In plain english, what this means is that if you have a task, represented for example by a standard size Post-it, you would add a physical tag, represented by a smaller colored Post-it, to indicate it has some particular status, such as “Blocked” or “Delegated” or “Bug” or “Please Test”. This creates visibility and awareness and enables the right people to react to that new status fast.

A visual alternative to tagging is creating special columns or specially designated areas in your taskboard that fulfill the same purpose.

While this is valid, and many people do it, I much prefer tagging to that approach. Taskboard real estate is expensive. If you start creating special areas or columns for each status a piece of work can have, you might quickly fill your Taskboard with empty zones. Furthermore, changing the structure of your taskboard is cumbersome. This might limit the number of status areas you create. Too many areas and columns make people think about waterfall processes, even if they are not meant to be used. For example, look at the picture of the following kanban board:

While it looks good because it was done with care, there is much wasted space in those columns and boxes. And let’s take a closer look at those separate areas at the right. In this example we see a “Back to business” box. What if this status is very temporary? In that case, you are probably better off tagging it. Creating the box has allowed work to accumulate there, unchecked. Are all those post-its supposed to be going back to the main board? Someone is going to be spending some serious time moving post-its back and forth…

Another example: let’s assume a task that involves coding but is functionally testeable is being developed. During the same day the following happens:

• A developer starts and finishes it
• Someone else tests it and finds a bug
• The original developer fixes the bug
• The task is re-tested and this time declared “done”.

This is a typical scenario in Agile teams. If you have separate columns for “In development”, “To validate”, “Defect found”, you are going to spend the whole day moving the task around columns. People might lose track of where the task went (well, not really – but it does require more effort to locate it). I prefer the much simpler solution of leaving the task in place and rotating status tags on top of it. Another advantage: if it would go through this code-test-bug-fix cycle many times, you can place status tags on top of others, creating a “traceability” effect. With columns, you can’t do that.

Tagging is very flexible. There is no limit to the number of tags you can create. Some teams create temporary tags for special occasions. In the example above, the tag “checked” was created specifically for the occasion. This can be done quickly and easily by the team by their own initiative. Almost no work is required and suddenly your visual management process includes a new status.

I think the elegance, flexibility and visual appeal of using colored tags for indicating task status cannot be denied. Even in a software tool, it looks good, as the example below shows.

For physical taskboards, my preferred tags are Post-it 653 which come in many different colors. They are the 1.5″x 2″ small ones.

Important detail: if you just stick this small post-it onto a bigger one, it will not stick, it will fall off almost instantly. That’s why I use a small piece of Scotch Magic tape with each status tag. See the first picture in this post for a detail.

I will demonstrate using a 120 x 90 cm whiteboard, the smallest format that will support a small team board. Magnetic whiteboards make great task boards because the surface is so versatile: you can write on it, you can stick magnets, post-its stick and unstick very cleanly, so does Scotch Magic tape, and -most important for this case- so does electrical tape, which is what we will be using to make the lines. That means that if you make a mistake, you can just unstick and re-stick the tape, though it will never be as easy as the first time around. The downside, of course, is that they are expensive and/or not always available for hijacking in your office. That’s why I advocate building boards wherever you can: I have built boards on the back of closets, directly on walls, and even on windows (looks cool at first, but later it’s very distracting – your attention always ends up going to what’s outside).

What you will need:

• 1 ruler
• 1 roll of electrical tape
• 1 whiteboard marker
• 1 pair of scissors

Note: if you don’t have a whiteboard, electrical tape might ruin your surface (for example it might peel off low quality wall paint). A good alternative is thin blue painter’s masking tape.

Step 1: This is how our whiteboard looks before starting. If you did not buy a new board, make sure it is clean of any old whiteboard marker ink, old pieces of scotch tape, etc.

Step 2: Make two small marks at 25 cm from the left side of the board, one should be around 5 cm from the top, the other almost at the bottom.

Step 3: Press the tip of the tape with your thumb on the top mark.

Step 4: Carefully extend the tape out and downwards, without touching the board, making sure you do not pull too hard on the tape. Electrical tape is elastic, and if you pull, you will stretch it and stick it in a stretched state. Later on it will contract to its original length, unsticking and curling upwards, ruining all your great effort. (It took me several cases of shouting “Who sabotaged my taskboard!” in vain to figure this out)

Step 5: With the tape still only touching the board at the point pressed by your thumb, carefully bring down the roll of tape onto the bottom point.The full roll should be resting on the bottom dot. The tape will now be touching the board but only lightly.

