It came up in the discussion thread on my Kanban in Action post, that a white board was all very well but how did we deal with remote working? I answered that we use Team Foundation Server to track all work items and that we keep the white board in sync with the electronic tracking system.
Well it turns out that keep them in sync is problematic especially when people are working from home or otherwise remotely. Darren Davis has instituted a "sticky buddy" scheme where people who are WFH for the day, have to designate a in-office buddy who will update the white board for them and keep it in sync with the electronic tracking system.
I came in this morning to see this huge reminder to the team that we take sticky buddies seriously - or more importantly we take the integrity of the data on the white board seriously. They all got to see this reminder at the 9.45am standup meeting today.
It's a good example of how we are combining, agility, collaborative working, end-to-end tracking, formal reporting and remote and multi-site working all together to deliver a better more lean solution for sustaining work. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering
