, because it’s more lean to refrain from it. That can be also an improvement. To live and feel and act in an agile way is mostly to look at the things and see where there are levers to improve.