Step 6: Carefully pass your thumb upwards over the entire tape, which should stick cleanly and nicely to the board.

Step 7: Cut the tape at the bottom and voilá, you should have a perfect line.

Step 8: Repeat 3 more times, each line 25 cm from the one before it. You should now have 4 vertical lines.

Step 9: The horizontal lines should be placed in a similar way. First put the bottom line on the bottom of the board. Then measure upwards at distances of 15 cm. You should be able to place 6 lines.

Step 10: Add any additional sections you wish in a similar fashion. Then add little signs for the columns, status tags, nametags, team pictures, and you are ready to start scrumming!

For the electrical tape, I recommend 3M Temflex 1500. This tape is cheap and high quality and in Belgium can be purchased at the Brico for less than 1 euro the roll. Look for these packages of 10 rolls if you are going to build multiple boards for different teams: you get all kinds of colors.

This is my recount of my session at Agile 2009 Chicago. It was titled “Visual Management for Agile Teams” and was part of the Manifesting Agility stage.

The session went well, around 36 people came and left 27 session reviews. Many people found value in the practical, down-to-earth approach of the workshop, leaving comments such as “excellent hands-on demo”, “extremely applicable information”, “finally something hands-on practical” and “very helpful”. Review averages were: Met expectations 4.4/5; Would recommend 4.3/5; Presentation skills 4.1/5; Command of topic 4.6/5; Matched description 4.4/5 and Overall 4.4/5.

I changed the format and structure of the session a little bit. First I gave a short presentation to introduce the topic. I was nervous and it showed… I’ll do better next time. We quickly moved on to starting the workshop itself. Each team was given a bag of office supplies and a blank taskboard. They set themselves up around a table.

The format of the workshop is simple: teams have to build taskboards, following some guidelines such as “the boards must show who is working on what”. The first round gave teams 20 minutes to figure out what they were going to do and how to implement it. Here is the red team getting busy:

The blue team had a good idea: they did a rapid prototype on a paper on the wall, and only after that started building their taskboard.

More taskboard building:

After a first round of taskboard building, people spread out to review other team’s boards.

Some stayed behind to present and defend their boards…

Finally, we did another round of taskboard improvement with new requirements, and another review session. To close, I presented my own version of the taskboard that I had built the night before in the hotel room.

Results

These are the final taskboards of all four participating teams, with comments.  Click through to see a larger version of each taskboard. My comments are meant to show how each team approached a certain problem, the idea is to point out to the reader the different ideas that emerged.

Blue team

• They found and put up some team pictures. They used them to assign a color to each member and used colors as nametags. The only problem with this is that with a larger team you will run out of colors.
• They created an “URGENT” swimlane for expedited work. It is clearly distinguishable with a different color tape and a header. It is at the bottom, but they said during the workshop that if they would have had more time, they would have refactored their taskboard and put it at the top. Very good solution.
• They used red stars to indicate all impediments. I’m not so sure I would use this, as stars connote something good to me. But you can certainly see impediments clearly.
• They re-wrote their story cards in big blue post-it’s; other teams simply stuck up the printed stories.
• They put columns for “QA” and “Done Today”.  In the QA column there is a single small yellow post-it that says “BUG”. No idea where the bug is though.
• Each story has tasks of a different color. There does not seem to be any significance to this other than visually pointing out that tasks belong to different stories.

Red Team

• They put their project backlog on the leftmost column. From there, they can “pull” stories into the Sprint backlog. When an urgent story came in, they placed it on top.
• They have a column “WIP Blocked” and next to it “WIP”. Another column is called “Done today”.
• They have a calendar that shows at what moment during the week they have Planning, Retrospective and Release. This allows me to see that they do 1-week iterations.
• They used different colored post-its to indicate different types of specialist work. This is a very good idea (where it makes sense). In the bottom right hand corner is the color legend.
• They did not use the red electrical tape to make their swimlanes, instead opting to go for a blue masking tape. This makes it harder to identify them as the red team.

