Toolbox for the Agile Coach

How great teams visualize their work

Jimmy
Crisp Publishing Janlén
Toolbox for the Agile Coach
Visualization Examples
How great teams visualize their work
(Version 1.01)

© 2015 Jimmy Janlén

ISBN 978‐91‐88063‐01‐4
Illustrations: Jimmy Janlén
Printed by: Bergs grafiska, Stockholm, 2015
Published by: Crisp Publishing
Toolbox for the Agile Coach – Visualization Examples Jimmy Janlén

Welcome
This book is filled with visualization examples for teams to improve
collaboration and communication, as well as shaping behaviors. It is
written for people and teams working within an agile software
development context.

The pages within only depict examples. Nothing else. No deep

theoretical explanations. No explanation of Agile or Scrum. No
references to Gamification. No discussion on how the brain
interprets visual input or how our behaviors are influenced by visual
information. There are other books written on those topics.

If a page contains an arrow (➨) in the upper corner, it means that

there is a link to a blog or an article with more information to be
found on the page “More information”.

If a page contains a heart (❤) you will find a person or team credited
on the page “Sources of inspiration”.

The examples in this book might be perceived as if they are the best
and only way of doing things. Of course that is not true. The
examples are not best practice. They are only suggestions. You need
to adapt them to your team’s context and needs.

This book is not intended to be read cover to cover. Browse. Jump

back and forth. Pick what you like. Combine the ideas whichever way
you find useful. Experiment and evaluate. Evolve or throw away.

Have fun!

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Content

Introduction
Welcome! p3

The juicy stuff

Examples p 7 ‐ 104

Appendixes...
But hey, what if… p 105
Example index p 106 ‐ 108
More information p 109
Sources of Inspiration p 110 ‐112
Reading tips p 113
Acknowledgments p 114 ‐ 115
More from Jimmy Janlén p 117
Your own examples p 118 ‐ 121
About the author p 123

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General Advice
Accessible – Position your wall with visualizations in
the area where the team sits. You want it easily
visible for everyone in the room.

Simple ‐ The wall needs to be easy to update. If you

make it too cumbersome to update, the wall will
probably deteriorate. If you suspect that it’s not up
to date, you will stop trusting it. If you don’t trust it,
you will update it even less frequently.

Clean – If you put love and care into designing the

wall you will probably respect it more and want to
continue to keep it nice and tidy. Don’t go bananas,
choose components with care.

Core flows – Design for the normal cases and core

flows. Choose additional components based on the
behaviors you want to change. Treat exceptions like
exceptions.

Evaluate – Your wall is a living thing. Evaluate each

component's value and design regularly. Improve,
adjust or abandon.

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Visualize your workflow

Example 1 Example 2

Example 3

Use boxes, lines, rows and columns to describe your workflow

and which states work transitions between. Use Post‐its to
describe the work to be done which flows through your
workflow. There is no right or wrong, keep on experimenting
until you find a good representation of your workflow, a view
that helps you see progress, collaborate, plan, do forecasts,
and that reveals bottlenecks.
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Tips

Write on Post‐its with a proper pen, thicker than a normal

pencil (like Sharpies, Pilot SignPens or similar). Don’t write
small text, it needs to be readable from a couple of meters.
Only using CAPS almost automatically makes the text bigger
and more readable.

Buy proper Post‐its. Avoid the cheap fake ones. Get a lot of
different sizes and colors. I can recommend Super Sticky Post‐
its and Stattys.

To make it simpler to draw straight lines on a whiteboard, get

a big ruler.
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Visualize your policies

Make your policies, routines, working agreements and rules

explicit and visible. Create posters or dedicate a portion of
your whiteboard wall to your rules.

Making the policies explicit and visible forces you to come to a

shared understanding within the team. It also gives you
something concrete to refer to when you’re discussing how to
improve your way of working. Every policy should also have an
expiration date (3‐6 months into the future). When a policy
expires, review it! Make a conscious decision to keep, modify
or to abandon it.

Yet another tip is to skip the bottom line and add an empty
bullet, signaling that there is more to come.
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Avatars
Example 1 Example 2

Example 3 Example 4

Visualize who is working on which task with the use of avatars.

If you work on a task, put your avatar on that task. The
simplest version is names on small Post‐its. More elaborate
alternatives includes writing the initials on round magnets. But
way more fun is to have photos of the team members. Even
though I find it confusing, many teams like characters, such as
South Park figures or cartoons. At least, write the names so
that new team members don’t have to guess who is Boba Fett
and who is Darth Vader.

Use Tack‐it or magnetic tape to make them stick to the board.

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Legend

A good visualization that a team likes and continues to use

over time tends to get more and more complex as the team
adds more and more information to it.

To make it easy to understand for new team members, and

curious colleagues – provide a legend that explains the colors,
icons and symbols.
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Inbox

Are extra tasks frequently added by creative team members?

Do you suffer from tasks introduced into the sprint by
people/managers outside the team, asking specific team
members for help? Does this sabotage the focus on the sprint
goals? Add the Inbox policy!

Policy: new tasks aren’t added to Planned or Doing, they must

be placed in the Inbox. The following standup the whole team
decides if the task should be done or not, i.e. if it’s valuable
and aligned with the sprint’s goal. If the team decides it
shouldn’t be done now, it goes into the product backlog or into
the trash bin.

Each Inbox should be empty by the end of the Daily Stand‐up.

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2 Avatars - One big, One small

Each team member has two avatars, one big printed in color
and one small printed in grayscale.

They mark which tasks that team member is currently working

on. The big one signals the main focus. When blocked on the
main task, the smaller grey avatar signals where the person is
helping out.

Each team member is only allowed these two avatars. If the

person wants to start a third task he/she either needs to finish
any of the current ones, or put one of the current ones in the
parking lot or move back the task from Doing to Planned.

If you currently only have one avatar for each team member,
please ignore this example. You are good :‐)
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Days ‘til Demo

Days ‘til Demo is a simple countdown to the next demo. Its

purpose is to raise awareness and to help teams remember to
plan and prepare for the demo. And of course to raise the
expectations for everyone else.

It simply shows the number of days left until the demo. The
last one reads “TODAY at 2pm” (or something similar).

It’s preferably placed in a highly visible place, such as by the

coffee machine or next to the toilets. And yes, a manual one
like this needs to be manually updated by someone. This could
be a good thing since it reminds the team that the day is
approaching.
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Confidence Smileys

This is a powerful alternative (or complement) to a Sprint

Burndown.

At the end of every Daily Stand‐up meeting the team asks

themselves; how confident are we that we will be able to
finish each User Story by the end of the Sprint. The answer is
represented by a Confidence Smiley.

The team quickly goes through each lane/User Story and

updates the color of the Confidence Smiley. When in
disagreement, the most pessimistic voice wins.

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Confidence Smileys (cont)

Happy/Green smiley = We are
confident that we will be able to finish this
story by the end of this sprint.

Nervous/Orange smiley = We will

probably not be able to finish this story.

Sad/Red smiley = No way we will be

able to finish this story.

Green checkbox = User story is DONE.

When a smiley shifts (from green to orange, or from orange to

red) the team grabs the opportunity to discuss what they need
to do, how they can help out, and if they need to alert Product
Owners and Stakeholders on changes in the forecast.

