Start with a Paper Board

It’s tempting to select an electronic tool when you start with an agile approach. Electronic tools provide you places to put your planned and in-progress work. You’re probably accustomed to electronic project-management tools. And electronic boards make it easy to calculate cycle time or velocity.

However, paper boards have several benefits electronic boards don’t have:

• The team members can pass around a card or sticky to review, add/subtract, or rephrase. That’s how people on the same team build the same mental model of the story or feature set.

• People don’t move something to some sort of in-progress column without actually standing up from their desk, walking over to the board and moving it. Electronic tools make it too easy for the team members to say, “Yes, I’m done with that” or “I’m working on it” when neither state is true.

• Electronic tools can hide the details of the card. Often, the box is too small to see the story details or the acceptance criteria at a glance.

• Paper helps you create smaller stories, because the paper (cards or stickies) is small.

• When you start with paper, you can see which columns you need on your board and easily add or subtract them.

• Paper helps you limit the team’s overall WIP. Paper creates a physical limit for what everyone sees, considers, and works on.

If you’re worried about how a distributed team can see a paper board, see ​Create Visible Boards for Geographically Distributed Teams​, for more details.

Teams that start with electronic tools fall into many traps. These traps are not the tools’ fault. The problem is that the tools don’t help the team create new, agile habits. The team reinforces old habits. I’ve seen these problems when teams started with a tool:

• The team’s stories are too large to complete in an iteration, never mind in one or two days.

• The team creates architecture-based work or tasks, instead of stories.

• People tend to create tasks around the story to break it apart instead of swarming around the feature.

• People tend to say, “I’m an expert there, for that story. Assign it to me.” Aside from the fact that no one should assign anyone work, reinforcing the expert problem creates bottlenecks and reduces team learning and feedback. Paper boards don’t have a need to assign anyone to the story when the team creates the story.

One of my clients used a whiteboard with index cards. Each person on the team had one magnet. Because each person had only one magnet, each person had limited WIP.

Another client had index cards on corkboard. They used pushpins with people’s faces on them to push the index cards onto the correct column. They had three pushpins for each person on the team. When I asked them how it was to have people be on three cards at the same time, the director said, “We know that having people assigned to multiple items is not helping our throughput. However, we can see what people are working on.”

Start with paper on your board. Paper invites collaboration and the agile mindset. Paper will help you see what you’re doing and not doing, as individuals and teams.

Don’t start with an electronic board. Start with paper of some variety.