Whiteboard With Stickers vs. Excel

At the company I work for we are trying to do things in a more agile way. And one of the things that people hesitate to do is to stick to something to 'taste' it. It doesn't necessarily means that there will be no value delivered to the client, or the work will be entirely stalled. To me it means don't turn down right away something until you know what are you talking about. And you won't know what you are talking about unless you do it. So this one is about whiteboard with stickers vs excel spreadsheet.

Why excel spreadsheet? Shared easily with remote people, supports the paperless office, and.... that's it.

Why not excel? Don't have to scroll, by looking at the whiteboard you can have a quick idea how good or bad things are. Allow multiple team members concentrate on a few things at the same time due to the fact that there's no restriction on the viewport  (computer screen).

So we have now a few post-it notes on the whiteboard in the column In-Process, none in done (hopefully not for long), and more in not started. This is definitely feels better when you walk in into the office and see the "big picture", realizing  that the value has to be produces, and not just the status updated to XY% in the spreadsheet.

I would love to hear ideas on how to make it work better, especially from people who have done it already.

4 Comments

  • Yup, whiteboard and post its is the way to go. A planning board or wall is the best source of truth as to where things are at (as long as people are a) updating it and b) honest).

    Excel is nice for tracking stuff but too much of a maintenance hog when all you want to do is move a stickie from In Progress to Done (or Done or Done).

    Once a task is Done, Done, Done, you don't need the spreadsheet or the stickie so just throw it away. The software is the artifact.

  • We've tried post its, sharepoint, excel, story cards, tfs and TFS wins: any time. And no, I'm not a developer, I'm the product owner.

  • Task management with post-it notes is a joke. It doesn't scale, it's slow, metrics calculation (such as velocity) is tedious, it doesn't suit for distributed development, it's very difficult to record stuff for long periods of time etc. etc.

    I can't believe some people are actually advocating it as the "best method".

  • @Dick,

    what would be your recommendation?

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