I think that this statement is a *gross* overstatement: "The great thing about a tool like LP is that it replaces the whiteboards, post-it notes, and filing cabinets of the physical office allowing people to have access to the company’s institutional knowledge anytime, anywhere."

LiquidPlanner is a great tool, and I find it useful in replacing... other planning tools.

With a whiteboard, I can produce a complex flowchart in about a minute. I can make a simple UI mockup in the same time. I can make a todo list for the afternoon in about fifteen seconds. Everyone in viewing range has access to those. So, it's true that remote users can't see my whiteboard, but LP certainly didn't replace it. Instead, LP gives me a mechanism to share a photo of the whiteboard. I could make a diagram in OmniGraffle (or whatever) instead, and share that, but that takes much longer to produce. Also, then I have to upload it somewhere, and anyone else who wants to see it has to download it. With a photo, I suppose they don't need to download an open it, but it's still not Just There.

The middle ground for whiteboards is (for me) Dropbox. I drop a file in a file hierarchy (probably one of the best-understood computer access metaphors) and everyone else on my team gets it on his hard drive instantly without having to think about it. Anyone can edit the file and it's synchronized all around with no "re-upload" or "re-download." It also gets Spotlight indexed, gets Quicklook, and so on.

Attachments on a bunch of items (be those items email messages or LP tasks) cannot compete with the filesystem as a storage and retrieval mechanism.

Post-it notes mean I can make a "do this before end of day" for myself in about five seconds. I can assign it to someone else in the time it takes to drop a note on his desk on the way to the fridge. In LP, I have to leave the dashboard and click quite a few times. In my experience, LiquidPlanner does not scale down to "the dumb things I gotta do today." It's great for planning out your week or month. It's fantastic for that. It's not great, in my experience, for quick todos, especially those that are more or apropos of nothing. A brightly-colored post-it note lets you put something "permanently" in the field of view of the target. He will not miss it, will not think he can do it tomorrow, and will not be able to reschedule it.

(I think it's interesting that I have yet to find any system that was good for project planning *and* a grocery list. Believe me, I have looked.)

And filing cabinets? Well, I guess we have those, but I think they're mostly for storing fuel in case we're all stranded in the office during a blizzard and blackout.

My company has an office. I'm there about fifteen hours each week, and those hours can be really, really useful. The thing that's most important about face time, in my experience, is bandwidth. The communications bandwidth available even with video conferencing, wikis, email, instant messaging, Twitter, and all that crap is still tiny. It takes forever to explain things or have a back and forth volley of ideas. Worse, the medium is highly lossy. I can't read your body language in response to my suggestions over TeamSpeak. I can't drag over another whiteboard to draw another complex two-minute flowchart. (Seriously, find me one really good piece of cross-platform collaborative whiteboard software... and it will still stink because people aren't used to drawing boxes and arrows with a mouse.)

I'm working in my home office or elsewhere the other 25+ hours of the week. That time is great, too. I can work in my bathrobe, I can talk to myself like a maniac, and I can know that if I turn my back to my screen, nobody is going to wander over and distract me from my work. That is, the downside of telecommuting is drastically lowered bandwidth with my team. The upside is that I can turn it down *even further* so that it gets down to zero and I can concentrate on hard problems.

LiquidPlanner's great strength in all this is, as you say, making it possible to plan out future work so that I don't need to interact with the rest of the team every time an item is done. I can queue up enough work so that I don't need to constantly have access to my internal customers. It is fantastic at that.

On the front of providing a high-bandwidth collaboration space, it is simply incapable of approaching the efficiency of a room with chairs, a whiteboard, and a water cooler.

So, virtual offices? I think they're only useful in rare situations. Your team should be able to talk, draw, and gesture wildly at each other regularly. Virtual offices are great if you have two teams who need to interact now and then -- I once worked with another team in Wales, and virtual conference helped, but it was in addition to semiannual real meetings, and was poor in comparison. I'd much rather have some time in a real office and some time walled up, out of communication. Working in a virtual office would strike me as an act of desperation.

Ricardo - awesome reply and points well taken. We have big whiteboards mounted all over our office and we do exactly as you do. Mostly we go to the WB first, then snap the picture with the phone and email in to a specific folder in LiquidPlanner that we actually call "PM dropbox."

I agree that face time is critical which begs the question, how much face time is optimal? Clearly there can be too much of a good thing. Maybe there is a simple test like "If your team can't keep going for 3 days without face time, then your planning is made from the weak sauce". :)

Anyway, thanks for the thoughtful comment.

"How much" is definitely a tough question. There are at least three factors for us.

We like having our iteration (sprint) planning meetings in person, although I think they're the least compelling thing to do face to face. I like doing them in person, but doing them on a conference call wouldn't bother me too much.

When we're discussing the design of a new or redesigned system (either backend or user interface), face time is a must. It's so much better to be able to say, "what if you move that box a little to the right... wait, does that look too green to anyone?" while you all look at the same window and can point and doodle ideas on paper than to do anything else. These kind of meetings only need to happen maybe once a month, on average.

The third factor is the most nebulous one: it's great to have people around for high-bandwidth interaction when you suddenly realize you need it. This takes the form of "this library can't work the way I wanted, I would like to discuss new designs" or "wait, if we do the UI the way we planned, no one will ever be able to access his mail," or "I just had a brilliant idea for a new feature that I just need to discuss with another tech guy and the UI guy right now." This is where you gamble in-office days on unscheduled meetings. When you go to the office several times in a week and don't interact with anyone else, these seem like a big loss... until the one day where you have a two hour discussion about a random idea that leads to massive improvements.

I would love to know how to optimize for that factor, but right now it seems like everyone is happy with, "always go to the office, unless it is very inconvenient or there's nothing planned and you expect to be able to use isolation to your advantage."

Really, so much of this is the whiteboard. If someone would produce a system for sharing a real 4' x 8' whiteboard-like surface in real time, I could forgive the loss of many other aspects of in-person communication... nearly 2009 and no jetpacks, no flying cars, and no telewhiteboards worth a darn. I can't get Jiffy Pop at the corner store anymore, either. It's the worst of the past and the future!