Yellow team

• I like how this team kept their board “clean”, in comparison with other teams. Also, they put the most effort into making sure their swimlanes were tidy.
• They have only 3 columns, yellow post-its and few elements, keeping the board clean and uncluttered. It is much more relaxing to look at.
• They used red stars as nametags. Each star has the name of a team member written on it.
• They used small green post-its as “DONE” tags. They put their DONE tasks on the Complete column, so during the daily standup all they will do is remove the green tag I assume.
• They move finished stories to the 3rd column together with all the tags. For some reason, they finished the least priority story first. They seem to be working on everything at the same time.
• Pink post-its indicate a special situation is happening with that task.

Green team

• The first thing you notice is that this team opted for no horizontal swimlanes. This makes the board lighter and cleaner, but might cause confusion as to where tasks belong. To compensate, they gave each story different colored tasks as we saw the Blue team did before. This is an interesting design alternative to consider.
• Another original idea is the use of Post-it flags as status indicators with a clear legend on the lower right hand corner. Some examples include “defect found”, “retest”, “urgent” and “blocked”. This is the first time I see it and I want to say that it is an interesting idea. The Post-it flags are unobtrusive and easy to detach. I will add Post-it flags to the Elements of Taskboard Design page.
• They also have the Product backlog on the left-hand column and pull stories into their WIP backlog like the Red team.

Xavier’s board

For completeness, here is my board. The only new thing if you follow my blog is that I decided to use pink post-its instead of yellow post-its for normal tasks, simply for effect. But I didn’t find any value in it and actually the pink color is too noisy. So I will definitively stick to yellow (there are economic reasons for using yellow for tasks too – yellow super stickies are cheaper)

Conclusions

I want to thank all participants for coming to my session. I think the session was a success, and each team left me with new ideas and lessons learned.

• From the Blue Team, I learned I can create a priority swimlane which is visually clear.
• From the Red Team, I learned to use colors to indicate the nature of work. This could be used to visually identify the need for more specialists for example.
• From the Yellow Team, I learned the value of keeping it simple and clean. Overloading your board with elements and colors creates visual saturation and is tiresome to the sight.
• From the Green Team, I learned to use Post-it flags as status tags. They are small, elegant and unobtrusive.

I also wish to thank the following friends who helped me out: Mark Levison for all the advice before and during the conference, Karl Scotland for helping me during the session and for motivating me, Dan Mezick, stage producer, who came to visit during the session and seemed to really care about the quality of his stage; Tobias Mayer for always supporting me; and above all my sweetheart Joke Vandemaele without whom I would not be able to do any of this.

Thanks to you all!

PS: If you missed this session and would like to attend, I will be doing a short version of it at the Agile Eastern European Conference in Kiev next week. Registration for the conference is still open!

It will also be presented at Agiles 2009 in Florianópolis and at XP Days Benelux 2009. See you there!

We arrived with Joke a couple of days early in order to visit the city before the conference. Chicago is an amazing city with an incredible skyline full of modern buildings. I especially love that red one!

We got a room on the 30th floor with a great view. I particularly liked it by night.

We walked to the Millenium Park near the hotel where they have this really cool “thing”

Then we rented bicycles…

and biked around the park area. This fountain is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen!

Apparently Segways are not as unpopular as one would think; especially with tourists.

Segway invasion! They even have pink ones.

We then went to the aquarium. Joke wanted to see and hear a Beluga whale while she’s pregnant. She got what she wanted. This guy kept coming out of the water and I caught him smiling at us:

The Shedd Aquarium is really nice. I would recommend it even to people without kids.

Watcha staring at? Never seen an ugly fish?

Or a smart one? The legend says this guy knows TDD and refactoring…

They have the oldest fish in captivity in the world. This guy was brought into the aquarium in 1933! It’s a lungfish, an ancient beast that actually has lungs asides from gills.

But of course the cutest of them all are the little Nemos swimming in the coral reef:

The next day we went to visit the work of reknown american architect Frank Lloyd Wright in Oak Park.

And we did a tour in his old house and study. They didn’t allow pictures of the inside though

Ok, enough about fish and architecture. On to the conference.

The conference

This was my second Agile 200x and my first time presenting. Considering the crisis this year, I think both the organizers and us (as in “the community”) did a pretty good job of keeping our flagship conference healthy. More than 1350 people passed by the registration desk in an orderly manner…

and enjoyed well delivered keynotes from Jared Spool and Alistair Cockburn

A couple of visual management good ideas. Every day the conference program was presented in these big panels (that I later used for my session )

And individual rooms had a sign outside announcing the day’s sessions:

The printed program was also much better organized than last year (it was actually usable!) and the badges were the same as last year, very readable and of the non-reversible type. They also had RFID as a novelty.

