You can tell an awful lot from a quick glance at a delivery board. As for all tools and metrics, a delivery board may not give answers, but will offer very good questions.

Stream-level delivery board

The value stream has three teams and each team has a board (more detail about their boards later).

The value stream has adopted a 6-week iteration, with iteration 14 one week longer to include the holidays. The Sync Event is in the first week of the iteration, probably the beginning of the week judging by its position.

The value stream has decided to show the next 2 iterations at a lower level of detail. They are currently at the end of week 3.

There is a cross-team dependency shown as a less visible arrow between teams Octopus and Gorillas.

The teams seem to have an agreed and shared definition of done reported on the board. Also, there is a link to the strategic roadmap for the value stream and/or company.

Team Lions

Showing the start of iteration 12, between planning and the Sync Event.

Some board features:

• Swimlanes track epics for this team, with one for general items
• Christmas is marked on the board
• “Andy” is probably a new team member joining at the start of November

Some questions arising from the board:

• Is it realistic to have 4 deliverables all in the first 2 weeks of the iteration?
• There are 3 weeks without any deliverable, could intermediate deliverables be found?
• “Another epic” does not look planned out AND there are no questions on the board about it… It may be ending but there’s a deliverable in iteration 14 so what’s going on?

Team Gorillas