Confidence Smileys offer an instant and simple overview of the

team’s sprint progress for anyone else as well.

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Lane priority

This is more of a process/working agreement tip than a

visualization tip.

In order to work more efficiently as a team and to collaborate

more on finishing stories rather than starting new ones – agree
to help out working on stories together in priority order.
Place the story of highest priority on the top, then rank the
rest according to priority.

When a story has finished, move it to the “DONE / Ready for

Demo” area. This will leave an empty lane. Some teams move
all other Post‐its up one lane to fill the gap.

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Blocker Notes

If you for some reason become blocked while working on a

task, preventing you from moving forward ‐ add a red blocker
note on top of that task. This makes the reason known for
everyone, and also works as a follow‐up reminder.

Review the blockers during the Daily Stand‐up and discuss how
to address and resolve each of them.

The description clearly states why you are blocked, who you
are waiting for (and why), or what the problem is. To make it
even clearer, write your own name and the date you became
blocked in the corner of the Post‐it.

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Dependency Spider

Draw a spider with your team in the middle. Around your

team, draw your dependency sources that sometimes block
your progress or force you to wait for some kind of response.
On the legs of the spider you continuously add notes
describing how you are currently blocked or dependent on
that source.

When resolved, move the ticket to the “Resolved” area. When

it’s time for a retrospective, grab Post‐its of the most common
sources and analyze what you can do to reduce or minimize
the pain and frequency of those dependencies. To ensure that
you’re not sub‐optimizing for your team’s convenience,
include the other teams or persons into the discussion.

A great tool for cross‐company (and release train)

retrospectives as well.
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Dotting

Every day, put a new dot on each task in progress. Put a dot
regardless if someone is actively working on it or not. When
everything is running smoothly (given that the tasks are
broken down enough) no single task should get more than a
few dots. If the dots starts building up, you know that
something is wrong and that you need to talk about it.

Dotting is a simple and powerful way of revealing problems

and bottlenecks. The same principle can be applied for other
columns, such as “Waiting for code review”, but instead of
dots draw a line or use a different color for the dots.

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Absence Calendar

This calendar shows when people know they will be away and
absent from the office doing something else, avoiding “Does
anyone know where Julie is today?” moments.

Each team member writes his/her name on the date(s) when

they know in advance they will be off on vacation, attending a
course or doing something else. The calendar could also
include holidays or other important events.

The yellow arrow points to the current day and is moved

before the Daily Stand‐up meeting.

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Days blocked (wasted)

When using Post‐it notes to indicate blocked status it can be

helpful to keep track of the days since the blocker was
introduced.

On the Daily Stand‐up meeting, simply put a dash on the

blocker note, also known as tally marks. The dashing in itself
will remind you and your team to act on the impediment or
dependency. And the number of dashes will tell you how many
days have been wasted waiting for something or someone.

A large number of dashes is an invitation to a serious

discussion. Why does the team fail to resolve its impediments?
Do they lack support? Motivation?

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Due dates and boxes

Sometimes there is a strict due date on fixing things, like a bug

for a critical patch. To visualize this, write the date of the
deadline the task has to be finished by, and draw one box for
each day that remains until that date.

On the Daily Stand‐up meeting, cross one of the boxes. This

way you can easily see when time is running out and how
many days are left.

Sometimes the bug needs to be dealt with right away forcing

you to drop whatever else you are doing. But sometimes there
is some leeway, allowing you to wrap things up before
addressing the semi‐urgent task. That’s when due dates and
boxes comes in handy.

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Question icon

Sometimes you have a question about something, but the right

team member isn’t around, and it’s possible to wait until the
team’s next Daily Stand‐up meeting. If that’s the case, you
mark the task you have a question about with a Question icon.

During the Daily Stand‐up meeting the team makes sure to

scan the wall for Question icons, addressing them and
removing them one by one.

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Urgent lane + policy

Not everything can be planned and foreseen during the sprint

planning. To deal with urgent unplanned tasks in a structured
and transparent way, add an URGENT lane.

Since urgent tasks are never planned, the “Planned” (Tasks

Todo) column isn’t needed. Use that area instead to clearly
state the policy that describes what counts as an urgent task.
Which criteria need to be fulfilled for a task to be allowed to
go straight into the urgent lane? If the criteria are not met, the
task should be considered during the next sprint planning or
the next Backlog Grooming session..

The urgent lane should normally be empty! Remember that

every time you introduce something into that lane you create
waste in terms of task switching and multitasking. With great
powers come great responsibility. Don’t abuse the urgent lane.
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Bomb icon

One team I worked with decided to get rid of the Urgent Lane.
It was misused, always cramped with “important” tasks and
sabotaged the team’s ability to focus and plan.

Since all tasks were now related to a story there was no way
for an urgent task to enter the wall until a lane on the Kanban
board was empty. This worried the Product Owner. So, the
Product Owner was given one (one!) Bomb icon. He could put
that on any task he wanted. Anyone who could help out
paused whatever they were doing and worked on that task
instead until it was done.

(The Bomb icon was used less and less frequently since the
pain and cost of adding it to the wall quickly became
apparent.)

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Parking Lot

If the team has temporarily stopped working on a story (or

paused a specific task) due to changes in priority – make that
clear and transparent by moving the Post‐its to a Parking Lot
area.

Moving the story/task away from the primary board also

reduces the chance that people accidently work on a paused
task (i.e. increased unnecessary multitasking).

When a story or task becomes parked, write a Parking Ticket

with the date when it became parked and who was working on
it.
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Achievement Posters

GOOGLE
DOCS

At the end of every sprint (or every second week if you use
Kanban) summarize your team’s achievements. To build pride
and celebrate accomplishments is as important as planning
ahead and focusing on the next challenge.

Set a timer on fifteen minutes during which you help out to

remember and summarize. The prouder you are over an
accomplishment, the bigger the Post‐it. Use different colors
for different kinds of events. Once the poster is hung on the
wall, applaud yourselves.

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Kaizen board

To ensure that the actions decided upon during the

retrospective are followed through, write down the actions on
Post‐its and bring them to the wall.

If the Post‐its do not have a natural fit on your normal board,

create a small separate Retrospective Actions Kanban board
(sometimes known as a Kaizen Board) where you can track the
improvement work.

If you use Avatars, use them same the way as you use them for
the regular wall.

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Team Members with Hats

Make it easy for your colleagues to know who is who in your

team with the use of a Team Members Catalog. Also, visualize
who is having which role with the use of hat icons. If you want
you can add their primary skill, email address or some other
additional information.
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Team Habits

During a retrospective it’s quite common that you decide to try

to implement some new habits, to do something differently
from now on. If you have a Working Agreement, it should
probably be updated. If you don’t have a working agreement
(or don’t feel the new policy fits there) create a Team Habits
area on your wall.

Newly decided habits that you have agreed to try to follow are
written down on orange Post‐its. Once they have become true
habits, re‐write them on green Post‐its. If you become sloppy,
change it back to orange. Review your habits on a regular basis
(for example once a month).

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Rotating facilitator’s hat

Does the Scrum Master really need to be the facilitator of

every Daily Stand‐up? Of course not. Why not rotate the
facilitation.

Facilitating a good, short and concrete Daily Stand‐up meeting

is difficult. By rotating the facilitation you share the experience
and more people get to practice facilitation skills.

