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

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.