Open jam was the place to hang out if you were into networking or just wanted to sleep. And even though it never works well in ths type of conference, there were still a couple of good open space sessions.

What didn’t go well?

Well, the food was where the organization decided to cut corners in order to meet the budget, something I don’t approve of. And Programming with the Stars suffered from a lack of public, because of where the actual competition took place (extremely far from where the food was, compared to last year). Still, the sign was great!

Gordon Pask Award

07/Sep/2009 Update: This section is new, the original post has been edited. I had expressed some pre-judgements regarding the award that I wish to retract. I have re-written this part of the post based on feedback and information I received and researched. Let’s keep the award and the community healthy.

This year the first Gordon Pask Award was given to somewhat less prominent figures of the agile community (compared to previous years). As JB Rainsberger, member of the award commitee explains: “We awarded the Pask to Simon and Gus [...] as an attempt to live up better to the stated purpose of the award: to shine a light on those great practitioners in the field who have something special to share and need exposure to do exactly that.”

Congratulations to the “no compromise, no excuses” zealots Simon Baker and Gus Power from the UK! They sound like people with high quality standards, something I appreciate. You can read their reaction over winning the award in their blog.

The second award went to renown and groovy David Hussman, who BTW is coming to the Ágiles 2009 conference together with previous award winner Naresh Jain this fall. Congrats to David who certainly deserves it!

Let’s start betting on who gets it next year…

Agile Alliance Board

The big surprise of the conference for me was that Cesar Idrovo, with a spectacular political campaign, managed to get elected to the Agile Alliance board! Kudos to him and I hope he gets to do lots of good work there.  I will certainly be supporting and helping him (Cesar is also Latin American / European like me). Also congratulations to Henrik Kniberg for getting elected.

All in all it was another great conference. Almost as good as Toronto last year. I met and re-met lots of friends and community leaders from around the world. There were some great sessions, and I think everybody was generally satisfied with the event.

See you in Nashville next year!

By coincidence, last week my friend Ariel Aizemberg sent me a TED Talk video that is spot on the topic and makes a good starting point. This video is short (6 minutes), informative and entertaining. Even if you don’t care about science too much, you will surely enjoy the presentation style.

How big is the Team?

A Team is a group of people collaborating towards a common goal. Sometimes it’s not that easy to pick your goal, and thus figure out who the Team is, or who it should be. On one hand, small teams are good. Small is simple, small is beautiful.  So maybe you should pick a small goal, and make a small Team.

On the other hand, you should try to look at the system as a whole. This could mean anything: a project, a department, the whole company… What is the ultimate system, but the Organization itself? Your whole company is the Team, from the Systems Thinking perspective. Especially for small companies. So maybe you should think of a large Team.

Most likely, we need to strike a balance between these two dichotomic approaches.

I have found my comfort zone with a simple, practical definition: One Team, One Backlog.

Splitting it up

Let’s assume you found your definition of Team, and you have more than ten people in it.  Since the ideal team size is 5 to 9, you probably want to split them up. But you don’t want to lose the concept of  one Team. The recommended approach is to break them up into sub-teams. I will discuss some ideas for creating these sub-teams and for visualizing their work, while trying to keep and respect the spirit and vision of the one (big) Team.

Feature teams

Using the same logic regarding why it is interesting for team members to be as cross-functional as possible, the best strategy for making sub-teams is to create cross-functional feature teams, as opposed to ‘component’ teams or -god forbid- teams that specialize in a certain technology or skill (like  ‘QA team’ or ‘.Net team’).

Feature teams are teams that work on features, i.e. stories. Pieces of business value. They are value-driven teams, whereas other sub-team splitting strategies (component, skill, etc) create function-driven teams that invariably fail to deliver business value and create local optimizations and waste.

You create your feature teams by spreading out the knowledge, skills and experience equally. The goal is that any team can do any story in the backlog.  You should stress that the “real” Team is the big one. Sub-teams are just created for communication and coordination purposes. In my opinion, they should not develop too strong a team identity. For example, I would not measure sub-team velocity, and I would make sure people rotate from sub-team to sub-team a lot.

