We ♥ our Physical Wall
There is nothing that creates visibility, collaboration and flexibility of process in a team like a physical wall displaying the process and the work.
But... they are not without their limitations. They lack the detail and the reporting aspect that you really need an online tool to fulfill and that's why...
We ♥ Trello
Trello is the closest app to a physical wall that we have ever come across.
But... in all it's virtue it does lack the transparency and in your face impact that a physical wall gives. So we continue to hold our face to face meetings at our physical wall.
Why eClaire was born
Therefore, both a physical wall and trello are 'must haves' for our team however having both is not without it's own pain. We have to keep the two in sync and for months we were typing a card in trello and writing a physical card for the wall. When you're creating and delivering cards as quickly as our team does - this overhead starts to wear thin.
We ♥ hack days
So one hack day we decided to build eClaire - a trello label printer.
The requirement was simple; I want to create a card in trello and it create a card for the physical wall too.
We built a solution that has saved us countless amounts of hours while raising the bar of how aesthetically pleasing our physical wall looks.
You create a card in trello, label it how you'd like and then add the label "PrintMe". A sticky label is then printed out from the eClaire printer with the title and the relevant labels tagged at the bottom.
Oh, and did I mention it is printed out in my own hand writing? As a nice to have you can upload your own font to not lose the feel that handwriting gives you on your physical wall.
We have our own Kogan.com index cards, so we stick it on the appropriate coloured card and tack it to the wall.
Another added bonus is that the card contains a QR Code which links to the Trello URL for the card. Now we can scan a card with our phone, open the card in the Trello app and get context on the card whilst at the wall -- quick & easy!!
This means we've been able to capitalise on all the value of a physical wall without the inefficiencies!
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