Task Boards are commonly sued by agile teams to manage their workload. They’re an incredibly simple tool for keeping everyone informed of where tasks are at and who’s working on them.
What are Task Boards?
At the most basic level, a task boards contain three columns:
- To Do - Tasks to do, with the highest priority at the top.
- In Progress - Tasks that are currently in progress.
- Done - Tasks that are finished.
Tasks move from left to right along a task board until they end up in Done. Tasks that are in progress should always have an assignee to show who is working on it unless progress is blocked, in which case it should clearly be marked as blocked.
Some task boards might have more than one in progress column, each representing a distinct stage in the process work goes through to get to "done".
Here's an example of a simple task board built in Notion...
Mohamad Chamas
Rhys Black🔴 BLOCKED
Why do task boards work so well?
- They are an information radiator - if we keep them visible, they help people understand what's happening in the team at a glance.
- They passively communicate a lot of information, reducing the need for status updates.
- They make it clear who is working on what at that moment.
- They make it obvious when tasks are blocked.
- They visually show how much work has been done so far at a glance, and therefore give a rough indication of the team's progress.
- If you use a digital tool like Notion or Trello, you can attach relevant documents and links to the task so they're easy for people to find.
Using Task Boards
Here are some basic rules that will help you use task boards well...
- Tasks on the backlog should generally not have assignees - this means anyone can pick them up and work on them.
- All tasks that are in progress should have an assignee - otherwise, they are not really in progress.
- Avoid working on too many tasks at the same time. It's usually best to work on one at a time.
- If you are blocked on a task and can't progress it, mark it as blocked and pick up another one.
- Keep the task board up-to-date.
Breaking down tasks on the backlog
For task boards to work properly, it's really important that the tasks available to be picked up by team members are clear enough that anyone can pick them up and just get on with them. This means someone needs to make sure those at the top of the backlog are granular enough and contain enough information.
In a team using scrum, this will often be done in a sprint planning meeting, before tasks are moved from the product backlog to the sprint backlog.
In teams using a continuous approach (ie without sprints), this needs to be done on a continuous basis.
There are lots of strategies for breaking down large tasks (sometimes called Epics into smaller do-able tasks, but these will depend on the team and type of work you're doing.
The key thing to remember is that tasks that are ready to be picked up should be well planned and detailed enough that someone can work on them without needing to clarify the details.
Definitions of Done
At it's most basic level, a Definition of Done is a checklist that must be completed before a task is moved into Done on the task board.
Here's an example from a team building a simple website. Each page needs to have the following check before it goes live...
DoD for New Feature ✅
Kanban Work In progress limits (optional watching)
You'll sometimes see teams using Kanban apply work in Progress limits to columns in their task boards. The video below explains how and why these work.
