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Printed story cards for your Scrum board

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I am a firm believer in a big tactile visible physical radiator board. You can simply not beat it for something that serves as a focus for the team and help them maintain scrum practices. This can sometimes be a problem when the projects you are working on have outgrown hand-written index cards but are not yet big enough for a formal tool, or they simply need a little more formal retention. (read governance here).
In the spirit of re-use and not doing any more than you absolutely need to do at any one time, I realised that the workbook I include in the free scrum tool would serve this purpose quite well once you have captured the stories. In fact you could run your entire project using the spreadsheet. It allows you to print stories 4 to a sheet and you end up with a card around A6 in size. Download the workbook here
How to use the workbook without the tool:

  1. Open the Workbook making sure that you enable macros
  2. Capture your project data in columns 'B' to 'R' (There are no mandatory fields) on the extract tab.
  3. Input the character 'P' in column 'A' for those stories you want to print
  4. Select the 'How to use me' Tab
  5. Hit the 'Prepare cards' Button
  6. Select the 'Stories' Tab, print it, and there you have it.

Use a ruler to tear into cards and put them on the wall and away you go.

The template is currently set up for A4. if you want to change it fiddle with the configuration on the 'How to use me' tab
The workbook will easily cope with small to medium sized projects and if you auto filter the extract tab, it becomes even easier. When you outgrow it though, why not have a look at the free scrum tool available from the Resources page.