Arb Design » The Digital Planning Board

In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. - Dwight D. Eisenhower

The Digital Planner is a planning tool for small teams developed by Arb Design. It’s a very simple tool to manage and visualize tasks and progress on a weekly basis.

The Analog Planning Board
The planning board hails from the planning activities in Agile Software Development but could be used in most projects where tasks are divided amongst a group.

Analog planning board
An example of a planning board

Demo

Low tech technology like index cards, colored sticker dots and a whiteboard is a fast way to visualize and change a plan. The Digital Planning Board is not meant as a replacement of this but as a tool for distributed teams, enhanced client communication and quicker storage and search functionality.

Using User Stories To Define Tasks
The work planned for an iteration is divided into tasks with a clearly defined deliverable and these tasks are represented as User Stories. User stories are represented by story cards and will not hold all information about a given task but enough information to remind involved parties what the requirements are. Ron Jeffries describes it as “The card is a token representing the requirement”.

The Basic Rules of a Planning Board
A planning board is managed using these basic rules:

A lane represent a person or a team.
Blocks represent a task
The size of a block displays the estimated time to complete the task.

The colors indicate the status of the card:

Not Started
In Progress
Complete
Blocked

The user stories being worked on in an iteration and their status in development are clearly displayed on a public board. When workers start working on a user story they mark that story card on the planning board with a yellow sticker dot. When workers complete a story they mark that story on the planning board with a green sticker dot. If the workers encounter a problem on a story that blocks their progress then they mark that story on the status board with a red sticker dot. And move on to their next story.

The Digital Planning Board
The digital planning board has the same basic features as the analog, you can move cards around, change the status color, change the text of a card or remove a card from the board. The advantages by using a digital board is that distributed agile teams will be able to see what the current board looks like in a browser. A remote team will be able to update their lane to let the rest of the team know their status. In most agile software projects the costumer is a very integrated part of the process and giving her continual access to the planning board can improve the communication. Bigger projects can have well over 500 story cards. Using a Digital Planning Board it is possible to sort, tag and search stories a lot faster than using analog cards.

Tasks can be moved around freely but adding a task to a lane will push the subsequent tasks further down the list.

An example of the Digital Planning Board

Advantages of Using a Planning Board
Using simple visual clues The Digital Planning board can be used for

Selecting scope – what is in and out of the interation/project
Ressource allocation
Establish priority – establish order and dependencies, late stories may never be used
It sets up practical constraints
- No work is done unless it is on the board
- If the plan changes you need to move a card to make room for a new task
Facilitate important communication – Identifies new story cards to be written, or existing to be reestimated

About Arb Design
We specialize in software user interaction and design. That is to say we help organizations satisfy the needs of their user base through design. We produce online, desktop and mobile application designs targeted to a domain’s primary users. We live by the motto Useful Through Design and believe that a good design should allow users to easily, intuitively and efficiently navigate a system and perform their goals.