Skinnyboard uses Agile development principles to organize information.
Here are the main elements, working from left to right:
Projects are broken down into “Stories”, which are self-contained manageable pieces of functionality. Each Story has a narrative and an estimate attached to.
Skinnyboard provides the ability to assign “Story Points”, which are relative estimates of size combining complexity and time. Adding up Story Points provides a general idea of “how big” a project is.
You might want to combine this estimation with something like planning poker. www.planningpoker.com
Once your story point estimates are established, you can break things down further by creating tasks for each story, and assigning an hourly estimate value to each task in the task column.
This breaks down work into smaller, more precise units that can assigned to team members which can measured as they are completed.
As a team member takes on the task, they move the task card to the “In Process”. This lets everyone know who is working on what.
As a task becomes completed, it needs to be verified/tested that the work was completed by a fellow team member to assess whether it is completed.
Tasks completed and verified can be moved to the “Done column”. They will disappear from the board when the checkbox is clicked off. All data will be stored back in Basecamp for future reference.
Clicking on the “View Progress” button will generate a graph that shows you how your project is trending towards a completion date so the team can answer “When will the project be done”
