The ultimate method to guide your team members to become more proactive and autonomous looks like a quite simple tool.
“All workers on Board!” – your primary collaborative teamwork tool
Not too long ago, teams used to communicate by phone, paper, and use a blackboard to exchange ideas in many ways. Nevertheless, none of them seemed to be helpful enough. In the 60s, the industrial Japanese engineer Taiichi Ohno invented the Kanban visual method at Toyota. Soon, companies and schools all over the world began to use it. Kanban helps keep a process flowing, once it allows you to visualize the number of tasks under a production or development stage. One of the main goals of kanban is to avoid overload and bottlenecks at any point. Until today, thousands of companies worldwide use Kanban, because of its effectiveness for project management and teamwork collaboration.
No matter what your business area is, collaboration is essential. Even if you work all by yourself, you will have to collaborate with partners, suppliers, clients, and prepare for future assistants. For companies that already have one or more teams, a collaborative working tool is vital. For everyone, time is money, and optimizing the way your team(s) collaborate is the first step to becoming a truly sustainable business.
Reasons to Use the Collaborative GitScrum Board
ORGANIZE THE COMPANY’S WORKFLOW AND WORKLOAD
The GitScrum Board brings a modern version of the Kanban Board, and it’s the ideal format for you to organize your ideas. Each one of your projects has a separate Board where you can add corresponding tasks. You will be able to apply and customize workflow templates to each project. Then, you will start creating tasks and will manage the project’s flow. Distribute work for your team in your project’s Boards and monitor their workload on the project Overview page.
CREATE AN AUTONOMOUS WORK AND SELF-ORGANIZATION CULTURE
Nowadays, top managers are pretty busy, so the more they can delegate work, the better. Providing the appropriate working tool for your team to collaborate is elementary to developing an autonomous team. Researches demonstrate that autonomy leads to greater team motivation and commitment, which contributes to a performance increase. The GitScrum Board gives you the basis for team workers to manage and update their own tasks, working self-organized.
DISPLAY IDEAS AND TASKS CLEARLY
The GitScrum Board presents a friendly universal format that can be promptly comprehended by all collaborators, from any culture. It has customizable details like labels, colors, and columns. The task stages and tasks under them are visible to all team members, so they can monitor the progress of work.
KEEP IDEAS SAFE AND ORDERED
Include task ideas directly into the GitScrum Board, so you make sure you won’t lose them. Keep all ideas and team tasks’ and actions’ history ordered and recorded. Never miss your company insights again!
CREATE CLEAR TASKS AND ASSIGNMENTS
On GitScrum Board, each task has a card where you have the task settings and a space to write a task description. Use this space to write instructions and include references, texts, embed videos, and images.Assign a task to one or more team members, allowing them to collaborate together. When you make an assignment, the team member(s) will receive a notification, and the other users will see who the task is assigned to, as well as its task status and updates.
ENCOURAGE TEAM COLLABORATION
Offering a collaborative Board and demonstrating the benefits of achieving common goals can contribute to your business. It helps develop a positive organizational climate, stimulates teamwork capacity and creativity and the ability of team members to solve problems together.
BECOME MORE RESPONSIVE BEFORE CLIENTS, CUSTOMERS AND PARTNERS
The GitScrum Board is also a tool for you to interact with your clients, partners, and sponsors. You can invite them to your projects as Guest members who can only visualize your project(s), or as regular Members who can edit them.
Present projects, layout samples and promote feedback loops and product reviews, based on tasks on your GitScrum Board, which integrates with other productivity features.
Allow clients and team members to exchange ideas on tasks, working customer-centric for product increments that attend GitScrum User Stories. These are short reports with customer requirements and needs for product and services improvements.
BECOME AN AGILE TEAM
When you set the right project management tool and a dynamic routine, your team develops agility. Reduce the time you need for meetings, creating an instant communication culture. Teams that communicate and update tasks in real-time are always aware of what’s going on with projects, so they can become much more agile and responsive.
Explore the GitScrum Board and all your team can do with it
There is a variety of actions you can take, to teach your team to work more efficiently with the GitScrum Board and highly contribute to your projects. Here are some of them:
CUSTOMIZE THE GITSCRUM BOARD TO YOUR BUSINESS
The Gitscrum Board uses the Kanban boards format. However, you can customize the task status columns according to your professional or personal needs. You can choose to download one of the many free templates from GitScrum Marketplace and customize it. Otherwise, you can create your own workflow template. In both cases, you will name/rename and label the columns as you prefer.
Each Board column represents a task status and has a different color. The columns may relate to a stage of your project, a production line, or a development phase. One classical example of a simple template for task management would present the statuses “to do”, “in progress”, “done”. Then, you might want to include other options like “testing”, “waiting for approval”, “need review”.
WRITE STRAIGHTFORWARD TASK DESCRIPTIONS
In every GitScrum task, you should use the task title and task description to develop effective communication with your squad.
Writing attractive task titles is the first step to creating motivation and facilitating project organization. Team members tend to be more interested in tasks that demonstrate their value and commit more to them. Besides, when you start writing many tasks, remember to write titles that are clear and specific enough to identify the Tasks, when you need to search for them in the future. For example, if you name a task simply as “text” or “email”, it might become difficult to know what they are about. If necessary, create a standard nomenclature and add prefixes that your team can spot.
Clear Task descriptions are important to make work more efficient and reduce time on phone calls and instant messages. Use simple language, so all team members can understand you, and add task references. References can be examples, benchmarking URLs, and extra content that can serve as a model of what the work could be like.
ADD ATTACHMENTS, VIDEOS AND IMAGES
Make task descriptions and references even richer, by embedding Youtube videos, including images and using rich-format texts. You can make communication more informal and emotional using colors, motivational quotes and emojis ??.
ORGANIZE TASKS, CREATING TASK HIERARCHY
Split complex tasks into smaller ones, using Subtasks. This will help you monitor each Subtask independently, and let your team members get a sense of accomplishment each time they complete their part(s). It feels much better than taking a long time to reach a deadline and obtaining feedback.
You can write a major description and set a final due date for the parent Task (or no due date at all), and can add details on the description of each SubTask, for which you will set a specific due date. Each SubTask can have one or more specific assignees, and they don’t need to be the same as the parent Task.
DUPLICATE AND MOVE TASKS
You don’t need to create all tasks from scratch every time. If you’d like to create a task that’s similar to a previous one, you can duplicate a Task, then edit its details. Let your team members know this and work faster.
SHARE THE GITSCRUM BOARD
You can share the GitScrum Board of a project with a URL link, using the Share (<:) icon. Send it to your project stakeholders, sponsors and partners to ask for feedback.
MOTIVATE TEAM MEMBERS WITH TASK COMMENTS
Comments are an excellent opportunity to motivate and show recognition to team members on the GitScrum Board. The idea is not to trivialize and suggest forced praises. Just remember that this is a space for heartfelt encouragement when team members complete tasks in an exemplary way.