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Agile/Jira Best Practice: Single or Mulitple Boards for large diverse team?

ialexand
Contributor
December 2, 2018

From an Agile perspective: Is it better to use one single board for an entire  (large and diverse) team/project or multiple boards for different sub-teams that share the same workflow?

 

Background:

I run a support team where we take on:  project work, investigation/tickets and bug fixes/code patches. We support multiple applications and service both internal and external customers.

We used to 3 boards:

One for the issue backlog where stakeholder could view and prioritise issues for us.

One for the investigation team

One for the developers.

All boards are part of the same project and share the same workflow and issue types and an issue would and would often move across all boards (if necessary) during its lifecycle.

  • Backlog board: 150+ of items in the backlog board, but managed and maintained by multiple stakeholders managing their own issues.
  • investigation board:  Typically with 25 or so issues in priority order leaving scope for unplanned work each period. With items either go to "done" or "Dev queue" when required
  • Dev prioritised list -> in progress -> done  : Typically with 15 items in priority order

This worked quite well until a new manager took over and insisted that we work off one board as that "is the agile way". Now we have a board with 6 columns, multiple statuses within each column and around 200 items on a single board.

As you can imagine, this even with 25+ quick filters, this is virtually impossible to manage. and I'd like to go back to a system that worked well for us and stakeholders.

I can find anything, anywhere that suggests Agile/Kanban best practice is to put all issues on one board.  But If anyone can point me towards any Kanban/Agile articles that might suggest one board is better or worse than multiple, I'd be most grateful.

1 answer

0 votes
Ismael Jimoh
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December 2, 2018

Hi @ialexand,

I would advise going back to a method that works for the team for the time being.

You can explain to the manager why you work that way and show him the problems faced with having a single board and should he insist on a single board, I would suggest inquiring why a single board is better?

If it is for better visibility and transparency(the only scenario that comes to mind)?

  • Add in swimlanes to the quick filters for a further drill down.

Else the answer would be creating an extra board with All information as he requested  for all to have an overview and then each team/role uses separate board. Remember boards serve simply as visualizers and the important thing here is task should be done in a way that is most comfortable for the team and business without adding complexity.

ialexand
Contributor
December 9, 2018

Thanks for the answer, Very much appreciated.

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