Scrum Master: Wall of Work

As mentioned in a previous post I have been given the role of Scrum Master at work for a specific feature that we are going to deliver.

As anyone who takes on a new position I wanted to make an impact and try out some different approaches to enable the team to work as efficiently as possible.

There are a series of videos that are available through work about agile development. One of the videos featured "Walls of work". There were a few different types of walls of work, such as:

• ​Release Wall
• Iteration Wall

​I thought I would give it a try and see how well it works.

Iteration Wall

I decided that I would start using an Iteration Wall to track our progress and easily visualise the tasks that need doing for each story.

The layout for an Iteration Wall is as follows:

At the start of the iteration you would create post-it notes for all the tasks for a story and put them in the not started section. As people start working on particular tasks you would move them across and eventually into the completed section.

As new tasks came up they would be written down and added to the iteration wall. It is a good way for visualising all the tasks that you are focusing on for the iteration and is quite rewarding when you can get up and move the post-its across.

Fail Fast!

So we have given this Iteration Wall a good go in this last iteration but we came to the conclusion that it wasn't really working for us.

Our scrum team all sit in the same area and the wall was placed where everyone could see it, which was great for tracking. The issue is that we go to a separate meeting room to hold our daily scrums as there are other teams sharing our area as well. I think the iteration wall would have been much more effective if we could stand in front of it at the scrum and update/add things during the scrum.

As we didn't really have the opportunity to do this then the wall often became out of date and then required extra work to update it.

Cheers