In March 2020 the world faced a situation that none of us could have predicted, namely COVID-19. I thought like many that this would be a temporary blip but here we are, a whole year later and still working from home.
As an Agile Consultant providing Coaching & Scrum Master services I did wonder how I would maintain effectiveness while working from home, particularly with the teams being widespread geographically and across multiple time zones.
How would I manage without interactive White Board sessions, team collaboration space, share ideas via conversations, etc? With the teams being in the early stages of an agile transformation they had just got used to visual aids, using post-it notes on physical boards to flesh out ideas and creatively express themselves in an interactive way.
I was then introduced to Mural Boards by the hugely impressive Agile Monster:
Check out https://www.agilemonster.co.uk.
I have to say that these have proved invaluable and if anything, have help improve productivity during lockdown. I may have been slow to the party in discovering Mural Boards, they have been around for some time & a good number of Organisations proactively use them daily. This was clearly illustrated when I recently completed my IC Agile Professional Coaching Certification, superbly delivered by The Agile Company:
See https://theagilecompany.org.
That course was hugely interactive, entirely using a combination of a Mural Board & Zoom Breakout Rooms, it was a highly effective way of delivering training & reinforced my understanding of the power of these boards.
The teams absolutely love the Mural Boards for their versatility, ease of use, the range of built in templates, the fact that you can drop in your own images & creatively come up with your own ideas. So far I have used it to deliver Team Retrospectives, planning the Lunch & Learn training sessions that I provide, Team Canvas sessions, Roadmaps, VMOST sessions (Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategy and Tactics) and also fun events such as our remote Christmas Party and informal Virtual Coffee discussions.
Should we return to office based working in the future I’m sure that there will still be a place for the power of Mural Boards.
I’d love to hear other people’s views & experience on Murals, please share your thoughts.
Many thanks.