Sprint Lanes

[milynnus]

As I had many opportunities to work with people on their Trello boards, most would adopt a left to right work progression with team members updating cards and collaborating with one another through comments, @mention ...etc. You have your own experience.  In several cases, they need to be re-look at their boards to incorporate improvements using Butler or a total re-build. 

Is it a more structured approach where people work in list on a project with cards further down representing subtask be a better and easier way to work with? Team members can still collaborate the way they do now but on different Sprint Lanes. When the project/task is done you simply archive the entire list. 

The objective in Sprint Lanes, as the name suggests, is to incorporate key elements of Sprint inside the lane including a simple way to mark daily sprint, do standup, a record of past reports, owner’s visibility on statuses, automatic WBS etc. An option to spin off Sprint Lanes to different boards are being work on now. 

(1) I would like to hear your experience whether you think the concept of Sprint Lanes will be be a such good idea?

(2) If you can have Sprint Lanes, what else you like to see incorporated in it?

(3) Would you pay to use one or have someone customise one for you. The good news is many you can build one. 

[David Bakkers]

Trello already supports the concept of Sprint Lanes, but instead of being horizontal lanes, they are vertical lists. All you do is name the lists accordingly, like:

• Program Backlog
• Sprint Backlog
• In Progress
• Blocked
• Done

Use the labels for Epics or Features, add in some custom fields for Story Points etc, some Butler commands for basic card management, a custom report page to show burn-down etc and you've got a mini Agile environment.

If you use a browser side tool like Pro for Trello, it has the ability to flip the orientation of the lists to being horizontal and you then get the 'lanes' you describe.

[milynnus]

@David Bakkers 

Let thank you for your feedback. I think my choice of a name is frankly quite bad.

Each list has a top card representing a task with subtasks below it. A checklist to the subtasks and a link to the task in each subtask card - kind of mini wbs in a list. There is marker card “Yesterday”  so between the task card and “Yesterday” are cards being worked on each day - including a Daily Standup card. This mini wbs is constructed automatically from another board using Butler. The requirement in  each subtask are defined here including any specialist assignment. The trigger processing can be time or eg when member is a assigned. 

I will check up the browser extension. Thanks. 

[David Bakkers]

OK, I understand better now.

Sure, that method is an equally valid way to operate a sprint and manage the completion of tasks. That's one of the nice things about Trello, you can use it in many different ways to achieve Agile like project management outcomes; it really comes down to the preferred method of working that the team likes.

[milynnus]

@David Bakkers 

Thanks.

The idea is to allow for more structure to be predefined for your team yet allowing the flexibility to extend work like using checklist from template cards to convert to more tasks but always keeping them in the ‘lane’ aka list. 

[V_Vasilijev]

It might not be wrong naming in the end... I was looking for swimlane topic and found this one. I think you still want ideally a two dimensional board structure with statuses and swimlanes. Otherwise it is better to split into separate boards to reduce clutter, which also is a downside (making things less visual). And by two dimensions I mean somethink like swimlanes for kanban as in this example.