Mastering Agile: How to Build your Own Scrum Board in ClickUp

If you’re here, chances are you already have a good grasp of the agile scrum methodology and want to put it into practice with the right tools. The real question is: How do you set up a ClickUp Scrum board that fully integrates into your daily workflows and operations? 

Because let’s face it, for a Scrum team to be effective, the framework needs to become an integral part of your systems and processes.

That’s where modern Agile project tools come in, helping you to build a task management system rooted in agile scrum methodology. 

With so many options available such as ClickUp, Jirra, Trello, Monday.com and Asana, the challenge is in choosing the one best suited to effectively incorporate the agile scrum framework. 

When deciding which  productivity tool to use, the goal is always to utilize the tool that combines diversity of features, flexibility, and ease of use. In this pursuit, we invariably arrive at ClickUp as the answer. It brings together features, structure, and integrations that make it easy to create a Scrum board, track your sprints, and build long-term visibility into your project roadmap.

With this in mind, this guide will walk you through how to make a Scrum board in ClickUp so that your team can collaborate effectively and streamline your agile workflow.

Your workspace architecture is your organizational structure. In ClickUp, this flows from the top-level Workspace down to individual tasks and subtasks. This system enables you to group related work into dedicated locations, creating separate areas for different departments, projects, or specific workflows. Consequently, it’s necessary to think about how you can build your own Scrum board architecture in a way that allows for comprehensive integration while also remaining distinct enough to allow you to track and report on the Agile scrum process.

The first step in this process is creating a dedicated Agile Scrum board space. This becomes your central hub for all things Scrum, making it easy to track, manage and report on your agile processes. Inside this space, it’s useful to create folders for each of the primary scrum components, namely: product roadmap, ceremonies, backlog, and sprints. For comprehensive workflow integration, we suggest going one step further and adding department-specific folders to break down the Agile workflow into resolution streams for each development team. Sophisticated automations can then ensure that these department folders filter backlog and sprint items into the correct department folder, giving each team visibility over only the items relevant to them. In the instance that they exist, department folders can then be moved into relevant business areas or department spaces for comprehensive workflow integration.

Within each of your agile scrum component folders, it’s useful to break things down further into more granular workflows. For example, your Ceremonies folder can be broken down into Sprint Planning, Daily Standup, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective lists. For additional visibility, pair this with automations that feed all events into one All Ceremonies list, giving you a single location to plan, schedule, and track your scrum meetings. 

Similarly, your Backlog folder can be broken up into two lists: Product backlog, and Sprint Backlog lists. Use the Product Backlog to capture and groom tasks, receiving tasks that are added from any location in your workspace or created via a ‘backlog intake’ form fitted on your Product backlog list. Once groomed, and earmarked for the upcoming sprint, tasks can then be added to the Sprint Backlog list, forming a library of all of your upcoming sprint tasks. 

The most effective way to supercharge your sprint lists is by creating an optimized sprint template, fitted with all the necessary status options, views, custom fields, and dashboards. Apply this template in your Sprints folder ensuring that each new sprint is fully optimized from the start. 

We’ve spoken about the importance of integrating the agile scrum framework into your workflows, but what does that actually look like in practice? This is where ClickUp’s features make a big difference. One of the most powerful is ClickUp’s ‘tasks in multiple lists’ functionality, which allows you to house your tasks in several locations within your workspace. 

With this feature, there are two simple ways to add tasks to your Product Backlog from anywhere in ClickUp. 

1. Manual add: Use the ‘add to list’ function whenever you need to include a task in the backlog. This is the best way to include tasks that are not added to the backlog on a consistent trigger or workflow stage, but rather as and when needed. 

2. Automations: Set up automations to ensure that tasks are automatically added to the Product backlog. For example, during sprint retrospectives, your team identifies action items for improvement. These action items or retro items need to be added to our backlog for incorporation in future sprints. By combining a “Retrospective Category” custom field with powerful automations, you can ensure that any action items are automatically added to our “Product backlog” without any extra effort.  

The beauty of this powerful ‘tasks in multiple lists’ feature is that it allows us to keep our tasks in their original lists, while including them in our backlog as a secondary location. This enables us to  maintain the structure of our organization while comprehensively integrating the agile framework into our operations. 

We use the term ‘back-end’ to describe the dynamic grid that forms as a result of the intersection between our hierarchy (y-axis) and our views and custom fields (x-axis). When building your agile scrum space you want to think about how you can combine these elements to produce the most effective results. One of the most powerful ways to do this is by combining intuitive custom fields with sophisticated automations. In the context of our agile scrum framework, there are a few important steps you can take to unlock powerful visibility and reporting capabilities.

