Definitely agree. What do people think about remote teams?
And also agree with Daniel, there is a powerful simplicity in post-it notes. Automated tools on the other hand never improve your process. At best, at best they automate it and everything that is currently broken about it.
The state of the system is only one dimension, who’s interested in what and what they are doing is another. The claim was that humans are optimized for watching other people work, and most office automation hides all that:
You never see Snively grab the Horrocks file and open it on his desk. Anecdotally, I have seen benefits from physical cards: People might see someone grab a card and speak up “Hey, are you looking at Thermoregulating Widgets? I was talking to Phred and he said...”
This information is theoretically available when someone clicks “start” on a task, but somehow it is not as visceral as watching someone grab or move a note card.
I'm a big fan of "physicalizing" things that need to get done. I put little notes to myself all over the house and in my car.
One small problem: the number of developers who think they can handle working remotely in a team is much greater than those that actually can.
One major problem: none of these factors are constants. They are variables, and if they change in the middle of your project, none of the many things you could do to get a physically co-located team or company back on track will work.
In fact, unlike a team you see every day, it may take you a lot longer to even notice something is off. People so underestimate the importance of body language in human co-operation. The way someone walks into a room can sometimes tell you way more than 2 hours on a Skype call.
Even when it got to a point in the project where it was just me tracking my own tasks, Pivotal worked better for me than post-it notes could possibly have. Among other things, I ALWAYS had access to them where I needed them -- at my computer.