To emphasize the rotation of the facilitator, get a nice hat for

the facilitator to wear.
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Interruption buckets

Do you suspect that most of your interruptions have a

common origin and source? Do you have a growing frustration
towards someone or something? To turn that frustration into a
data driven insight and data driven decision to change
something, collect your interruptions on Post‐its and sort
them according to category.

Do this for a couple of weeks and then bring the notes to a

workshop where you analyze and discuss how you can reduce
the frequency or pain of the interruptions. Or, instead of
having a time‐limit, whenever there are 5 or more notes in a
bucket – call for an interruption reduction workshop.
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Daily Stand-up timer

One team I was working with repeatedly decided that they

should really limit the Daily Stand‐up meeting to 15 minutes,
but never succeeded to accomplish it. One day I placed my
tablet on a small table (that happened to be positioned in front
of the wall) and started a timer. I didn’t explain why.

That simple thing made everyone slightly more focused and

avoided a lot of detail derailing. And voilà! As if the tablet held
a secret superpower, the Daily Stand‐up meetings most of the
times finished well below 15 minutes.

Note: The goal of the Daily Stand‐up meeting is of course not

to finish within 15 minutes, it is to figure out how we as a team
need to collaborate today to accomplish our goals.
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Stand-ups on time
+ high score

Do you think you are getting better at starting your Daily

Stand‐ups on time? Why not measure it?

Every day you start the Daily Stand‐up on time, increase your
“Daily started on time”‐score. If you start it late, reset it to
zero. Next to the counter, write your high‐score so far. If you
can, think of a fun reward for the team every time you break
your own record.

Other examples of counter and high scores (aka “chains”) are

“We fixed more bugs today than were reported”, “Days with
zero bug reports”, and “Urgent lane empty by the end of the
day”.
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Parking lot with states

When you pause a full story and move the associated tickets to
a Parking Lot it might be a good idea to preserve the states of
the tasks.

This takes more space, but that could be used as a WIP‐limit,

i.e. no more than one story may be paused at any single point
in time.

Don’t forget to write down the date when the story became
paused.

This approach can be useful when something urgent arrives

mid‐sprint temporarily overriding the priorities.

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Progress Pie

Do you have your roadmap visualized on your wall and would

like to visualize progress of Epics related to a specific release?
Some rough estimate is usually enough, for example a
progress pie.

Draw a circle on the Post‐it and ask “How much is done?”. Fill
in the pie according to the answer. An empty circle would
mean “not begun”. A full circle “Ready to ship”.

This of course triggers discussions about what is needed for a

full circle, which is a good thing! When needed: clarify
acceptance criteria and maybe replace the Epic with sliced
User Stories.

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Box on the floor

Are you standing so far from the wall that you can’t read the
Post‐its? Do people have to walk across the room to move a
Post‐it? Does it look like people are afraid of the wall?

Try Drawing a box on the floor (using white adhesive tape) in

front of the team's board.

I’ve found that for some strange reason, people like to stand
inside boxes. Don’t be surprised if this simple trick makes
people stand closer to the board. At least, you don’t have
anything to lose by trying it once.

Adhesive tape doesn’t stick that well to the floor, but I would
not recommend painting or drawing directly on the floor.

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After Party

When people derail in detailed discussions during the Daily

Stand‐up meeting, pause them and add the topic to
“Immediately after”. The policy could be that whenever
anyone makes a T‐shaped hand signal, the discussion is moved
to after the Daily Stand‐up.

Once the Daily Stand‐up is wrapped up, those that need to

(and those that want to) stick around and discuss the listed
topics. Some people call this the “After party”.

As each topic is resolved, cross it over. When all have been

discussed, clean the area so that it’s ready for the next Daily
Stand‐up.

For some teams this is a great approach to make the Daily

Stand‐up meetings shorter and more concrete.
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Team Rhythm/Cycle
Example 1 Example B

Example C

Many teams who Kanban still experience value from having a

rhythm. For example, backlog grooming every week, demo
and retrospective every second week, and so on.

Visualizing this rhythm, and where in the cycle the team is,
helps focus and provides a sense of structure to an otherwise
response and pull driven work environment.

The cycle can be visualized in many ways: a clock (example A),

a road (B), a game board (C). Pick whatever you like and find
amusing.
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Improvement Lane

To make your retrospective improvement actions a natural

part of your planning and Daily Stand‐ups, add an
Improvement Lane to the board.

Some teams place the Improvement lane at the bottom and

have the policy that if you’re blocked on your primary work
you work on improvements until you become unblocked, or
someone else needs help.

Other teams place the lane on top, signaling that the

improvement actions are the most important thing to finish
first (right after urgent production problems).

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Today’s Headlines

Many times teams start or end their Daily Stand‐up with a

general information sharing moment.

To reduce the chance that you forget to share something

important with your team, add your news headlines to the
“Today’s Headline” whiteboard area as soon as you come to
think of a topic.

When the news or information has been shared, clear the area
so that new headlines can be added for the next day.

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Late = Cake

Draw a circle. Slice it up in 8 slices. This represents a cake.

When someone arrives late to the Daily Stand‐up write that
person’s name in one of the slices.

When the cake circle is full, count the “winner”. The winner
bakes a cake that the team enjoy the next day.

An alternative for this is to write a

list of the team members. When
someone is late, he or she gets a
tick. Three or more ticks mean
cake.

If you don’t like cake, or this policy

makes the team fat, try another
policy.
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Task size < 1 day

When tasking (i.e. breaking down the work that needs to be

performed to complete a User Story) don’t stop splitting the
tasks until each task can be completed within a day.

This policy makes it easier to see progress and bottlenecks. It

also triggers deeper collaborative discussions during the
planning sessions.

Furthermore, if you use Dotting, you know there is something

fishy going on if a task starts collecting dots since no single task
should have more than one dot.

If you use a Sprint Burndown, you can instead of summarizing

hours summarize the number of tasks. Much faster!

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Task describes result

The texts on the Post‐its matter. Spending a couple of extra

seconds to describe the work a Post‐it refers to can make a
huge difference.

Don’t simply write a keyword or a vague description of the

work – describe what state we are in when the task has been
completed. Another way to phrase the same thing: don’t
describe the work, describe the result.

When applying this policy, it becomes much clearer for the

team what the goal of the task is and what’s expected.

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Portable boards

It’s quite common that planning or retrospective meetings

take place in meeting rooms from where the team’s physical
board isn’t visible. And it’s also quite common that you would
like to bring part of the wall to those meetings.

One solution to this is to create portable boards, i.e. boards

that you can lift down from the wall and bring with you. For
example, there are small whiteboards you hang on the wall as
you hang a painting. You could also create a foldable mini‐
board from foam boards and then attach some hooks to it.

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Flowglass

Do you want to signal to your colleagues that you want some

undisturbed time to focus on something difficult? Reaching a
mental state of flow usually requires some undisturbed time,
especially when working with complex work such as software
engineering.

Invest in an hourglass. Whenever you require some

undisturbed flow time, turn the hourglass over and put it on
your table. For clarity, perhaps add a note next to it. Your
friends can now see that you actively request some time to
focus. It’s also easy for them to roughly estimate when it’s ok
to come back to you (based on the amount of sand left).
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Kudo Wall

Show more love in the team! Whenever you feel someone else
did something great that deserves appreciation and
recognition, write a Kudo card and put in on the team’s Kudos
Wall!

