— August 22, 2010 —
By Tobin Harris
We recently embarked upon building a virtual card wall to help us see all the work our team is doing, across all projects. It’s proving to be incredibly useful, and gives us a huge feeling of control.
The reason is that we’re learning about Kanban to help us better manage our projects. We believe that the more visible the process and the work are, the better we can manage manage them.
Features
The idea is that the card-wall has sticky notes stuck to it to show all the work in progress and queueing. The board is split into columns.
We’re trying to draw inspiration from the real-world. Cards can appear skewed if they have been recently touched, or grubby and faded if they’ve been sat around too long.
We can also group cards into piles to get an overview.
Video
You can see a video of it in action here.
Technology…
The technology behind this is Sencha Touch, which allows us to use this on a large touch-screen in the office. It also means it is compatible with the iPad and iPhone.
At Engine Room we use Pivotal Tracker for actual project management, so the board basically is a birds eye view on all the information in there. It also means that, as our process changes, the card wall can be configured to reflect that.
We’re also integrating the card-wall with 37Signals Hirise to give us visibility of our sales pipeline.
It’s all good fun!
Will we be sharing it?
We think so. Probably with free and paid options. Watch this space!
