Card Wall + online card wall = duplication? [closed]

Question

I'm not a great fan of duplicating effort. I do find, however, that there are benefits to tracking agile iteration progress on both a physical card wall and an online "calculator" (Excel, some scrum tools) or an online card wall (e.g. Mingle).

I find that a physical card wall in the team space provides a visceral kind of connection to the status of the cards... and that moving a card physically when you finish something provides a level of satisfaction that can't be duplicated online. I can feel the card... and people can see me walk up to the wall to move something.

Online tools provide great capabilities to share remotely and to calculate progress (e.g. in Mingle, you can use the built-in tools to automatically calculate burn-ups or burn-downs from the real data, saving lots of administrative time in doing those things manually).

I'm curious if agile practitioners maintain two tracking media like I do, and how do you present the benefits of the physical wall to those who say "I can do it online... why would I want to do it on a card wall instead?".

Answer 1

I feel the same. There is something very psychologically satisfying in moving a physical card around on a wall. Thinking managerially, we like stats and we like them to be automated as much as possible.

Perhaps you can keep both? Use the physical wall as the main daily source of information your team work from. Then, assign one person (e.g. the scrum master) to take down the live status and put it into Mingle/Excel at the end of each day.

As long as there is good benefit for the users to have both, then you should find both keep happening alongside each other nicely. Find out what the motivators are for each tool. For example:

Physical wall:

• Instant reaction
• Quick visual
• Physical satisfaction

Online records:

• Really really useful statistics
• People can be rewarded against the stats in there (e.g. points completed)

Hope this helps.