You can then work with a single, large backlog and distribute stories in round-robin fashion.

Colored teams

I like to give sub-teams a color for a name. E.g “Red team”, “Blue team”, etc.  Colors are very visual and we will be able to use this to our advantage. For example I use electric tape of the same color to create their taskboard, which gives them an immediate strong visual identity (see picture below). Another reason colors are good is that they are non-hierarchical, and people don’t attach themselves that much to a color.

The Black team

In large projects, particularly in transitioning organizations, there are always some people left floating around that are not doing any actual work at team/trenches level.  I put them in the Black team. This is a pseudo-management team that mostly combines the responsibilities of Product Owner and Scrum Master (in the same team, not the same person!) and any other role that you either want to share across teams or that you simply can’t get rid of.

Typical examples of people who we have put in the Black team include:

• all the ex-Project Managers, who now had to remove impediments full-time (they also had a lot of administrative work to do: fake Gantt charts, fill in timesheets, useless reports, etc)
• the Agile Coach
• the Product Owner(s)
• an Architect from Architecture (we later convinced him to move into the trenches with the real teams)
• a QA Team Lead who didn’t want to test (we later got rid of him, once the testers he used to C&C were doing agile testing)
• a Release Coordinator, whose job was to beg to Infrastructure to deploy our app into production (this was a full time job)
• etc.

As you can see these were mostly roles that existed because we were doing Scrum within a traditional large organization. In any case, the idea is to group all these people into one “team” so as to not leave any loose ends. Ideally they will jell and work cooperatively, otherwise at least you can visualize their work by putting up a taskboard for them. For example on this picture below, most tasks are either impediments or things that have to be delegated to people outside of the Team. The horizontal lines are not stories but simply priority slots, i.e. High Priority, Medium and Low. If I would have known at the time, I would have put WIP limits, because nothing was ever getting done here.

The Scrum of Scrums

Ok, let’s move on to the interesting part. Each sub-team has their scrumboard with the stories they have selected for the current Sprint, divided into tasks as usual. How do we visualize what is going on at Big Team level? How do we keep track of so much work? We need to change the level of granularity. In the Scrum of Scrums, you only visualize stories. You create the “Scrum of Scrums storyboard” where every story that is currently open is visualized, with the team that has it and the current status indicated. The picture below shows such a board at the beginning of a Sprint. Click on the picture for a larger version. Note: This is actually the same physical whiteboard as pictured above… you are just looking at the other side! The Scrum of Scrums side is pointing towards the hallway, so passer-bys can look at it.

There are only two columns: “Story” and “Status”. Story has a copy of the story card that is on the team board. Status is normally “not started, “in progress”,  “done” or “done-done” (a curious distinction between “we think we’re done” and “we’re sure we’re done”). This last done-done was indicated with a red star. Each story has a little magnet indicating which team is working on it, but we also experimented with other visual elements like creating status tags of the color of the team. In this example you see both at the same time: a Green Team story will have a green “in progress” tag, and also a green magnet.

The mechanics for the Scrum of Scrums are simple: after the daily Scrums, each team sends a rotating delegate to give a brief status report on each of their open stories to the other delegates and the Product Owner. The delegate is then responsible for updating the rest of his sub-team members on what’s going on at project level (something that never happens, but oh well). Of course sometimes a lot more people show up during the Scrum of Scrums. Anybody who is interested in knowing what’s going on at Big Team level goes.

Note: The black and blue tape indicate nothing in this case, we simply didn’t have enough tape of the same color, and our boss was a fan of Club Brugge (whose colors are black & blue), so we made it for him.

This is how the board might look like towards the end of the Sprint, on a good Sprint where lots of stuff got done. (Click for large version)

Note how you can quickly visualize different types of problems.

• Several top priority stories are not getting finished. In particular the #1 top priority story.
• The yellow team seems to be in trouble. I see 3 yellow “in progress” and only red star with yellow magnet. Also comparing yellow to green, red and blue you can see the difference.

If you looked at the large version of the picture, you probably noticed those white horizontal lines that say for example “End of Sprint 9 Demo: 8/Sep”. This is a visual way of indicating what was the scope taken for Sprint 9. The point here is that this was a Team that was not delivering all they started, and was dragging along open stories. Some stories were blocked, others underestimated, some teams had sick people… for whatever the reason work wasn’t getting finished, and since it was not possible to limit WIP for political reasons, we just let the teams take more work, keeping existing stories open. But with this board at least the situation was kept clearly visible and the Product Owner knew perfectly well what was going on.

