Using Miro as virtual team board
For our development teams, we wanted a visual way to share goals and objectives. In a remote environment, we have refined over the course of a year a board that has stick long enough to become an organisational central point.
At Mia-Platform we use Jira to organize our sprints. We tend to have a short backlog and epics are refined as we approach the implementation.
During the sprint review and planning, teams review past sprint goals and discuss the next ones on the Miro board. Then we move to Jira to detail stories related to the objective.
We are aware of the duplicated and potentially misaligned, information. The board represents an instant picture of each team status. Even without knowing the specific content of the different projects, you can immediately evaluate:
- number of in-progress activities,
- closest deadlines,
- performance trend,
- blocked activities,
- the forecasted workload for the next few weeks.
How is made
The team board is composed of:
- a frame with sprint high-level objectives and deadlines,
- a frame dedicated to the monitoring of performances and indicators which is presented every sprint review to the development team,
- a section dedicated to the team identity, a place to brainstorm and keep team memories.
For each team, lanes show the implementations that are open or that will start in the short term. On the columns are listed sprints (past, present and future). In different cells are then placed high-level objectives for each sprint. The size of the post-its and the space present in the cell constrains to keep goals to a high level.
We have adopted this colour convention:
- yellow post-it for high levels of objectives,
- orange indicate deadlines,
- pink post-it show an external dependency currently blocked,
- during the sprint review, we pass through all the objectives post-it and turn them green for those achieved and fuchsia for those that need to be rescheduled for subsequent sprints.
Information radiator in a remote environment
The main objective is to collaboratively maintain artefacts that keep information visible to all stakeholders. All team members as well as virtual passers-by can see the latest information at a glance.
Having the objectives clear and potentially ready to be worked on for the next 2–3 sprints is important for team performance. This provides us with enough flexibility when external factors change our plans.
The absence of “ready-to-work” objectives may be a signal for the product owner that needs to work on removing impediments and plan the discovery of new activities.
The post-it colours facilitate the identification of deadlines and help the team evaluate if the goal is achievable, also having the workload of precedent sprints as reference.
Colours also help to evaluate if the work planned for the next sprints is blocked by external dependencies. In this case, it becomes a priority to make sure that the goal is workable or to plan the goal for later.
The team’s performance naturally emerges from the post-it colour trend. The presence of too many fuchsia post-its indicates that the team is not achieving the objectives set and that there is something that may be worth investigating.
The number of lanes with goals planned in the sprint shows the number of projects open in parallel. This too can be a wake-up call for the team that is working too many things at the same time with subsequent inefficiencies.
Weekly, we show the board to our reports and discuss about opportunities and get advice on impediments.
Team board at scale
We started using this board over a year ago in a team of 6, working together on a few projects. Over the year the team has grown a lot becoming an area with multiple teams working with multiple customers.
The board scaled up with the team, becoming also a tool used by all the area product owners to have visibility about the in-progress and scheduled activities, to coordinate each other and facilitate flexibility in case of emergencies.
Written by: Jacopo Martolini and Edoardo Bevilacqua