A Kudo wall is a great way to nurture intrinsic motivation

within a team and to self‐reward good behaviors.

You can use Post‐its, design your own cards that you print, or
buy them online here:
https://management30.com/product/kudo‐cards/
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Task Progress Bar

Some tasks get stuck on the wall because they either describe
a big chunk of work, or the amount of work turned out to be
more than first anticipated. When that happens draw a
progress bar (on the task Post‐it) which is updated during the
Daily Stand‐up.

If you use dotting (see example “Dotting”) as a habit you could

add the policy: as soon as a task gets two or more dots, we add
a progress bar and discuss what is needed to complete the
task.

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Awesome Person Dice

Just for fun, choose today’s Awesome Person of the Day by

rolling a dice at the beginning of the Daily Stand‐up meeting.

Each side of the dice has a team member’s name written on it.
Are you more than six people in the team, no worries – there
are 8 and 10 sided dice as well.

Once a Today’s Awesome Person has been selected, applaud

that person and put their photo in the Today’s Awesome
Person photo frame that hangs on the wall.

Why? Because it’s fun.

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Story Point Ruler

To get better at doing relative Story Point estimation as a

team, create a Story Point Ruler.

By the end of every sprint (for example during the Sprint

Review meeting) ask yourselves, for every story completed: In
hindsight, given what we know now ‐ how many Story Points
should this user story have been? Put the User Story on that
place on the ruler.

When it’s time to estimate new stories (with for example

Poker Planning), simply compare that story to the stories
already estimated on the ruler. As time goes by, clean the ruler
so that it doesn’t become too crowded. Keep the good
examples and remove similar User Stories.
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Reward Jar

Creating new habits can be difficult. To reward yourselves for

your efforts of converting new policies to habits, get a Reward
Jar. List the things you want to reward yourselves for (together
as a team), including the score for each achievement. Agree on
some milestones that are put on the jar.

Whenever you "score", place a marble in the jar. When you hit
a milestone: collect the reward!

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Release Credits

By the end of every movie, there are release credits

acknowledging everyone involved in creating the masterpiece.
Why would you deserve any less!? Celebrate your
achievement of finishing a sprint with the creation of a
Release Credits poster.

I've seen teams who have chosen themes such as space

missions, superhero movies, rock bands etc. Whatever makes
you tick. The responsibility to create the poster could rotate,
or you create it as a team during the Sprint Review.
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Task Estimation Boxes

One simple approach to learn if things take longer than

expected is to estimate the work for a task with boxes. Two
boxes could for example mean a full day’s work.

During the Daily Stand‐up you cross the boxes as you work on
the task. Continue to cross even when there are no more
boxes. This technique will make it easy to see when something
turned out to be harder than initially estimated, which in turn
should trigger a discussion on how to help out.

The estimation could take place during the sprint planning or

when the task is moved from “Planned” to “Doing”.

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WIP Limits

In the example above the team has a limited Work In Progress

(WIP) in several dimensions. They only work on a maximum of
three stories at any given time. If they want to start a fourth,
they first need to finish any of the ongoing. If “Doing” + “Ready
for Test” are full (joint limit of 4) they aren’t allowed to start
on a fifth task. They first need to help out testing, moving tasks
down the board. And so on.

Put the WIP Limits on Post‐its since you probably will change
them over time as you try to find a good balance.

Limiting WIP is at the core of Lean and something many

successful teams do. Explaining Lean, or why limiting WIP is a
great idea, is beyond the scope of this book.

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Color according to skill

Some teams like to color the tasks according to the primary

skill needed. During the planning session this helps the team
to split work into tasks and to clarify the diversity of work.

I’ve seen that some teams have a color for testing activities,
others have a column named “Testing”. You need to
experiment to find what works for you.

But, if this technique undermines teamwork ‐ stop using it! Not

finding a task with “your” color is no excuse to not collaborate
and help out.
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Parked by Person

Some teams I’ve met (who have a Parking Lot) make clear who
was working on the task when it became paused by sorting
the Post‐its by team member.

When a task becomes paused, the Post‐it gets moved to that

person’s line in the Parking Lot area. When that person, or
someone else, picks up the task again it gets moved back to
the it’s original position on the wall.
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Pair Programming Matrix

Are you trying to do more pair programming in your team?

Would you like to visualize how much you pair during a week?
Try putting up a Pair Programming Matrix.

Whenever you’ve done a pairing session, make a tick in the

corresponding box. You need to agree as a team how much
pairing is required for a tick.

Set a date when you review and talk about the results. If you
want to continue tracking your pairing, reset the matrix and
agree upon a new review date.

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Daily Stand-up Routine

Instead of just jumping into doing the Scrum default “round”,

make the routine of the Daily Stand‐up a conscious design by
writing it down. Once written down it becomes easier to have
constructive discussions on how to improve it.

It also makes it easier to rotate the responsibility of facilitating

the Daily Stand‐up.

The same approach could also of course be applied to other

kinds of meetings such as Sprint Planning, Backlog Grooming,
Sprint Review, etc.
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Pause Icon

Sometimes you need to pause work on a task because another

thing has become more urgent. You’re not necessarily blocked
by anything, but you are nonetheless not working on it at the
moment.

In order to make that clear and transparent, put a Pause Icon

on top of that task. And for extra clarity you might want to
leave your avatar on the task to signal that you were the one
working on it.

Another approach to address the same issue is to use a

Parking Lot instead.

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Stress Level Meter

Are there days when you as a
team is swamped and
stressed with work and just
want to be left alone? While
other days are calm, almost
boring.

To share your stress level

with others, making them
aware of your mood, put up a
Stress Level Meter next to
the entrance to your team
area. Perhaps you have a
suitable door frame, a glass
wall or something else
colleagues need to pass by in
order to enter the team area.

At any given point, anyone in

the team can move the arrow
of the Stress Level Meter,
reflecting the mood of the
room advising people how to
approach the team.

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Improvement Theme

Improvement Theme is a tool in the form of a poster that

works as a conveyor belt for continuous improvements once
the Retrospective is over. Describe the current situation in the
red section. Then define how the situation would look like if it
was awesome in the green section. Then ask yourselves, six
weeks from now; what realistic and concrete goals can we set
that will bring us closer to our “Definition of Awesome?” Then
identify the first three smallest steps you can take to get closer
to these goals.

Follow up on the steps during the Daily Stand‐up and add new
ones as tasks are completed. When the six weeks have passed,
evaluate the poster and create a new “Next Target Condition”.
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Test Server Icons & Info

If your team uses several different physical or virtual test

environments, and this causes confusion, make it easier to see
where things can be tested and the state of each test
environment.

When something is ready for testing in a

specific test environment, mark the task with
the appropriate icon.

Additional details, such as server name, purpose, version,

branch, date of upgrade etc., are put somewhere next to the
wall. The color of the icons corresponds to the colors of these
server notes.
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Ready for demo

Teams that Kanban should also of course demo as well. If your

team hasn’t scheduled a recurring demo, perhaps a Ready for
demo area can help.

Once a story is done and ready for demo, move it to an empty

slot in the first row. When the first row is full, an invitation for
a demo is sent out. When the demo is held, all ready‐for‐demo
stories are shown, after which the area is cleared.

