Creating Excel-based Scrum schedules for Agile projects

If you are a ScrumMaster, you understand the importance of good planning and keeping each sprint on schedule. Agile timelines are a great way to communicate the important details of your schedule, including sprint planning, standups, and reviews, with each member of your team.

Creating an Agile timeline or a Scrum schedule is easy, especially if you already keep a list of important meetings and deliverables in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. OnePager Express will take your task list from Excel and create timelines that everyone on your team can understand.

OnePager Express is a Microsoft Excel add-in, so you can launch it directly from Excel without having to export or convert your data. Here's how to build your Agile timeline:

1. Open your task list in Excel. Your list can be in any format you like, but you might want to include things like sprints, standup meetings, ongoing backlog planning, and other scrum meetings:




2. You might want to group your tasks by sprint or color-code tasks by the responsible team. To do this, insert a "Team" column (Column E above), and specify the person or team assigned to each task. We will use this for grouping in a minute. To color-code by a particular sprint, or by any other category related to your tasks, create a "Task Category" column (Column F above) and enter the category for each task.
3. Click the OnePager Express button, which appears on Excel's Add-Ins tab. If you haven't purchased OnePager Express yet, you can download a 15-day free trial.
4. OnePager Express will ask you to name your Agile timeline, which you should do in the Project View field shown below. You don't need to change any other settings on this page for now:
   
   
   
5. Click the Next button to tell OnePager Express which Excel columns you want to import for the Agile timeline:
   
   
   
6. For Task Name, select the "Event Description" column. For Color, choose the "Task Category" column. Finally, for Swimlane Titles (grouping and sorting), choose the "Team" column.
7. Click on Create new project view. OnePager Express will import your task list from Excel and begin to create an Agile schedule that highlights all of the important tasks for each team.
8. In OnePager Express, go to Project View->Properties of the Project View. On the Main tab, find the Task/milestone text position section and set the value to Best Fit Left/Right.
9. Before closing the Properties of the Project View form, go to the Swimlanes & Colors tab and uncheck the Order swimlanes same as Excel box. Now, press OK. This will regroup everything based on the "Task Category" column you imported earlier.
10. On your timeline, you will now see individual symbols for each meeting. You might want to move these up or down to lie on top of an overall recurring meeting theme. For example, you might want to have all of your individual backlog planning meetings sit on top of an ongoing backlog planning task. To do this, start by lassoing the individual meeting tasks. Then press the Position text below marker button, as highlighted below, to move the labels for each task towards the bottom.




11. If you want to show the date for each meeting, right-click on the lassoed group of meetings, navigate to the Show Date menu and click Show it.
12. Finally, click on each meeting marker individually, and use your mouse to drag it into position on top of the ongoing meeting task. When you're finished, it should look something like this:
    
    
    
13. After moving all individual tasks into position, you have extra spaces in your timeline. To remove these spaces, right-click on the white space to the left of your chart and select Hide swimlane, as shown below:
    
    
    
14. If you would like to change the colors or symbols that are associated with each sprint, just right-click inside the legend on the item you want to change, and pick a new color or symbol:
    
    
    
15. You can also add links between two related tasks to show a relationship. To do this, click on the first task, hold down the Ctrl key, and click on the second task. Right-click on either of the two selected tasks and choose Event links. You can then specify the color and style of link between the first and second task in your ScrumMaster schedule:
    
    
    
16. Congratulations! Your Agile timeline is now complete:
    
    
    

You can customize your OnePager Express agile project timeline even more before sharing it in a standup, or with other ScrumMasters:

• Show original sprint dates or percent complete for a sprint
• Add comment boxes, text boxes, or images to your task board
• Change the time scale to show all or part of a longer Agile schedule

Once you've set up your Agile timeline the first time, it's easy to update it as your schedule changes from day to day. OnePager Express automatically remembers all of your settings, and will use the same template to create updated views of the same schedule as you refresh your task list in Excel.

Get started today by downloading a free trial or attending one of our demonstration webinars.