When ToDo, In-Progress, and Done Aren’t Good Enough

On a task board there are two places that we can capture additional detail regarding the tasks we are working on:

1. In the tasks and stories
2. In the categories that we use to organize the tasks and stories

The common starting point for categories on a task board are: ToDo, In-Progress, and Done. Obviously this works for the great majority of cases because the categories are so vague. It’s the starting point for most teams that are using a task board for the first time. However it isn’t long before we discover that some things don’t fit this model well. For instance many tasks commonly take place in multiple ordered steps. Look around you, it happens all the time. Trying to capture tasks that have more than three steps to them on a task board starts to feel awkward. People start to ask if there should be another column on the board. The answer is probably yes.

You see, if you resist and decide not to track additional legitimate state for a task, then in essence you are keeping that information invisible. State is important. Hidden state violates the principle of transparency that we are trying to promote on agile projects. So you need to find a way to represent it on your board. There are lots of mechanisms to reflect additional state on a task board:

1. Add new swim lanes
2. Use color on the task/story cards
3. Use labels or stickies on the task/story cards
4. Additional text on the card
5. Additional task cards

All of these techniques will provide additional state information to your task board. A common symptom of a board that isn’t conveying enough state information is when the stories tend to get “stuck” under the In-Progress category for long periods of time. Now there are lots of reasons this can happen, but one reason the task/story may not be moving is because you don’t have an adequate way to express the state of the progress being made on the work. The developer may be making lots of progress, but none of it is reflected in the task board. When this happens, you need to consider that perhaps the board is not displaying information that would make the progress visible.

I was reminded of this today when looking at a team’s task board. Stuff was sitting in the In-Progress” category for too long. However I knew that the team was making great progress. So they weren’t lazy. And they were keeping the board up to date. So what was the problem? There wasn’t enough information on the board to properly reflect the work that the team was doing. As a result, there were impediments that we couldn’t even recognize because we didn’t have any way of showing progress on the hidden states. Being blocked on “In-Progress” is not very informative. Being blocked on the “certification request” is much more explicit.

So the next time that the team seems like they are stalled with their task board, consider changing the way the information is presented. Adding a few new categories could help the team identify some of the hidden issues that are currently blocking them.