A last picture with some comments, in a style similar to my original “Scrum Board with Comments” picture:

2a: an agreement or pledge to do something in the future
2c: the state or an instance of being obligated or emotionally impelled
(source: Webster’s Dictionary online)

I would like to refer to these two as “hard commitment” and “soft commitment”.

A hard commitment is essentially a promise, as in: “I commit to finishing this report by the end of the week”

People without hard commitments work without deadlines. Their work is done when it is done. An example is scientists or people working in Google-style companies.

(Note: Don’t confuse “no deadlines” with low productivity: not having a deadline means nobody forces you to predict a delivery date or conform to a schedule, not that you can get by without actually doing anything)

A soft commitment, by contrast, is an expression of an emotional state, of caring:

“I am commited to this relationship”

and more to the point:

“I am committed to this team” or “I am committed to this project”.

People without soft commitment are people who “just want to get their work done and go home”, typically because they either don’t enjoy their work or they are demotivated or burned out.

What type of commitment do we care about in the Agile world?

As it turns out, we seem to care about both. And we don’t distinguish too much between them. But there is a big difference between the two.

Hard commitments are typical in command and control, plan driven environments and dysfunctional organizations. This is a world where deadlines abound, monitored and enforced by armies of Gantt-chart wielding project managers who love to micromanage. In these projects, hard commitments are everything; and they translate into unmissable deadlines that themselves translate into long working hours, unsustainable pace, cutting on quality and eventually large turnover and technical debt.

A defining characteristic of these environments is that there is generally punishment envisioned for not living up to your hard commitments. From not making your bonus, to being publicly chastised by your boss, all the way to being fired; failing to comply with hard commitments is taken very seriously in these organizations because deadlines are the heart and soul of plan-driven management processes. Missing deadlines, simply put, costs money. Lots of it. Money in change management overhead, and money in penalties over contractual obligations missed.

Soft commitments, on the other hand, abound in startup type organizations, small projects and any environment where people are happy, work as a team, take pride in their work and care about the result.

Scrum: the all-commitment framework

Scrum is a framework that requires both soft and hard commitments from team members. The team is required to work as a team (for which soft commitment is required) and to commit to finishing a certain amount of work  in one Sprint. Now, I don’t like hard commitments. I associate them invariably with command and control thinking. It is all too common to force people into accepting a hard commitment, by insinuating that bad things will happen if we don’t make a deadline or simply by giving an order:  “make the deadline or you’re fired”.

But, in contrast to plan-driven processes, the difference is that in Scrum the hard commitment comes from within the team itself. It is not imposed from above. This is why many people see it as  a “healthy” hard commitment.

Scrum and hard commitment failure

Have you ever seen a Scrum team that does not make its sprint goal? Of course you have. In fact, failure to meet hard commitments in Scrum is so common, Jurgen Appelo blogged about it today.

Let’s now compare Scrum with with plan-driven processes. What happens in Scrum if a team does not make its commitment?

I can envision any or all of the following happening if a team does not deliver all it promised:

• Nothing; since the Product Owner already knew they were behind schedule and adjusted her expectations a week ago.
• They get slapped in the buttocks by the Product Owner, who says something along the lines of “Bad boys! Bad boys! Don’t do this again!”
• The team feels bad about it. Someone might cry (yeah, right). They go into a retrospective to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Then they go for a beer.

See, in Scrum there is practically no external punishment for not delivering. Nobody will get fired. Nobody will lose their bonus. The only “punishment” is the team feeling more or less embarrassed because they overcommitted. This can hardly be seen as punishment when compared to a command-and-control organization.

Delivery in Scrum is governed by Systems Thinking. Essentially this means that if a team does not deliver all it promised, it is not the team that is at fault, because it is out of their control. It is the system that governs performance. (In this case, the system refers to the way work is chopped up and estimated and velocity is calculated.) “Not making it” only means that System capacity is lower than expected, or the system is unstable. The common solution is to reassess your expected Velocity to make it lower, and take less work next Sprint. And maybe to divide your work into smaller pieces. In any case, there can and should be no punishments dealt to the team.

So what is the value of making a hard commitment without punishment? What’s the point of committing to something, if everybody in the game knows that when we don’t keep the promise, nothing will happen?

