5 Scrumban Board Examples To Get You Started

Scrumban is a hybrid Agile project management framework made out of two other popular frameworks Scrum and Kanban. Being a mixture of two other approaches, Scrumban offers the best of both worlds. However, it also brings some confusion on how to best apply for its benefits in practice.

To help you do just that, we have come up with 5 Scrumban board examples below. See what the Scrumban board could look like, what fits your process, and apply it in practice.

And if you want to see how Scrumban looks in a project management tool, check out an interactive Scrumban board in Teamhood.

Basic Scrumban board example

One of the simplest ways to set up your Scrumban board is with three sections – Backlog, Work in progress and Completed. The backlog section holds all of the planned tasks for the team to complete. Work in progress is divided into several columns that fit your company process. In the example below, you can see a sample board for a manufacturing process – each item has to be designed, manufactured, and tested before it is completed. There is no saying how many steps there should be in your process and this is very individual to each team.

Lastly, the Completed section holds all of the items, the team considers being finished. It is up to each team to decide when this section should be emptied out – after each iteration or once a project has reached completion.

Prioritized Scrumban board example

The Scrumban board example above is the simplest and the most straightforward way to set up your Scrumban board. However, most teams work with complicated processes and thus need solutions that allow for more visualization on the board. One of the ways to do that is by adding a priority column to the backlog section. This way, instead of having one big list of items to do, the team always knows what is the most important and should be completed next.

In the example below, we see a process similar to that of a design team. All of the work items are prioritized with the help of two priority columns in the backlog. Meaning, when a team member is done with a work item, they can go ahead and start working on their next highest priority item immediately.

You might say that the same effect can be reached with the help of due dates. However, priority columns also add a visual element to your Scrumban board. You can quickly check on the team priorities and adjust them easily right there on the Scrumban board.

Sub-task tracking board example

If your team process includes complicated steps or you work with user stories that need to be divided into separate tasks, you should consider adding a secondary task process to your board. What we mean by this, is dividing large process steps into smaller ones and tracking work item subtasks as they are being completed.

As you can see in the example, Backlog and Completed sections hold larger user stories. When they are pulled into the Work in progress section, we can also see the subtasks and track them through a separate process. This is especially useful when you need to specify and track subtasks for user stories. However, this is not the only use case for secondary process columns.

Teams that work with complicated processes also often add such secondary steps into their boards. Most commonly to expand one or two process steps that are more complicated than the rest.

Approval Scrumban board example

The last modified Scrumban board example on this list is the one with expanded sections. In all of the previous examples we have seen three main sections – Backlog, Work in progress, and Completed. So it is important to mention, this is not the only setup you could or should be using.

One of the most common additions to this list is the Approval section. It is an important aspect of many business processes and having it separated from the WIP section allows gaining a better understanding of the progress. Have any other process steps that are of higher importance? Use a separate section on your Scrumban board to identify them.

Scrumban board system example

One last Scrumban board example on this list comes from using not one, but several boards. One of the most common reasons for such usage is using one board for planning and prioritization and another for execution. Only work items that are of highest priority and ready to be performed by the team are moved to the execution board. While all of the planning and Backlog grooming is done on the Backlog board.

Such a system is especially useful for teams with larger processes and a larger number of tasks. As it allows for the boards to stay relatively easy to read and tidy.

Another way of using a system of Scrumban boards is creating separate boards for separate departments. For example, you could have a system of bards in an engineering company where one board is dedicated to design, one to execution, and one for administrative tasks. The three processes are quite different and such separation allows tracking each of them more accurately.

Ready to build your own Scrumban board? Check out Teamhood for all of the discussed features and easy collaboration with your team!