Huddle Boards: How a Pop of Color Motivated a Team

Angela is a creative and agile early-career project coordinator. She is passionate about learning and enhancing her project management practice through certifications and on-the-job training.

  Communications Management  

In a world filled with minimalist designs and text-heavy slides, teams crave tools that are new, fun, and effective to use. My team recently became Lean enabled, which involved adopting team huddles and huddle boards. The huddle board template was a starting point, but there was room to evolve it to fit the needs of my team. My contribution was to update our huddle board with a bit a flare and color.

Huddle boards are visual tools to get a temperature check of your team. The goal is that they are easy to read and low effort to update. The template given to my team was text based. An overwhelming wall of updates that required significant effort to write out statuses. It was also a bit dated with the clip art and format. My idea was to rely on visual icons and modern design to make our huddle board a conversation starter instead of a written update tracker.

The first item to tackle was status. How is the team feeling about their amount of work? I added a visual status tracker for “drowning, treading water, and lifeguard” to help the team communicate capacity and stress.

• Drowning status means you are overwhelmed with work and looking for help to ease the load.
• Treading water status means you are at full capacity, neither overwhelmed nor available to help others.
• Lifeguard status means you have capacity to take on more work and or help someone else.

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