Hard commitments in Scrum might, in practice, not be as ‘hard’ as they seem. Why try to make them look harder?

Kanban: the no-commitment framework

On the other side of the spectrum, we have the new Kanban ultra-lighweight framework. In Kanban there are no iterations and no hard commitments. You just limit Work In Progress and pull in work. Things are done when they are done, based on prioritization, cycle time and lead time. Proponents like to state that one of the benefits of Kanban is that it is a framework that (unlike Scrum) you can put in place in existing waterfall organizations without requiring disruptive change [1]. Kanban works along with the pre-existing method. For example, a tester just has test whatever he pulls into his plate and pass it along. No teamwork or commitment is initially required where it did not exist before. (Note to Kanban advocates: of course undoubtedly things will be better if there is a commited team; but the idea, if I understand correctly, is that Kanban will plug into the existing process, with or without a team).

Moving towards a “soft commitment only” framework

What would a framework in the upper left-hand quadrant look like? Soft commitment without hard commitment?

• It would require healthy, self-organized teams.
• It would require no deadlines, no “sprint goals”.

I believe both Scrum and Kanban can evolve in this direction.

For Kanban, it would probably mean adding the restriction that people have to work as a self-organized team. It becomes the responsibility of everyone to get work to fully done. This would maybe make Kanban less suitable for immediate implementation in waterfall organizations.

For Scrum, it would mean dropping the restriction that Teams have to “commit to delivering a certain amount of features during a Sprint” and going towards a more continuous flow paradigm. In this way, at Sprint Planning, teams would just pull the amount of stories they think they can do, but without explicitly committing to finishing them. They would do their best, and any unfinished stories would simply remain as top priority for the next Sprint. The Product Owner would monitor Velocity and progress during the Sprint, and adjust her expectations of what will be delivered accordingly. It is really just a simple change. Almost insignificant.

But is anybody interested?

Many people who practice Scrum correctly will swear by hard commitments. I have raised this issue several times and have always been fiercely rebutted. These people, who defend hard commitments with energy, are divided in two camps:

Camp A, the “Transitioning organization” camp: this is the camp that has two faces. Inwards they do Scrum, outwards (towards their external customers, or towards Senior Management) they maintain a plan-driven façade. They are in transition, having implemented Scrum internally but failing (or not yet getting around to) selling it to external stakeholders.

The problem with this camp is that many times they cannot or do not shield the Team from the external stakeholders. They pass on the Sprint scope as a hard commitment to the outside world, creating pressure on the team. Still, they are trapped with the problem that they cannot punish the team if it fails to achieve. Scrum in such a situation is very difficult.

Camp B”: the “People are Lazy” camp: this camp believes that people are not intrinsically motivated to do their best, and need someone with a whip (even if it is an imaginary whip in the form of a deadline) to keep whipping them in order to work hard and do their best. They think that people are naturally lazy, and if we would have a world without clear goals or deadlines, nobody would get anything done. It is surprising the number of software developers who think this way even of themselves.

This is more difficult to challenge. I don’t agree with this camp mostly on philosophical grounds. Basically I do not believe that this is true of human nature. Maybe I am idealistic. Or maybe they are right, and it is true that most people hate their job and are not intrinsically motivated to do their best. Or maybe we have been living too long in a command and control culture. So long that we have forgotten that work is one of the fundamental human rights, and many people actually like to work .

Readability

Readability is defined as “how easy it is to read something”. There are two meanings, as in “a readable handwriting” and “a readable book”. In this case we will focus on the first definition as it applies to answering the following question: how easy is it to read the tasks on our taskboard?

Readability will always be somewhat subjective: what could be perfectly readable for me, could be unintelligible for you. But let’s try to agree on a general readability acceptance criteria. I propose the following:

Tasks should be easily readable and understandable by a person with normal sight from a distance of around two meters.

Why two meters? Because it is a reasonable (maximum) distance from the board you can expect people to be standing at during the daily standup meeting, and when passing by.

In order to achieve this, we have to comply with two simple guidelines:

1) Small amount of text: tasks should have no more than 10 words, as a rule of thumb.

2) If handwritten, text should be written in big, bold, capital letters.

