There can only be one

Mike Cohn said that he seldom participate in a project where he'd found any use for digital tools for handling sprint backlog, sprint burndown and product backlog.

I've heard the same on multiple scrum seminars and even heard the phrase 'Oh, you have so much post its, you must be really agile'. As if there where some kind of corralation how many trees that need to be killed and how agile you are.

But the strangest thing is that the same persons who talk so warmly against our forests are often good at showing burn downs from Excel. I do not understand that. If the horrible truth isn't that many using postits also keep the info as a list in excel.

My experience from keeping double records of lists that changes all the time is that one copy is never up to date. And there is something that is more dangerous than lack of visualization and that is visualization of old or wrong data.

There can be only one! That is true not only in the 80's block buster. I want my stakeholders to be able to see the one and only product backlog or burndown. And since my boss wants that diagram in Excel and since we have developers who needs to work from home from time to time we can't keep postits visual to all users. Well, we could place a web cam in our team room but that does strike me as a really weird solution.

My team's main reason against using Team Foundation Server for keeping the backlogs was the visualization but the introduction of Elektropost's Scrum Dashboard even the most stubborn has accepted the solution and we've also started an interest in our services organization. I would really like our consultants tracking their project in such a tool and also visualising it for the rest of the company. And why not the customers?