Note: This example has been mentioned earlier (see Lane

Priority), but is presented here in more detail.

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Team Mood Barometer

Team Mood Barometer is a
board with a rope on which
you position your clothespin
with your name. The
position of your clothespin
reflects your current mood.

You update it whenever you

want to. Once a week or
maybe several times a day.

If you as a team want to be

better at sharing your
mood, and how you are
feeling, this could be a
simple tool to trigger dialog.
If someone is far down, you
probably want to know if
there is something you can
do to help that person. It
also provides some kind of
overview how the team in
general is feeling.

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Newsletter

In a team all kind of exciting stuff happens. One way to create

transparency within the organization (apart from Demos,
Townhall meetings, Community of Practices, etc.) is to send
newsletters from the team.

As interesting things happen, add a bullet to the Newsletter

content list. Write a paragraph about it in the shared
document. When you have six news items to share, convert
the document into an email and send to your colleagues.
Writing the newsletter could be a rotating responsibility. The
person who is supposed to write the next newsletter has his or
her avatar next to the list.
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Out of Office

I’ve seen some teams dedicate a small area of the team wall to
show where people are if they are not at the office.

As soon as someone learns that a person is sick, working

offsite (conference, course, etc.), on vacation, or home doing
VAB, the person’s avatar is moved to the corresponding slot.

Additional information can of course be added on Post‐its, for

example: when will the person be back from vacation.

Note: VAB is perhaps very Swedish… it means “Getting paid for

staying at home taking care of my sick kid”.

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Exploratory Testing Wheel

If you vacuum a huge floor with an automatic semi‐dumb

vacuum robot, at least at some point in time every area of the
floor has been vacuumed. You could use the same approach to
testing.

Choose a couple of Exploratory Test Charters. Place them

around a wheel. Make it a policy that each member runs one
of those charters each week. When done, the charter Post‐it is
put back on the wheel and the checkbox is crossed. When the
wheel is done, replace some of the charters and restart the
wheel.
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Envelope Collectors

Envelopes are great for collecting Post‐it. I’ve seen teams use
them simply for storage, a place to store Post‐its instead of
throwing them in the bin.

A little more elaborate approach is to put up new envelopes

every month and then store different Post‐its in different
collectors. At the end of the month the finished stories and
tasks are summarized and analyzed. What was the ratio of
value adding (User Stories) work vs bug fixing? Planned vs
unplanned work? Most common source of interruptions?
Common causes of Urgent tasks?

If you are nostalgic you can put the envelopes in a plastic

pocket, label it with a date and put it in a binder.
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Limit by Space

If your team does Kanban or some version of Scrumban and

have a hard time honoring the WIP Limits you have set for
yourselves, perhaps this approach can help you.

Instead of writing the WIP Limits, adjust the spaces. Make the
boxes and areas containing the Post‐its so small that you can’t
physically fit more Post‐its than the space allows without
breaking the WIP Limit.

This approach also makes it bluntly obvious if the WIP Limit

has been broken somewhere, just look for Post‐its stacked
upon each other.

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Retro Input Inbox

When it’s time for the Sprint Retrospective, do you often have
a hard time remembering the sprint and what it was you
wanted to bring up in the meeting? Why wait to write down
your thoughts and ideas until the retrospective, do it
continuously!

As soon as something happens or when a thought pops into

your mind, capture it, write it down and put it in the “Retro
Input Inbox” area. If you think it will add value, note the date
and author of the note as well.

When it is time for the retrospective, simply bring all the Post‐
its from the area.
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Sprint Info

While doing the sprint planning, why not capture the details of
the sprint on the wall. I’ve seen many teams having really
creative Sprint Information areas.

Apart from the ID (or number) of the sprint, it could state the
sprint’s goal. Some teams also name their sprint according to
themes (NASA missions, rock stars, super heroes etc.) And
then of course you can add a start and an end date, number of
people in the team this sprint, date of demo, and so on.

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Review Queue

One HR team I was working with had a long list of wiki pages
describing different policies and guidelines. They suspected a
lot of them needed to be revisited and updated. So, we
created a Policy Review Queue. Every week one policy was
reviewed and updated. Some updates needed approval from
someone else so they went through a “To be approved” box.
Once done, the ticket moved to the end of the queue. The
order and content of the queue was rearranged when needed.

The same approach could of course be applied to technical

documentation, website content, FAQs, manuals, etc.

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Team Presence Hours

Do you have the feeling that, although you as a team are

sitting in the same room, you have trouble getting the
communication and collaboration flowing? The reason could
be that although you sit together you are not actually all there
at the same time during the day.

To explore this, paint a graph where each person plots when

he/she typically arrives, is away for lunch and is off to
recurring meetings. Or even better, record actual data over a
two week period. This might reveal opportunities to
reschedule some meetings, or others might consider arriving
earlier or later.

If the team is dis‐located, people might even be spread out

across different time zones, then this can be very useful and
valuable to map out.
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Stuff Collectors

Having a hard time finding the right colored Post‐its? Do the

pens seem to constantly disappear? Why not put up boxes
beneath or beside the whiteboard where you can collect them.

You can even add labels that at the same time will function as
a legend, explaining the colors of the Post‐its.

The boxes could be made out of cardboard and put up using

adhesive tape. Or buy yourself shower storage baskets with
suction cups, attaching them to the whiteboard itself or a
nearby window.

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Fail Wall

Do you as a team want to create a safer environment for

experimentation and learnings? Perhaps one way to shape
your behavior in that direction could be to defuse the drama of
failures, and instead celebrate them.

The rules of a “Fail Wall” is simple. Whenever you screw up or

make a blunder, you describe what happened on a Post‐it. You
put it up on the Fail Wall and do a failure bow. Here, the other
team members should applaud you for sharing something that
probably presented a learning opportunity.

You are of course not allowed to put up Post‐its on behalf of

others.

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Pyramid Backlog

Instead of ordering the User Stories of your backlog in a strict

order, try sorting them in a Pyramid Backlog. In the Backlog
Pyramid, there can only be one top priority story. But as you
go further down the pyramid, you allow yourselves more and
more stories on the same priority level. Whenever the top one
slot gets empty (i.e. the team has pulled it into their work) the
rest of the stories “bubble” up the pyramid.

You can also impose rules on estimates. For example; stories at

priority level three or higher need to be smaller than 8 points.
For a story to climb to priority level 5 or above, it needs to
have an estimated size. And so on.
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Tube Poll

Dropping balls in tubes is a fun way to visualize data. The

tubes can be labeled. The colors of the balls could be used to
have different meaning.

The possibilities are of course endless, but here are some

examples:
‐ Statistics: Where do bugs originate from? Once a bug has
been fixed, drop a ball in corresponding tube.
‐ Data: Each tube is a sprint. Each ball a Story Point.
‐ Poll: Each tube represents a question. Green balls for yes,
red balls for no.
‐ Vote: “Refactor” ‐ what class should be the target for the
next hack attack?
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Promiscuous Map

This visualization is a way of tracking how often pairing

happens, and who pairs with whom. It addresses the same
behavior as the Pair Programming Matrix.

Whenever you’ve paired with someone, draw a line between

yourself and that other person in the Promiscuous Map.