Avoid documenting

Tasks should have no more than 10 words because fitting more text into a 3×3 inch (76×76 mm) standard Post-It forces you to write too small, and we want to avoid that. But there is also another reason. You shouldn’t need to write a lot of text if you understood the nature of tasks and how to use them in your process. Tasks are meant to be pointers to the work that has to be done. Reminders. Not a full analysis or description of what has to be done. The goal of a task is to represent a unit of work. The details of the work should be in the person’s head, having been discovered and defined by having conversations with the other team members. We should avoid documenting tasks on the post-its as much as possible. We should also avoid using sticky notes as “documentation hand-offs” between team members.

The reason for using bold letters is to increase readability of the text. Bold is required because of the distance we want to read from, and the size of the font we want to write in. Writing 10 words on a standard post-it in ballpoint pen in a text size that fills the post-it would result in a font that is too lightweight and disproportioned. Most likely what will happen is that people will write the 10 words in a very small font, thus rendering it illegible from the required distance.

The reason for writing in all capital letters is that lots of people have bad handwriting, or write in cursive when not writing capital letters. This makes a task difficult to read even if it complies with the 10-word rule and is written in big bold letters. We are not trying to learn to decipher your doctor’s handwriting here, thank you. See above example in orange.

Readability creates transparency and trust

Readability of tasks is cornerstone to generating and sustaining the feeling of transparency and trust that taskboards have the potential to transmit. To achieve this, the taskboard has to invite to be read. Avoid the following readability anti-patterns:

• Difficult to read handwriting
• Small text
• Text written in ballpoint pen or pencil
• Text written with colored markers.
• Text written with whiteboard marker or dried up markers.

Read it from your desk

If tasks are readable from two meters without effort, they might also be somewhat readable from a distance of up to 5 or 6 meters. If the taskboard is in the work area, chances are most desks will be located within this radius. This means that team members might be able to read the taskboard from their desk, something desirable. As an example, in the picture below, most desks are within reading distance of their taskboard.

The thick black marker

A black permanent marker with a rounded tip is the only writing tool you will need. If you take care of it well (you close the lid carefully and don’t press too hard on the tip when you write) it will far outlive your project. They are also very cheap and it is not unreasonable to give one to each team member.

There are several brands in the market. I have tested many of them and my top recommendation is the Edding 3000 which I can get for around €1 a piece here in Belgium.

Top contenders and good substitutes are the Sharpie classic and the Artline 70N.

What you are looking for in a quality permanent marker is:

• rich, solid black ink
• ink dries fast, doesn’t smear
• doesn’t bleed on Post-it paper
• lasts long
• cap fits on the back (so you don’t lose it), and is easy to open and close

As an extra, the Edding 3000 and some other brands come in a mini-marker version which is ideal for the purse of the lady Product Owner or the pocket of the gentleman Scrum Master.

Any similarity between this guy and my desk is purely… frightening. I hope these things don’t start moving on their own!

These boards are for a corporate unit that acts as a sort of “enterprise proxy product owner”. They receive business demands from multiple business units, they analyze and classify them, and make a proposal to the customer. They also make recommendations such as build or buy. If the proposal is approved, they send it to development and follow it up into production.

For my first attempt, I was told that there was a special state that had to be highlighted: the “GO/NO GO” state, where a proposal is waiting to be either approved or rejected. So I built this board with a red swimlane to hold kanban cards in that state:

I was very happy with this solution from the visual point of view. Unfortunately they realized that it did not reflect their process accurately so I was asked to tear it down and start over again.

For the next iteration, They identified four states where something vaguely resembling single-piece-flow should theoretically occur. The four states are “quotation” (yellow) , “study” (blue), “contract” (green) and “execute” (red). The colors are the background color I chose as a title for the swimlane to visually distinguish it. For each state, there are three sub-states that are not always the same. This is what a finished board looked like:

Note that I used different colored tape to indicate internal columns from state-boundary columns. In the first board I had used gray tape, which I like more than the blue tape in this picture because it connotes better the idea of sub-columns.

These boards were accepted and populated with kanban cards. Each card is a Super Sticky Post-It, representing a customer demand as it flows from being submitted by the business to being deployed into production. Note how immediately upon populating the board the bottlenecks became visible. This board represent the initial state this team was in when they decided to visualize their workflow.

They also put some sections out of the swimlanes for special things. For example jobs that get cancelled or sent back to the business. Those are the boxes you see on the side.

Here is a closeup of the main part of the board.