Huddle Board Ideas:
Managers have a plethora of tools to call upon when attempting to increase the productivity of their teams. Depending on your department’s mission and goals, there is no shortage of methodologies from which to choose.
The general purpose of these project management tools is to help make a company more efficient and boost that bottom line in the process. Luckily, depending on your goals and needs, there are multiple frameworks for helping streamline a business. One closely related to lean management and its various principles is agile development.
A Bit About Agile
Agile is a work management philosophy generally used in the IT and software development industry. It was originally devised as an alternative to Software Development Lifecycle methodologies and offers an iterative approach to software delivery.
Although agile was originally created to help businesses in an IT and software development context, the basic framework is applicable across every industry.
And a huddle board is simply one tool used to implement agile philosophies into various business environments.
What is a Huddle Board?
A huddle board, which is often seen in healthcare industry contexts, is a standardized visual tool meant to help teams collaborate on and visualize all the tasks necessary to complete a project.
A huddle board is often organized to contain all the ongoing tasks for a particular sprint (one of the iterations of agile projects, which generally last anywhere from two to six weeks). They often take the form of a plain white dry erase boards, and they’re most often covered in a variety of sticky notes with tasks penned on each one.
Huddle boards help organizations visualize their priorities for a particular stage in a project and help focus in on potential areas of improvement. For example, some healthcare organizations actually call daily meetings around the department’s huddle board, which outlines all the daily priorities for that particular team. This ensures everyone is on the same page and that everyone and expectations and tasks is set out in very clear terms.
Huddle boards also allow team members to track the life stage of a task as it moves from backlog to completion. It’s easy to visually see the status of a particular task based on which column it occupies on the huddle board.
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