It’s rare to get an Agile lesson on a hit TV comedy. But there’s a scene in the first season of Silicon Valley when Jared, the nerdy biz dev guy for the home-based Pied Piper team, introduces “an organizational system called Scrum.” After the two developers discover they’ve spent half the day doing the same work, the group concedes. Jared uses colored sticky notes to set up a Kanban-style board, describes the process and pumps up with the fact that now they all have visibility into each others’ progress. The devs go into uber-productivity mode, inspired by the healthy competition of seeing everyone’s task progress moving down the board—and wanting to be in the lead.

Scrum is one of the most popular Agile methodologies and for a good reason. It’s simple, it’s consistent and effective. According to the Scrum Methodology website, Scrum was inspired by inspect and adapt feedback loops in order to handle the complexity and risk inherent in all projects. Scrum gave us sprints, which divides work into short periods of one or two week periods. In short, Scrum is a set way of doing things in that reliable rinse-and-repeat format we all love. By having a solid process in place, teams can respond to the unpredictability of project work, and keep learning how to make the process—and their work—better.

If you’re working on a technology team, you know this stuff. Scrum, sprints, user stories, story points, backlogs—these are foundations of an Agile working environment. But you need to have your process dialed in, and used by everyone on the team. This gets more complicated as your team grows and team members aren’t located in one space. Plus, you could have the best online project management software in the world, but if you and your team don’t have your workspace optimized, you’re going to miss out on the beautiful agility that comes with running scrum projects. Every team is going to add their flavor to how they run their Scrum process, and using the right project management helps.

LiquidPlanner was created for technical teams working in Agile environments like Scrum. Watch this video to see how to run Scrum in a LiquidPlanner workspace.