Amplio Virtual Collaboration Boards

Virtual collaboration boards are more important than ever. While most people use them as virtual whiteboards, their potential impact is great. Our boards are designed with the following uses in mind:

• Real-time collaboration. This is how they are usually used – everyone on at the same time. But this is not always practical. These boards let everyone see what everyone else is thinking. This type of collaboration usually feels safer than other types.
• Asynchronous collaboration. The boards are designed so that people in different time zones can work together, even if not at the same time. This enables a new way of working. People in similar time zones can work together and then use the limited overlap time to consolidate views.
• Enables Safe Communication. Safe environments do not always exist. The anonymity these boards create enables “saying” things that might not otherwise be said.
• Enables dumping tacit knowledge. People know a lot more than they are often aware of. Many of the boards are designed to enable people to make explicit their intuitive thinking. This has a tendency to expand people’s understanding and collaboration.
• Documentation of any decisions made during a collaboration. Meetings and working sessions should result in decisions made. The boards are designed to document these and keep them up to date.
• Record sessions. This enables people who miss any to see what happened and contribute later.
• Include hyperlinks to related information. Boards can become collections of information that is useful for the teams.

Amplio workshops are based on the following boards. These are not just random collaboration boards. They are designed to work together to provide a solid set of collaboration methods that a coach can use to help teams improve. These are not mere tools. These boards enable a skilled coach, one who has taken the Amplio Development Masterclass, to guide teams through the problems we most see them face.

Other boards are available in the Amplio Consultant Educators Learning Journey.

Boards provided in the Amplio Learning Journeys

Boards in the Amplio Development Master Class are marked as ADM. Those in the ACEs Learning Journey are marked as ACE.

1. Lean Coffee Board

Lean coffees are informal meetings used to learn topics where the agenda is set by the participants. ACE.

2. Pre-mortem 

It is useful to look to see what can go wrong before jumping into a new project. This board walks you through a way to do this called the pre-mortem. ADM, ACE

3. Run a Café Conversation

The Cafe Conversation enables groups of up to 60 people to collaboratively solve problems while getting to know each other better. This board can be used to discuss almost any problem or garnering of insights for the group. ADM, ACE

4. The clean slate boards

Sometimes you need to clean up the “elephant in the room.” This board provides a safe way to discuss what may be difficult topics. ACE

5. The Challenges Board

This board can be used by individuals to identify the challenges their teams are having. It is a great way to identify and discuss the challenges present, why they are there, and what to do about them

This board can also be used as an ongoing “impediments board” to list challenges the team has had. It can also be used as a way to run a retrospection. ADM, ACE

6. First principles and the Factors for Effective Value Streams

This board lets teams learn together about how the first principles of Flow, Lean, and the Theory of Constraints, affect what they do. After that, the factors for effective value streams is presented so that people can see how they can look at their work to see these first principles in action. ADM

7. The damage delays cause, the value of feedback, and deciding on timeboxing or flow.

The true quality of the work being done is mostly invisible until something is demonstrated. When an error is made but not detected for a while the amount of work required to fix the error increases dramatically. This board helps people collaborate with each other to see how to remove delays and speed up getting feedback.

Timeboxing is not appropriate for all teams. This board helps participants be clear about when each approach is better for them. This board guides teams through what to look for to see which approach to take. ADM

8. Agile requirements and using Minimum Business Increments.

Agility is predicated on creating small items of value. This board facilitates identifying stakeholders’ values and writing up what can be quickly created and released. ADM, ACE

9. Value creation structures.

How people are organized has a big impact on how work flows. Organizing teams to work well together is often not something easy to just jump to. This board presents different ways to migrate to improve how people are organized. ADM

10. Capabilities for a quick start.

Although Amplio is incredibly rich in options, it can start as simply as Scrum. It accomplishes this by showing how to take a subset of its suggested capabilities and which could be partially implemented. This enables a quick start to take place while providing what’s needed as the teams need more. ADM

11. Two different After Action Review boards

Either of these can be used to help during retros. ADM, ACE

12. Create an improvement backlog board

While the earlier “quick start” board is used to start an Agile transition, this board identifies what improvements are needed and the order to implement them. ADM

Boards provided ACE Trainers

1. The Dot Game

The dot game is an easy way to teach the essence of Agile in an hour in a remote manner. This can also be given to management to teach them the essence of Agile and the importance of self-organization. ACE Trainer

Other boards are coming.