The first is a two step process that helps you achieve both granularity and high-level visibility in your ceremonies. Start by creating a dropdown custom field for “Ceremonies” and use automations so that tasks inherit the right tag (Spring planning, Standup, Review, or Retrospective). Then, create another automation that adds tasks from your individual ceremony lists to an additional All Ceremonies list. With these grouped views and filters, you’re able to achieve a complete overview of every Scrum meeting in one place

Perhaps the most important set of back-end automations revolves around your sprints, specifically, the ability to compare performance across all past sprints. Sprints are the backbone of your agile scrum framework. To get results, you need to complete work effectively and efficiently in this fixed-length time period. And, in true agile fashion, you should always be on the lookout for opportunities to iterate and improve your sprint process.

Insightful reports play a critical role here. They let you analyze performance across key metrics, and when you can compare results across multiple sprints, you gain a powerful historical view of your team’s progress. This perspective helps your team to remain focussed on the bigger picture, spotting trends in velocity, team member efficiency, and overall output. 

To formulate these high-level reports, you’ll need to combine a custom field with powerful automations. The first step in this process is creating a “Sprint” custom field in your Sprints folder. Create dropdown options to reflect the naming convention you’ve decided to adopt for your sprints (ie. Sprint 1, Sprint 2, etc.). This creates a one-for-one mapping of your sprint folder, allowing every task to be labelled with the corresponding sprint list name. To do this, include automations in your sprint template to ensure that all tasks created in, added, or moved to your sprint lists, automatically inherit the correct ‘label’. By building this into the template, each new sprint comes pre-loaded with the automations you need - only slight adjustments required. With this powerful data point tagging your tasks automatically, you can unlock powerful dashboard reports from your Sprints folder. Whether it’s sprint velocity, individual velocity (a controversial topic, we know), or time estimates versus actuals, you’re perfectly positioned to assess whether your sprint processes are actually improving. 

We’ve made brief mention of dedicated department folders to serve as mirrors of your entire agile scrum process, but let’s take a closer look: Why do you need them, and how do they actually work? 

Department folders function as filtered subsets of your entire agile scrum dataset. Think of them as siloes that allow each team to track, manage, and resolve the agile scrum tasks relative to them.

Here’s how they come together: 

1. Ceremonies list automation: 

Every department folder includes a single [Dep] Ceremonies list. Automations ensure all ceremony tasks land here automatically. 

2. Backlog assignment:

Backlog and sprint items are added to the relevant department folders. Simply combine a “Department” dropdown with automations to add tasks to department-specific locations. This takes place in your Product backlog list and again in your Sprints folder. Grooming your backlog involves adding additional detail to tasks and estimating the effort required to complete them. Automations then place each task in the corresponding Dep Backlog list. 

3. Sprint sync:

With department ‘labels’ attached to each of our backlog tasks, we can create a set of automations in our sprint folder to perform a similar function – every time a task is added, add the task to the [Dep] Current Sprint list in the corresponding department folder.

While not strictly essential to our agile scrum framework, agile department folders deliver major advantages: 

• Visibility - by creating distinct subsets of the data, department folders help organizations order the chaos, so teams see only tasks that relate to them. 

• Focus - department folders clear out the noise, ensuring that team members don’t have to scroll through irrelevant tasks cluttering their view. 

• Scalability - processes grow cleanly across departments without chaos

In a similar way, department folders bring clarity and accountability. With dedicated resolution streams, it’s clear which team is responsible for each subset of data. And with folder-level dashboards, you can generate department-specific reports that make it easy for managers and executives to compare performance across teams.  

As your organization grows, centralized Backlog and Sprints folders get more difficult to manage. A heavy task load can overload your workflows, undermining the agile scrum framework. Dedicated resolution streams solve this issue by breaking down backlog and sprint datasets into manageable sets for each team. This way, Department folders help the agile scrum space scale as your company scales. 

Department folders also add an additional level of workflow integration. Designed to be moved out of the agile scrum space, you’re able to move these folders into the spaces in ClickUp where each of these teams or departments perform their tasks. That means no more jumping between spaces to find scrum data - everything your team needs is right where they already operate. 

ClickUp’s customizability can either over-complicate or radically transform your workflow. With clear guidelines and the right structure, you can build your own Scrum board framework that scales, integrates seamlessly, streamlines processes with automations, and powers your reporting with dynamic dashboards.