Bring Back Whiteboards: Managing Projects with Digital Whiteboard Tools at SKILup Days 2024

Welcome everyone, and thank you for joining me today. My name is Imran and today we're going to explore how we can manage projects effectively using digital whiteboard tools. 'cause in the age of hybrid work, collaboration is taken on a new dimension and there are loads of different tools like mural, mural concept board that can all help us do things a little bit differently.

Today I'll be focusing on Miro, but there are different tools as well. Um, but I will get to that in a minute. Before we get started, a few words about myself.

Um, I'm Iran. Um, I am freelance agile project manager. I have, uh, over 10 years of experience in project management and more than seven years in agile roles.

Most I work as an agile coach or scrum master, occasionally as a product owner as well. And that's basically what I do. And aside from project management, I also help organizations transition into agile, adopt new practices like OKRs, for example, and scaling organizations.

So today, uh, I want to draw from my experience and uh, show you how I use digital whiteboards as a tool, uh, maybe a little bit more intensively than other people do. Let's have a look at what we will cover today. So we will start by looking at the new reality of collaboration and the challenge of tool overload.

Next, we'll go through each phase of a project and see how whiteboards can support your work. And then we will also build a sample board, uh, for your project. Finally, we'll discuss some of the potential downsides of using whiteboard tools and compare them, uh, to traditional tools like Jira or MS.

Office. Ready? Then let's get started.

Alright, uh, back in the non-REM remote day, a lot of my project work used to be done physically, so I remember walking, uh, through the office building to my desk and just see what's plastered with gun charts, Kanban boards, discovery work, and a lot more. Now things have changed for better, I think. Um, so we have a lot of digital tools right now.

Those, uh, have revolutionized collaboration, given us more flexibility and new ways to work together. But with so many tools like Jira, slack teams, office outlook and so on, it's hard to keep track of projects that become more complex. Studies even show that a tool switching between those apps, um, can decrease productivity by up to 40%.

And on average, one company uses 88 different tools in total. So that's a lot of overloads, uh, for a lot of people oftentimes spent searching it for information instead of just working with it even creatively. So today we're asking, are we missing the simplicity of traditional whiteboards and can we bring some of that magic back into the digital world?

So in my opinion, digital whiteboards have the potential to combine best of both worlds. So you have the ability to collaborate visually, which is good for a lot of people, including myself. I like to work visually as well, and they're also flexible.

So teams can use them in any way that suits them best. And uh, it also works well for distributed teams. And lastly, they also have a lot of integration tools nowadays.

So you can integrate your Jira, you can integrate your messaging apps, you can integrate them as office, and that gives us a structure of tra traditional project management tools combined with visual accessibility. So that was a lot of talk. Let's now have a look at how that would look like in the real world.

So I will go through a few project phases, not all of them, um, and just show you examples of, uh, frames that we have used in the past, uh, to just scribble on whiteboards instead of sending files to one another. So every project starts with initiation. We want to define the high level goals and business value.

Traditionally we'd create some kind of documents. So you put on a word file, put, maybe put it on SharePoint, have Google doc stolen confluence. Um, and then that's kind of easy to get to, but even easier is just having them all on the whiteboard.

Um, so in a whiteboard tool, you can just put all this information and visualize it also. So a single whiteboard can house the project charter, the team roles the objectives, and that's just really great for visibility in alignment. So this is how something like that would look like.

So here's just a regular project framing template. You can use this one, you can also use another one. Um, whatever suits your needs.

So if you have other dimensions that are more relevant in your organization, you can swap them out. And what's really neat is that you can treat this as a living document. So you can take this exact board, share the link and go through different meetings, refining it with stakeholders, with your team, um, and uh, just have a single source of truth.

Once you've done that, you usually take the next step towards project planning. And then the project planning. Uh, we try to identify and prioritize tasks.

And traditionally this has been done in tools like Microsoft Project, Excel, maybe Jira. Um, those tools are really good for task detail and structure, but they can become difficult to manage visually. So in a whiteboard tool, you can prioritize your tasks, you can create a roadmap like it has been done here.

You can create kan boards, flow charts to map out dependencies, whatever fits your needs. And this gives, uh, everyone an immediate understanding of what's important and where the team's focus. So you can just keep editing what you have.

So now that we've planned our project, obviously we're gonna work on it. Um, and in agile we do this not all the time, but mostly in sprints. Um, so we plan the work, we build the work and within we review the product increment if everything works out well.

So normally we'd use something like Jira or similar tools to track each sprint, but with whiteboards we can map out the entire sprint plan, track tasks as they progress and just be more flexible. So flexibility is the key here. Teams can design the board layout to fit the way they work, and this allows for adaptability over time.

For instance, we can have a daily standup section here or even track blockers visually. So this is an example of how you could do it. Um, you can see, uh, some kind of notes on the left hand side and the right hand side, whatever, uh, suit your team needs.

Um, a lot of these tools also have integrated, uh, tools that help you during agile ceremonies. So you have stuff for estimation built in, you can track your dependencies, everything can be done in here. And this example is also pretty neat because this one, if you look very, very closely, um, you can maybe figure out that all those little stickies, the tasks, they are actually Jira tickets.

