Research shows that the visualization of the score influences sports players’ performance during games. That research backs up this article which can help you make your SCRUM visualization more engaging and enjoyable for your team.
Firstly, you need to visualize the sprint storyboard.
The sprint storyboard visualizes the stories and their progress throughout the sprint. It’s common to have 3 kinds of stories: user stories, enablers for automation, infrastructure or exploration work, and finally, maintenance which includes bugs or refactoring work. The stories move from left to right across the columns, most commonly marked as Backlog, Architecture, Build, Test, Document, Demo, and Done.
Here green notes signify user stories, yellow notes mark enablers, and pink are mark maintenance. Orange is reserved for dependencies. Finally, use pictures or avatars of the team members to show who is responsible for what.
Secondly, visualize the team scoreboard.
Whereas the sprint storyboard visualizes the work on a single sprint only, the team scoreboard allows you to look at the whole game, that is, 8 to 12 sprints. For such a board, you need a point system where each story corresponds to a number of points. A classical example of that is the burndown chart.
In the chart, the horizontal axis shows the sprints. The vertical axis shows the amount of work in story points, remaining at the start of each sprint. The red line marks the plan over time and the blue curve shows the actual result.
Finally, you need to visualize so that everyone is engaged.
Nothing in SCRUM is made by the book so let the team be creative in drawing their own scoreboards and improving them over time. The cooler the SCRUM visualization boards are, the more fun the team will have, and more work will be done.
You can then put the plan in digital boards and include more details and metrics. However, the magic with gathering the team around an ESCREO wall is that all the people are standing and communicating dynamically while writing on the wall. The whole team is co-authoring the architecture and the plan. Apply these 3 pieces of advice on SCRUM visualization and you soon will see the tremendous impact on people’s engagement in and joy from work.
Watch the video below to learn how to create your Scrum visualizations so that they promote engagement, teamwork, and open communication.
