rose.pruyne

Everyone likes to think that the meeting they're sitting in is productive and staying on track. One of the best things about using a Kanban system is that it provides a highly visual representation of your team's progress. I've found that Trello works great for conducting meetings, work sessions, and other group activities. After all, what is a meeting but a short-duration collaborative project? If you go into every meeting with an agenda — as you should — then you have a predefined set of items for the To Do column. Then it is a matter of simply moving them through the steps required to bring them to conclusion. Furthermore, you can use Trello features such as commenting and voting to capture all sorts of information during the session. Here are a couple of the meetings and work sessions we handle using Trello: Agile Iteration Planning The main part of our Iteration Planning is done by the entire team. Once that is completed, the Scrum Master takes care of a...

Trello  is a highly visual, easy-to-use collaboration tool that lets you organize projects using  Kanban boards. Trello makes it simple to break down projects into components and components into checklists. You can track progress on each component, comment, even vote on tasks or ideas. Fog Creek Software, the maker of Trello, says it will be offered for free, forever. Here are a couple of the ways that our team uses this tool: Project Ideas These are ideas we pitch to our sponsors and stakeholders.  The columns: New Ideas: This is where the idea lives until it grows some legs. Documented Ideas: We've done technical research and requirements gathering. Proposed Ideas: We've pitched the idea. Approved Ideas: Sponsors and stakeholders like the idea. It can now be moved to the Project Backlog. Project Backlog Our Agile team keeps a Trello board for tracking the state of each project. The columns: Accepted: All have agreed that this is a project we...

So, your team has been practicing Agile for a while, but it's not making a whole lot of difference. Excessive planning sucks up weeks of time before the work even starts. Releases still take forever to accomplish, and you are not delivering value to the customer but once every few months. Iterations don't stay inside their time box but straggle all over the place. Has anything really changed? Maybe not. Because maybe you are using Fake Agile. In the big and overlapping world of The Agiles and their ilk, teams can adopt and fine tune a combination methods — team roles from Scrum, user stories from Lean, project boards from Kanban, pair programming from Extreme. But that does not mean you can borrow one or two techniques and call yourself Agile. You absolutely need to put in place the following: An iterative process in which the customer is an integral part of the team. Base changes and enhancements on customer feedback. Then do it again. And again.  A tea...