All development teams have an opportunity to improve their stand-up meetings and reduce the number of overall meetings and interruptions the team has on a weekly basis. We all know that meetings will be better run when those leading the meeting come prepared, yet why do so many not prepare for their stand-up meeting?
‘Walk the Board’ is a fundamental concept that will allow you to enable your team to be more efficient.
What is Walking the Board?
Walking the board is a process where you review all tasks currently in progress with your team, starting from those closest to being finished first and working from right to left across your board. The goal of this is to keep the team unblocked and efficient and to minimize the chance of a misstep happening in the development workflow.
Often time, Walking the Board is a concept for how to run a stand-up, which is also a great practice and an option to consider following. However, the proposition made in this post is that this task should happen by someone – anyone – on the team individually before the stand-up begins. Usually, this person is the Product Manager, Scrum master or Technical Lead.
Why it’s important?
It saves time and effort! That means cost & time savings for the business, increased the chance that you’ll meet project deadlines, higher throughput, and happier teams. If no one properly ensures the team is following an optimal flow, mistakes WILL HAPPEN that can lead to lost effort, inefficiency, or technical debt.
How do you ‘Walk the Board’?
Step 1: Review each ticket individually and ask yourself:
- What is the current status of the ticket? Is it clear?
- What is the next step for the ticket? Is it clear?
- Are there any issues with the ticket that should be addressed? Example issues could be:
- It’s blocked
- Confusing requirements or purpose
- It’s not updated
- Not following the teams established process
Step 2: After doing this with each ticket, appropriately update the ticket or take a note with your list of action items or questions for the stand-up:
- Questions to ask during the stand-up on particular tickets
- Tickets that require a discussion after the stand-up
- Action items for you to take (testing, requirements clarifications, ticket cleanup, etc)
If you do this effectively, you will have greater awareness and status on what your team is working on, and save yourself time throughout the week since you won’t have to constantly check on the status of tickets. Additionally, you will have provided yourself with a list of action items, which you can appropriately prioritize against everything else you have to get done or delegate out to other team members.
But this will take too long? I have too many tickets to review!
This is not a good excuse. It’s like people complaining they don’t have time to exercise. Wake up 30 minutes early, get to work, and GET IT DONE. If you either can’t spend more time or can’t finish in 30 minutes, then finish after stand-up.
If you can’t finish after stand-up, then start where you left off the next day and finish the rest of the board.
After doing this for a week, you will find that:
Your review will happen faster and faster, since you constantly know the status of where things are through your stand-ups and your individual walk the board.
You save time throughout your day because you’re already up to date on current issues, and you’ve prioritized your investigation of other issues for your team.
If you still find you have too much Work in Progress, consider limiting it so that developers are not working on too many tasks at once. This is a core principle of Kanban which can be applied to any process, and can help increase the further efficiency of your team.
Summary
Product Managers and Scrum masters are responsible for being facilitators of good process for their teams. The ‘Walk the Board’ strategy is a fundamental way to keep up to date on tasks, and allows you to ensure team members are following the process, staying unblocked, and working together efficiently.
About Peter Herr
Peter is an experienced Delivery Manager and Product Manager with 10+ years in technology consulting, notably spending 3 years managing and launching new high-profile technology products for the Obama White House.
As the Director, Product Delivery at Plusgrade, Peter oversees all product implementations and focuses on improving delivery practices. Plusgrade is a startup focused on increasing ancillary revenue for partners in the travel industry.