So, um, in the background, the Jira instance linked and you can basically just use them in this ui. UI is a big point because the developers I've worked with, they hate the Jira ui. Um, it's not, uh, the gusto.

Uh, so what we do a lot is we put everything in Jira so it's documented, it also fits the rest of the organization, which works a lot with Jira as well. But we use the myro boards to just do our own work, right? So the team can use it as a daily board and uh, everything is very, very easy and very user friendly and lots of flexibility there as well.

And then after sprinting you have the retrospective, which is where these tools just shine. So, uh, here's just a amalgamation of different layouts, um, and templates. There are plenty of pre-made retrospectives that you can use.

Um, and they also have a lot of built-in functionality, again, like anonymous voting time, boxing and so on and so on. So this is basically the, the core premise, uh, to use this tool. And this is how you can basically do your everyday project work, uh, in whiteboarding tools.

Apart from that, there are also unlimited options, obviously. So they have these tools are very versatile, so you can use them for other courses within or around your project. They're very good for large and complex workshops.

You can do pi plannings with them, you can do strategy sessions. You can also, uh, incorporate research UX discoveries and you can even do documentation in there or you can put your process documentation in there. What we do a lot is technical architecture.

We put the in there and all those items can be interconnected, so you can have them all on one board and whatever you want to look at, you just have a single source. So these are a few options. Now let me show you how I would build one of those boards.

So this is an example of a board that I have built, um, similarly, not, it's not the same obviously, but the board is somewhat similar to the boards that I've, uh, worked with with my previous teams and projects. And uh, I would just walk you through it. So in the middle you can see kind of a welcome box.

Uh, you can slip your team logo on there and then link to other areas on your port. This helps a lot with navigation because you will start to see that a lot of content comes together, but it's not always easy to navigate those ports. Having a site map makes things easier there.

So then we have the main area, the task board. This is where everyday work happens. So we have a kan board there, for example, and, uh, put our tasks on there like you've seen on the previous slides, and uh, you can surround it with whatever you feel like your team needs.

On the left hand side, uh, we have everything that feeds into that. So you can have your project charted in there, your long-term strategy. You can even facilitate the project kickoff on this board, which I've done in the past as well.

Um, and just have everything that actually led to this group of people coming together and working, uh, on the same board as well. Then we have what I like to call the preparation area. We have the backlog here.

We have a refinement space and sometimes during refinement we learn that some stories are not really ready to be executed. So we, we need more discovery. So what we do is we put the discovery right there.

So you have a discovery area, uh, where you can discover all the stories you want to work on or the features you would like to implement, and you have everything just right next to each other. Then moving on the right hand side, we have some kind of documentation. So this is where we can display health metrics of the project or of the sprint.

Uh, we cannot document the decisions taken in our meetings, uh, because we have a lot of people that cannot always attend every meeting because maybe they're only in the project for 50%, but then they have the decision log right there. Uh, you can also take meeting notes. You can write down people you need to contact or your stakeholders who to contact for what and just have it have everything in one place.

If you all want to go one step further, you can also put your retrospectives on this board. Uh, so with all the templates that I've shown you before, you can just do your retros on this board and just have everything in one place. One thing to consider though is, uh, who has access to the sport?

So what we do is, uh, we keep these boards very transparent so everybody in the organization has the link to the board, has access to the board, at least read access, and uh, can have a look though obviously having retrospectives on there is not the best way to go. So we have a separate board for that. But aside from that, you can just put anything on there that, uh, works for you when structured thoughtfully.

These boards can provide clarity for everyone involved and have everything in one place. So it's very easy, it's very flexible, but it can also be a little bit overwhelming, which leads us to the dangers and pitfalls of these tools. So they do offer great possibilities, um, but they do come with some risks.

So first of all, they lack the rigid structure of tools like Jira or MS project, which can lead to an inconsistency. This is the backside of having all the flexibility there. So, um, you get some flexibility, but then again, if you have the need for more structure, then these type tools are not ate for that as well.

Another issue is visual platter. So imagine the board that we had before, um, there's a lot of stuff going on on there, so, um, it is very hard to navigate those things sometimes. So having a navigation at some point, um, makes sense and helps with that.

Also, those whiteboard tools have usually very limited tracking and reporting capabilities. So let's see, you want to measure your lead times or cycle times and you just work with stickies. Um, then obviously you would have to do by hand.

So you don't have the burn down charts that you usually have in, in tools like Jira and um, dependencies are not updated automatically. So there's some manual work though. You can circumvent that with linking those services in the background.

So like I said, uh, what we do it, we have a Jira instance running in the back and uh, then just use myro for the front end and also for all the other stuff that we are doing in the project aside from from tasks. So linking those things can, uh, leverage your productivity as well. I've already talked about confidentiality, so this can be another concern, especially if you have sensitive information on the board.

So make sure you know who has access and uh, what can be edited by anyone. So this um, usually takes some kind of administration efforts. So all in all, it's very important to find what works best for you and your team, balancing the flexibility of the whiteboards and making the tool work for you.

With that, I want to thank you for joining me today to explore the role of digital whiteboards and agile project management. I hope the session has given you some new ideas of how to structure your project visually while avoiding some pit words fault. We discussed.

If you'd like to connect or discuss this further, feel free to, uh, reach out. And other than that, I hope you have a great skill update. Thank you.