Right now, our teams are using a combination of a bulletin board and an excel spreadsheet to keep track of tasks and to draw a burndown chart. Backlogs are keep on index cards in envelopes.
This works well when the stakeholders are in the same location. However, we will soon have Scrum teams in two geographically distant locations and I am looking for best practices on how we can leverage Sharepoint to help us communicate around Scrum artifacts (backlog, burndown chart, velocity, etc.).
How did you leverage Sharepoint for that purpose, what are the best practices and the potential pitfalls?
If you have SharePoint in house already,along with a user base that is comfortable using it I think it would be fairly easy to get started with using it for SCRUM. I would start with the following:
A site collection to hold 1 scrum site per project
A scrum site should contain:
Document library for the electronic files (add columns for categorization as appropriate)
List of team members
Discussion board
The site can be built from a Wiki site template if its necessary.
Once you get the scrum site "feeling right" save it as a template so its easy to spin up a new one.
This solution may not be designed for SCRUM to the nth degree, but it should be enough to get you started. It seems a lot easier than having the entire team learn a new tool when it sounds like you are undergoing some other pretty radical changes.
my $0.02
jt