Project Management Framework: How To Set Up Your ScrumBan Board With MeisterTask

The Agile Manifesto, with its core twelve principles, set the stage for what would eventually become the Agile Software development framework used by most companies across the world.

As software companies have taken over many industries, other business units within those organizations also adapted to the Agile Manifesto.

In short, where in the past the Agile Development Methodology was primarily used by software engineers. Today, also other business units can leverage this methodology.

Scrum in a nutshell

Scrum moves around three key profiles:

• The Product Owner, managing the completed increments of work.
• The ScrumMaster, helping the team perform at the highest level.
• The Development Team: usually organized around a flat structure, where there is no boss.

The Scrum process is also made of five main events:

• The Sprint:  2-4 weeks period.
• Sprint Planning, meetings to assess which part of the product can be completed.
• The Daily Stand-up: a short meeting of no more than 15 minutes to evaluate the progress of the project.
• The Sprint Review: a demonstration to present the work completed during the sprint.
• The Retrospective:  final team meeting to assess what worked and what didn’t to improve the process.

Another key element of the Scrum are its artifacts or:

• Product Backlog, usually a to-do list consisting of work items
• Sprint Backlog comprising things to be completed during the sprint
• Increment, comprising items completed after the last software release

All this will be accompanied by a set of rules defined by the whole team.

How do you set up your ScrumBan Board?

The Meister Suite is a set of web-based collaboration tools designed to make teamwork fun. This year, I’m partnering with Meister, the German software company that develops these tools, because I’ve first got to know them when I was looking for ways to order my ideas visually.

Their MindMeister tool helped me to sketch business models visually.

You can use the other suite, MeisterTask to build a Scrum-based board, which also leverages on Kanban, to make your team work extremely effectively.

For seamless team collaboration, you might want to use the Scrum methodology in combination with Kanban (ScrumBan). The MeisterTask team explains how.

Start from a product backlog

A Kanban board can start with a “Product Backlog” which is the place where you will compile the user stories, so that product owners can work and have an overview of those stories.

Move along the sprint events

At the same time you can set up the sprint plans, and as the development team works through the user stories they can add those cards in other parts of the boards to plan completion of each user story.

Close user stories and move on

Once gone through this process developers can work through the user stories, by defining their level of completion, which usually happens when the user story has been demoed to the product owner, and the product owner has accepted it!

With this simple process you can build up a project management board that helps your team to be more productive.

Key takeaways

• The Agile Manifesto comprising twelve core principles has become the foundation of methodologies like Scrum and Kanban, which laid the foundation for many software companies’ success.
• As more organizations turned into software companies, Agile methodologies also started to permeate other business units. So, not only development teams but also other internal teams can use them to be more effective
• For an effective project management board, a combination of Scrum and Kanban can help make your team super productive.
• We saw how to set that up with MeisterTask.