After a couple of days, patterns will probably emerge. How

much do we actually pair? Who pairs with whom? Do we want
to consciously break some patterns and be better at pairing
with different people?

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Team Time Zone Clocks

Do you collaborate a lot with teams located in another office,

in another time zone?

Having clocks on the wall showing the current time at the

different offices is a classic way of making it easy to know the
time for the different teams.

Another approach could be to put a poster behind your own

clock on which you show what time of day it is at the other
offices. From a quick glance you know if your far‐away‐friend is
at work, still hasn’t arrived or is done for the day.

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Activity Dice

When you start your Daily Stand‐up, roll the Team Activity
Dice. The dice will tell you what you should do together as a
team today.

It could be having a joint lunch, clean up the team area and

make it nicer, make a surprise visit to another team, go outside
for a walk, organize a Rock‐Paper‐Scissor team battle
tournament, do 100 push‐ups together, make a new dice,
afternoon break with ice cream, meditate together for 10
minutes, draw and discuss a Jimmy Card, delete old and
obsolete bugs in your digital planning tool, or anything else
you fancy doing as a team.
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Race Track

Instead of punishing late‐comers to the Daily Stand‐up, why

not reward those that are on time by allowing them to move
their figure one step forward on the race track? The person
that has come the furthest on the race track by the end of the
sprint wins an applaud and a group hug. A race like this could
also focus on other behaviors and actions, such as…

‐ Resolving blockers
‐ Getting committed code reviewed
‐ Executing retrospective actions
‐ Finishing tasks
‐ Reviewing code

Either the winner chooses the rules of the next race, or the
team decides this together during the Sprint Planning.

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Pre-printed DONE checklists

A simple way of making it easy to remember the agreed upon

Definition of DONE is to print cheat checklists. Put them in a
box or hang them on a nail.

When you start working on a new User Story, grab one of the
pre‐printed Definition of DONE checklist. As your work
progress, you tick the boxes.

Tip: Don’t print too big batches. The Definition of DONE has a
tendency to change a lot over time.

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Visualize internal queues

One of the seven wastes of software development is queues.

One approach to reveal bottlenecks within a team is to
visualize internal queues. This can be done by making it visual
when tasks are actually being worked on, or waiting to be
worked on.

For example: instead of just having a “Test” column, split the

column into “Ready for test” and “Testing”, or split “Review”
into “Waiting for review” and “Reviewing”.

If tasks get congested in any of these internal queues, you’ve

found your bottleneck and can start discussing how to address
this as a team.
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Today’s trick

Why not speed up knowledge sharing within the team, making

everyone gradually more efficient with your tools, by sharing
“Today’s trick”?

It could be a shortcut, a nice hidden feature of the IDE and

tools you are using, or any hack that simplifies your work.

As soon as you learn something new from reading a blog,

watching a YouTube tutorial or from pairing with someone –
share it!

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Servant Manager Door

I’ve heard many stories about how managers work with trust
and transparency by visualizing which organizational
impediments they are currently working on. This visualization
is sometimes called “Management Door” or “Servant
Leadership Board”.

Even though an autonomous team owns their own process

and self‐organizes their work, they often find a limit to their
area of influence, which requires the support of managers to
resolve impediments. Being transparent about which
impediments you as a manager are currently addressing, and
being honest about which one you’re currently not focusing
on, is a simple and powerful way to build trust.
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Hourglass Scrum Wall

A Scrum wall doesn’t need to be in the shape of a grid. The

Hourglass Scrum Wall replaces a User Story lane with an
Hourglass where tasks flow downwards. It provides two
natural dimensions for limiting work in progress; the number
of concurrent User Stories, and an upper limit of two active
tasks per User Story. If a story is too small to be broken down
into tasks (i.e. the team can finish the entire story within a day)
it simply occupies the whole Hourglass.

Not separating “Work in progress” into “Coding”, “Reviewing”,

and “Testing” and so on also enforces cross‐discipline
collaboration and knowledge sharing.
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Lava Lamps

Nothing beats a visual information radiator that glows. I’ve

seen many teams connecting lava lamps to their Continuous
Integration servers, alerting the team when something needs
attention. There are several plug‐ins for this, and numerous
blogs that describe how this can be done.

One team I was working with had two lamps. The red one lit
up when the Continuous Integration pipeline encountered a
problem (failed to compile, failed test, etc.). The other one lit
up when a new high priority bug had been reported.
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Arrival/Departure Timeline

I’ve heard of teams who keep track of important events as

their team changes over time. When the team was created,
when it got a new name, when its mission changed and when
new team members arrived and when members departed
from the team.

This creates a sense of common history as well as shows how

the team has evolved to where it is today. Even other kinds of
events could of course be included, such as major releases,
game changing decisions and other organizational changes.

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I want to learn...

Whenever you feel that you lack knowledge about a tool, want
to learn more about some part of the system or wish you were
better at something, capture it and put it up on the “I want to
learn…” poster.

When you spot something that you can contribute with or

teach someone else, schedule it and write down when the
session, workshop, seminar or lunch & learn will happen. Don’t
forget to announce it on the Daily Stand‐up or any other
appropriate meeting.
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User Story Flavor Legend

Some teams find it useful to distinguish between different

types of user stories. Not all prioritized work fit the typical
customer value focused User Story template.

Instead of forcing yourselves to write a weird card using User

Story format for a patch release or a time boxed investigation
or experiment, allow simpler templates when working with
non‐user centric stories. Make the different flavors of User
Stories clear by the use of colors and add the colors to your
wall legend.

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Color the glass

Does your team have partial glass walls defining your team
area, why not put them to use. Glass walls allow you to make
really fancy and colorful Scrum or Kanban walls by putting up
colored paper with adhesive tape on the other side of the
glass.

You can use different colored papers to emphasize different

lanes and areas. You could even use colors to signal status of
your work or other important factors.

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Concept Cubes

Instead of summarizing the results of a workshop on a poster,

or having a working agreements’ area on your whiteboard –
create a physical cube! One side could show the name of the
cube and the others contain text and images. A cube invites to
curiosity! I’ve seen people being far more eager to pick up a
cube then to stop by and read a poster.
Examples of cubes:
‐ Meetings. Each side describes the purpose and outcome of
the different meetings (Daily Stand‐up, Planning,
Retrospective, etc), as well as the default meeting routine.
‐ Working agreements (Definition of Done, Definition of
Ready, Behavior of conduct, Way of working, etc.).
‐ Expectations of roles (Scrum Master, Product Owner, Team
member, Development manager, etc.).
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Daily Goals

The single most important question to answer during the Daily

Stand‐up is; what do we need to do today as a team to bring
ourselves one step closer to our current goal?

During the Daily Stand‐up, if we would define the answer to

that question like an achievement we would be proud of –
what would that look like? That becomes the team’s goal for
that day.

During the next Daily Stand‐up we assess if we accomplished

our goal. If we did, we put a happy cross on the note. Then we
proceed to define a new goal for today. Always define a new
Daily Goal. Don’t simply copy yesterday’s goal in the case we
didn’t fulfill it. Everyday is a new day and there is always some
circumstance that has changed.

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Opportunities by Persona

Instead of having a backlog of User Stories, I’ve seen teams

having backlogs of opportunities categorized by persona. The
opportunity backlogs feed into the roadmap and into the
team’s User Story Backlog.

