Overview

When using Scrum and GitHub Project Boards to manage work on projects, it’s easy to overlook the importance of preparing and following up on meetings. To ensure your meetings are as effective as possible, here’s a comprehensive set of tips to follow, divided into the following three sections:

• Preparing for the meeting
• Conducting the meeting
• Post-meeting follow-up

Preparing for the meeting

• Ensure that all the completed issues are moved to the “Done” section.
• If you have follow-up questions/tasks on issues that are moved to “Done”, add comments to provide clarity. To add a comment, click the issue and then select “Go to issue for full details” in the right column of your screen.
• Close any issues that have no further follow-up questions. Do not archive the issue, yet!
• Make sure that you know the status of all the issues you have moved to the “In Progress” section.

Conducting the meeting

• Start the meeting by discussing the issues marked as “Done”.

• Then discuss the issues listed as “In Progress” and “To Do”. Take brief notes of relevant tasks discussed in the “Backlog” section. You will revise these notes after the meeting.

• Together with your team, discuss which issues from the “Backlog” should be worked on in the upcoming sprint.

Post-meeting follow-up

• Move issues marked as “Done” requiring further discussion to an appropriate category. Add detailed notes specifying the necessary follow-up tasks.

• Archive “Done” issues that are fully complete and require no more attention.

• Transform the quick notes taken during the meeting into issues. Link the associated repository to the issue and be thorough in renaming the issues. If needed, break the note down into smaller issues. You could also categorize all your issues with labels to better manage the project.

• Move the issues slated for the upcoming sprint into the “To Do” section. This includes both follow-up actions and new items from the “Backlog”.

• Prioritize the issues within the “To Do” section by dragging them up or down the list.

Summary

With these steps completed, you’re now ready to start working on your next sprint with a well-organized and focused project board!