How I allowed my team to come up with a better plan than I likely would have

Progress Boards are a new element we have incorporated into our project workflow.

At first we struggled with the creation of the boards. We looked at several different versions and could not come up with something that would suit.

As part of OpenAgile, I (with direction from David and Mike) put it to the team to brainstorm a new version of the Progress Board that would be more transparent as to how we were tracking against our goals. We do not use Scrum exclusively as we are developing applications using a pre-set software so many traditional boards do not work.

After a week we returned to the discussion and a team member came up with the traffic light colour coding that we now use on our board. Part of our BI suite is traffic light displays that let customers how they are tracking towards plan. The Red-Yellow-Green coding lets us know exactly where we are in the process. Green are completed tasks, Yellow are tasks in progress and Red are tasks that we have yet to start.

Now anyone, internal or external, can see how we are tracking in a matter of seconds without the need for a long drawn-out status report. We benefitted from putting the challenge out to the team which provided us with an excellent solution as opposed to the one first discussed that would use a combination of several boards and categories.

The lesson learned is that by putting the challenge to the team and allowing them to come up with their own solutions without fear of criticism, resulted in a superior solution.

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