Get Started with Team Foundation

The Concept

When teams rely on text-based lists, spreadsheets, and emails to keep track of their work, all too often things “fall between the cracks.” Regardless of the type of work you do, if it involves multiple steps and a team of people to get it done, then you’re probably familiar with the misunderstandings, oversights, and hand-off delays that can easily occur.

Using a Kanban board to visualize the work as it’s being worked on helps to reveal problems earlier in the process to eliminate them quickly. To create a visual representation of their work, teams define the series of actions, steps, or stages that a piece of work goes through to be considered “done” and depict this process using lanes on a board.

In the example above, the columns represent the different steps a work item can move through from initial planning through to completion. The specific lanes a team uses should meet the needs of the team and be tailored to their context.

Cards are used to represent work items on the board. This ensures that anyone looking at the board can instantly see what’s being worked on and the latest status.

Cards can be moved across the board easily using drag and drop to reflect the current status of each work item.

The combination of being able to see how work gets done and what is being worked on makes information a lot easier to consume, understand, and share.

Key Terms

Here’s a quick explanation of the most common terms you’ll see used in AgilePlace and related resources:

• Kanban Board - Kanban is the Japanese word for "signal card." A Kanban board is a visual way to manage activities by signaling the status of those activities in a highly visible way.
• Work in Process (WIP) - Work that has been started but is not yet finished.
• Board - A visual representation of your workflow, separated into lanes that represent stages of work with cards that represent individual work items.
• Card - A visual representation of a piece of work that can be moved through the lanes on your board. Cards help you visually track each work item as it is moved through the stages of your process.
• Lanes - Rows and columns on a board that represent different steps or stages in a work process.
• Planview AgilePlace Account - Each Planview AgilePlace account has its own unique web address, one or more users, and one or more boards. Within one Planview AgilePlace account, multiple users can collaborate and manage their work on boards they share. The web address is created during the initial account set up, but can be changed at the request of the account owner.
• User - Each account can have multiple users. Each person needs their own user login to access a particular AgilePlace account. Each user can either be enabled or disabled; only enabled users can login or otherwise access the account.
• User License Limit - Determines the number of users that can be enabled at the same time within an AgilePlace account. Only enabled users count against or "consume" the number of user licenses available.

Learn more key terms in the Planview AgilePlace Glossary.

Visualize a Process or Project

As you start out, it’s good to have a project or process in mind that you want to visualize. To give you some ideas, here are three examples of how different teams use AgilePlace.

This example shows how an IT operations uses AgilePlace to manage conflicting priorities:

In this example, a software development team is using AgilePlace to apply scrum:

Here’s an example of AgilePlace being used at the portfolio level to prioritize strategic business initiatives: 

Each of these teams has configured their AgilePlace board completely differently. What all three examples have in common is that anyone can understand what the team is working on and where each work item is in the process simply by glancing at the board.