What should you do with sticky notes in 'done' column of physical kanban board?

[Sloan Wheeldon]

My team is relatively new to using a physical kanban board. My biggest question is what we should do with the physical sticky notes in the 'done' column after they've been up there for a while. Do you just throw them away? Leave them there for weeks on end?  I am interested in somehow putting them in an online format each week in order to visualize what we are getting done but I am unsure of the best way to do that. What does your team do? 

[Alan Parkinson]

Hi Sloan

With Kanban, I normally remove tickets after they have been in the done column after a week. While this is easy with a tool like Jira, on physical boards it can be hard to track time. To solve this I normally move all the sticky notes in the done column to the bottom at the of each week. When I do this I remove all the stickies at the bottom (All the ones done in the previous week) and throw them away.

The stickies should be placeholders for conversations so keeping them doesn't represent much value apart from demonstrating progress. An easier way to demonstrate progress is to record the numbers that have been "done" in a spreadsheet on a daily or weekly basis.

If you are going to record this data you might to look at the different reporting techniques you available e.g. cumulative flow diagram. Tools like Jira do make capturing this data and reporting it easier, and if you do use Jira avoid using the Next-Gen projects (use Classic) as they don't do this kind of reporting right now.