An opportunity is described by:

‐ What problem are we trying to solve? Which need are we
exploiting? (Why should we do this?)
‐ For whom are we trying to solve this problem? (Persona)
‐ Success criteria. How will we know that we have
succeeded?
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Time Invested

Would you like a lightweight approach for presenting to your

stakeholders how you have been investing your time?

At the end of every week, sprint or month, roughly estimate

how you have spent your time. Each member draws ten bars.
Each bar represents 10% of the invested time. The time is
distributed into categories such as; feature development, bug
fixes and maintenance, technical investment and quick/panic
fixes.

The historical summary is then communicated to stakeholders.

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Release Train Departures

If your team have to plan your work according to release train

departures, why not visualize the different release trains and
each release train’s upcoming departures. Each “row” shows
the events for each train; such as latest commit date, code
freeze date, test phase or dates when the app is submitted to
apple the Apple App Store or to Google Play.

Today could be visualized by a movable string. Magic flipcharts

(self‐adhesive plastic posters) are useful since it is easy to add
new ones (and remove old ones) as time goes by.
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Guide Board

Capture the working agreement policies from retrospectives

by drawing and writing on Post‐its. Actually portraying the
policy in a drawing makes the policy easier to remember, stirs
great discussions and makes the Guide Board easier to read
for the team. For each, sprint add a new column.

If a policy is poorly followed, push the Post‐it down to the

“Under Observation” row. In the next retro evaluate your
ability to follow the policy, and then either put it back into its
place or close it with a blue note.

When a policy becomes replaced or deprecated, put a blue

sticker on the policy. The front of the blue Post‐it states the
sprint during which it became obsolete and the back side of
the Post‐it describes the reason why it became deprecated.
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Daily Check-in

Not everyone has the luxury of working in a co‐located team

but still depends on colleagues for discussions. You might for
example be an agile coach collaborating a lot with other agile
coaches and you want to easily see who else is in the office.

When you arrive in the morning, you move your avatar to the
current day, and when you leave you move it to “Not here”. To
make the visualization more fun, why not use LEGO?

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Christmas Tree

Do you have a pile of boring chores to take care of? Do you

have a dung pile of smelly bugs to deal with before you can
launch? Is it Christmas time?

Buy yourselves a table sized Christmas tree. Head out for

shopping over lunch. Disperse. Everyone buys a couple of
presents for a few euros each. For instance, it could be a small
gift, something silly or some candy. Hang the presents in the
tree.

Policy: When you have completed a boring chore or fixed a

bug, you are allowed to reward yourself with a present.
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Discipline Track Record

When getting started with Kanban, one of the first challenges

is to be truly disciplined regarding the WIP Limits so that they
aren’t exceeded.

An easy way to be transparent and honest about how

disciplined you are as a team is to keep a track record of how
often you break any WIP Limit.

Print (or draw) monthly calendars. By the end of the Daily

Stand‐up, check if a WIP Limit is exceeded. If it is, make a red
fat ugly blob in the calendar. If not, draw a nice green circle.

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Dependency Board

When a team discovers that they need something from

another team (in order to begin their own work), they add that
to the shared Dependency Board. “We need <red> before we
can start with <yellow>”. The notes are connected with a
string.

The board is regularly reviewed by the teams, for instance

during the Scrum of Scrums. Once a red note has been
resolved the connected yellow Post‐its is removed as well.

The Dependency Board can help teams to plan, slice features,

foresee needed technical collaboration, as well as finding
alternative ways of helping each other.
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Bonus: How to peel a Post-it

DON’T!
DO!

This might appear to be a stupid tip, who would need to learn

how to peel a Post‐it from a Post‐it deck?

Well, quite many people it seems. To avoid curly Post‐its that

don’t hang flat on the wall, lift the Post‐it slightly with a firm
grip and pull it down. Ta da!

If holding the thumb on the side of the deck doesn’t work for
you (as shown in the lower right corner) try position the left
thumb on top of the stack, under the Post‐it you are about to
pull.
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But hey, what if…

Digital planning tools ‐ If you only use digital
planning tools such as JIRA and you have a hard time
figuring out how to apply these ideas, well that’s life.
Hopefully you didn’t pay for this book. If you did, still
no refund though.

Dis‐located team ‐ If your team isn’t co‐located,

perhaps you can position a high resolution webcam
in front of the wall or send daily pictures to the team
members off‐site. Or discuss to rearrange the teams
so that each team is co‐located.

We don’t have whiteboards ‐ Try using magic

flipcharts. Or, be a rebel and draw directly on your
walls. That will probably speed up the requisition of
as many whiteboards as you need.

We only have yellow Post‐its ‐ Every policy can be

changed. Figure out whom to talk to and go and talk
to that person. Or go out and buy more colors and
reimburse the purchase. Someone once said “Better
ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.”
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Example index
General Advice 7
Visualize your workflow 8
Tips 9
Visualize your policies 10
Avatars 11
Legend 12
Inbox 13
2 Avatars ‐ One big, One small 14
Days ‘til Demo 15
Confidence Smileys 16
Lane priority 18
Blocker Notes 19
Dependency Spider 20
Dotting 21
Absence Calendar 22
Days blocked (wasted) 23
Due dates and boxes 24
Question icon 25
Urgent lane + policy 26
Bomb icon 27
Parking Lot 28
Achievement Posters 29
Kaizen board 30
Team Members with Hats 31
Team Habits 32
Rotating facilitator’s hat 33
Interruption buckets 34
Daily Stand‐up timer 35
Stand‐ups on time + high score 36
Parking lot with states 37

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Progress Pie 38
Box on the floor 39
After Party 40
Team Rhythm/Cycle 41
Improvement Lane 42
Today’s Headlines 43
Late = Cake 44
Task size < 1 day 45
Task describes result 46
Portable boards 47
Flowglass 48
Kudo Wall 49
Task Progress Bar 50
Awesome Person Dice 51
Story Point Ruler 52
Reward Jar 53
Release Credits 54
Task Estimation Boxes 55
WIP Limits 56
Color according to skill 57
Parked by Person 58
Pair Programming Matrix 59
Daily Stand‐up Routine 60
Pause Icon 61
Stress Level Meter 62
Improvement Theme 63
Test Server Icons & Info 64
Ready for demo 65
Team Mood Barometer 66
Newsletter 67
Out Of Office 68
Exploratory Testing Wheel 69
Envelopes Collectors 70
Limit by Space 71

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Retro Input Inbox 72

Sprint Info 73
Review Queue 74
Team Presence Hours 75
Stuff Collectors 76
Fail Wall 77
Pyramid Backlog 78
Tube Poll 79
Promiscuous Map 80
Team Time Zone Clocks 81
Activity Dice 82
Race Track 83
Pre‐printed DONE checklists 84
Visualize internal queues 85
Today’s trick 86
Servant Manager Door 87
Hourglass Scrum Wall 88
Lava Lamps 89
Arrival/Departure Timeline 90
I want to learn… 91
User Story Flavor Legend 92
Color the glass 93
Concept Cubes 94
Daily Goals 95
Opportunities by Persona 96
Time Invested 97
Release Train Departures 98
Guide Board 99
Daily Check‐In 100
Christmas Tree 101
Discipline Track Record 102
Dependency Board 103
Bonus: How to peel a Post‐it 104

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More information
Here you find links to articles and blogs explaining some of the examples
in greater detail.

