Start With Stickies, Not With Tools

The beginning of a Scrum adoption is always an exciting time for teams. The promise of what the future holds, a new way of working, and the possibility of a better way to do what the team loves always holds great potential.

But in this excitement, many teams rush into selecting a tool that will help them run their projects in this brave new world. This isn’t surprising, there’s no shortage of agile project management tools available and many of them shine in demos. But choosing a project management tool too soon confines your team to that tool’s approach, rather than allowing your team to discover the approach that works the best for them.

This can lead your team down the path of confusing discussions about the “right way” of operating and how the team can warp their process to meet the expectations of the tool. All of which can lead to a lot of unwarranted frustration with the team’s entire adoption of Scrum.

Starting on the Right Foot

So how do you avoid becoming a slave to your tool? Instead of choosing a tool too early in your Scrum adoption, begin your process as lightweight as possible. This can be done by simply creating a Scrum board on an empty wall in your team area from painter’s tape and a few pads of sticky notes.

When choosing the columns for your board just ask yourself what steps your team must take to deliver a piece of functionality to the market. We can assume that each feature must be coded, but what happens then? Is it peer reviewed by another member of your development team? Is it tested before release?

Whatever your delivery flow is, capture each step as a column on your Scrum board. Creating your board by hand gives you the flexibility to map out exactly what your delivery process looks like so it’s visible to everyone involved.

Only after you’ve discovered the process that works for your team should you consider finding a tool that supports that process.

Taking Responsibility for Your Process

But there’s another benefit to managing your team’s process by hand. Creating a board manually also requires your team to take responsibility for ensuring that the board is updated and always reflects the current state of each piece of work in progress. Is that authentication routine really still in progress? I thought it was tested yesterday? And what about the latest database migration scripts? The board says that they’re in progress but are you really working on them? Weren’t you busy with a production issue for the last two days? By forcing your team to take responsibility for updating the board each day you increase the odds that the Scrum board accurately reflects the work in progress.

Too many teams take a passive approach to their adoption of the Scrum Framework, relying on their tooling to manage the heavy lifting while they change very little about their way of working. The obvious result of this is that if the team changes very little about how they actually work, then very little actually changes. But by taking a hands-on and manual approach to tracking their project the team is forced to take responsibility for the progress they make day to day and to face tough questions when that progress isn’t what they expected it to be.

Limitations Breed Simplicity

But there is potentially an even bigger benefit to skipping an electronic tool early in the team’s adoption. This is that the natural limitations of a physical board drive a simplicity that simply can’t be matched by an electronic tool.

Electronic tools breed complexity with their multitude of options and seemingly infinite ability to capture detailed information. But a physical board naturally limits your team to focusing only on what is critical to their process. Do the columns on the Scrum board really reflect each step that your team takes to deliver a piece of functionality? If items seem to stay in certain columns for days with no obvious progress then you may be missing a step. Or, maybe you’ll notice that you seem to be trying to fit a lot of information on the front of a sticky note. What if instead you simply captured the essence of what you’d like that item to accomplish and let the rest of the detail naturally emerge from a conversation between the Development Team and the Product Owner.

Many of the natural aspects of working with a physical board that are often initially considered to be limitations, turn out to be advantages when looked at from the broader perspective of the team’s overall process.

Letting Your Team Drive the Process

The surge in popularity of Scrum and other agile approaches have resulted in a flood of great agile project management tooling on the market, many of which have some great features and amazing functionality. While these tools can add value to a team who has reached a certain level of maturity in their agile approach, they are almost always the wrong choice for a team just getting started on their agile journey.

Use your team’s Scrum adoption as an opportunity to press the reset button and take the chance to discover the process that works best for them, rather than simply jumping into the process prescribed by the tool that demos the best. You’ll find that the long term result is a team that’s much more confident, happier, and effective in how they work. Because at the end of the day, your tool should support your process...not the other way around.