Agile projects are well known for using a task board for teams to track what is being worked. They can be a simple wall in an office taped off with columns for status or web-based tools that allow detailed tracking of individual stories and tasks. No matter what is being used, the task board needs to benefit the team.
The task board is meant to share information about what the team is working on and the progress they are making. Without control of the tasks or stories being created, they can become out of hand. Make sure that the stories or tasks are focused. Track actually work that provides value. A task for each meeting attended or conversation that took place does not had value. This takes away from the time in the daily standup, and might even impact your budget for buy new index cards or stickies.
Virtual task boards can be useful for distributed teams and easily adding metadata data around the items being tracked. Sometimes status has to be reported as a percent complete. When implementing a task tracking system whether it is a physical board using sticky notes and index cards or a virtual solution with the ability to track the time spent down to the minute it is important to communicate to the team how work is tracked so it brings value to the team and to the client.