Concept Cubes (page 94)

http://conceptcubes.com/

Confidence Smileys (page 16)

http://blog.crisp.se/2015/04/01/jimmyjanlen/the‐sprint‐burndown‐is‐
dead‐long‐live‐confidence‐smileys

Daily Goals (page 95)

http://nomad8.com/daily‐stand‐up‐with‐a‐goal/

Guide Board (page 99)

http://mattischneider.fr/agile/guide‐board/

Hourglass Scrum Wall (page 88)

http://www.strongandagile.co.uk/index.php/the‐hourglass‐scrumban‐
board/

Improvement Theme (page 63)

http://blog.crisp.se/2013/05/14/jimmyjanlen/improvement‐theme‐
simple‐and‐practical‐toyota‐kata

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Sources of inspiration
For most of the examples in this book, it’s hard for me to pinpoint where
I saw it first or what inspired me. But for the examples below there’s a
clear source of inspiration.

Arrival/Departure Timeline (page 90)

‐ Yves Hanoulle, http://www.hanoulle.be/

Christmas Tree (page 101)

‐ Mattias Skarin, Crisp

Stand‐ups on time + high score (page 36)

‐ Kristinn Árni Lár Hróbjartsson, Plain Vanilla/QuizUp

Daily Check‐in (page 100)

‐ Rolf F. Katzenberger, Pragmatic Teams

Daily Goals (page 95)

‐ Sandy Mamoli, Nomad8

Dependency Board (page 103)

‐ LEGO (through Henrik Kniberg, Crisp)

Dotting (page 21)

‐ Team HW Partners, Spotify

Guide Board (page 99)

‐ Matti Schneider, http://mattischneider.fr

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Hourglass Scrum Wall (page 88)

‐ Craig Strong, Pearson

I want to learn... (page 91)

‐ Pierre Neis, Upward Consulting

Inbox (page 13)

‐ Team Gaia, Spotify

Kudos Wall (page 49)

‐ Jurgen Appelo, http://www.jurgenappelo.com

Pair Programming Matrix (page 59)

‐ Henrique Imbertti, Spotify

Progress Pie (page 38)

‐ Pétur Jóhannes Óskarsson, Plain Vanilla/QuizUp

Promiscuous Map (page 80)

‐ Patrik Enqvist, Nordea

Pyramid Backlog (page 78)

‐ Gunnar Holmsteinn, Plain Vanilla/QuizUp

Race Track (page 83)

‐ Georg Olafsson, Meniga

Rotating Facilitator’s Hat (page 33)

‐ Guðfinnur Sveinsson, Plain Vanilla/QuizUp

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Stress Level Meter (page 62)

‐ Crisp Office

Team Habits (page 32)

‐ Fredrik Lindgren, Crisp

Team Members with Hats (page 31)

‐ Gunnar Holmsteinn, Plain Vanilla/QuizUp

Team Presence Hours (page 75)

‐ Hans Brattberg, Crisp

Team Time Zone Clocks (page 81)

‐ Yves Hanoulle, http://www.hanoulle.be/

Time Invested (page 97)

‐ Mattias Skarin, Crisp

Today’s trick (page 86)

‐ Edward Dahllöf, Valtech

Tube Poll (page 79)

‐ Mattias Skarin, Crisp

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Reading tips

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Acknowledgments
Thanks to…

Therése Janlén Ressel – My beautiful wife and partner in

crime and adventures who always takes time to give me
feedback on things I write and supports me regardless if I
occupy our dining table with lego, spends 1 week a month
away on Iceland or writes book into the late nights.

Special thanks to my friend and colleague Hans Brattberg for

encouraging me to publish this book on Google Drive. Turned
out the be of awesome value and much fun.

My colleagues at Crisp – For their supportive cheering,

generous sharing of ideas, experiences and knowledge, and for
relentless and valuable feedback.

All my clients – For allowing me to be a small part of your agile

journey and for all the learning opportunities you have offered
me. A very special thanks to Spotify and Plain Vanilla.
Spending time with you, learning from you, fighting together
with you, and being challenged by you have had a tremendous
impact on me. I’ve grown so much thanks to you.

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Acknowledgments (cont)
Big thanks Yves Hanoulle, Rolf F. Katzenberger and Bart
Coelus for great feedback and suggestions through Google
Drive comments. Many thanks to these online contributors
too: Hafþór Bryndísarson, Edward Dahllöf, Martin Zehle, Erik
Buitenhuis, Arlo Belshee, Conor Moyne, Pierre Neis, Tobias
Modig and Tomas Nilsson.

A special thanks to Marlowe Klingvall, who took time to read

and give me invaluable feedback on grammar and spelling for
every single page.

And finally, thanks to all the curious anonymous animals that

came by to read the online Google Drive version of this book:
Koala, Crow, Ibex, Jackal, Iguana and Kraken. And Rabbit. And
Manatee and Cormorant. And Turtle, Panda, Axolotl, Wolf,
Sheep and Otter. Oh, I almost forgot; Dingo, Giraffe, Squirrel,
Skunk and Bat.

And everyone else I’ve missed to mention.

Thank you all!

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More from Jimmy Janlén

Jennie Discovers!
A small book (24 pages, 10cm x 10cm)
about product discovery. Written by
Jimmy Janlén and Hans Brattberg.
https://www.crisp.se/crispi1/en

Something Agile Lean Something

Educational posters about everything agile
and lean with Lego and Star Wars
as a theme.
https://somethingagileleansomething.com

Jimmy Cards Concept Cubes

https://www.crisp.se/bocker‐
https://conceptcubes.com
och‐produkter/jimmy‐cards
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Your own examples…

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Your own examples…

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Your own examples…

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Your own examples…

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 About the author
Hi!

My name is Jimmy Janlén. I’m an Agile

Coach. I also call myself a Bureaucracy
Therapist, Cultural Acupuncturist, and
Visualization Magician: maybe strange and
vague titles but they indicate how I view
myself.

Throughout the years I’ve worked with many different teams, all
struggling to become more effective, create higher impact, deliver
with higher quality and to have more fun while doing it. One thing
the best teams have had in common is the way they use
visualization extensively as a tool for collaboration and
communication.

I love visualization! I’ve continuously collected visualization ideas,

primarily from Spotify (Stockholm), Plain Vanilla/Quiz Up (Reykjavik)
and from my colleagues at Crisp. I also take every opportunity to
invent and try out ideas of my own.

I also love small books that are easy to browse and digest, with lots of
examples and illustrations. Hence the format of this book.

I hope you enjoy this one and find some of the ideas useful or
inspirational!
This is a book filled with visualization examples for agile teams
and agile people who are working with software development in
an agile context.

The examples are not best practice, only examples.

Be inspired. Experiment. Have fun!

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and online comments:

“Great tips for every Scrum Master and Agile Coach”
– Marcel van Hove
“If you ask me, the best book of 2015” ‐ Yves Hanoulle
“Wonderful visualization WIP book” – Bert Vermijlen
“Excellent, never thought of this. Thanks!” – Rolf F. Katzenberger
“It is awesome and filled with really quick practical ideas how to
visualise things – I love it :)” ‐ Samantha Laing
“It improved my sex life” ‐ Karel Boekhout

ISBN 978‐91‐88063‐01‐4