Introduction

Site Reliability Engineering is often framed as a world of dashboards, alerts, and automation. But as teams scale, something surprisingly analog can make or break reliability culture: a shared, physical space where the work is visible and negotiated in real time.

Enter the Paper Ops Control Tramway—a wall of sticky notes that functions like a tram line for your SRE work. It’s a simple, physical board that shows what’s moving, what’s stuck, and what needs to be built next to keep your systems (and your people) reliable.

In this post, we’ll explore how to use a sticky-note “tramway” as a modern ritual space for SRE, how to evolve from firefighting to proactive engineering with it, and how to connect it with your digital tools so no one is left behind.

Why a Physical Tramway Board for SRE?

SRE work is notoriously slippery:

• It spans incidents, toil, reliability projects, and platform work.
• It can be highly interrupt-driven.
• It’s often invisible to the rest of engineering.

A physical board tackles these issues by:

• Making work and load visible: Anyone can walk past and see current incidents, recurring pain points, and who’s carrying the most operational weight.
• Anchoring team rituals: Standups, incident reviews, and planning sessions all revolve around the same shared artifact.
• Reducing hidden work: If it’s not on the wall, it doesn’t exist. This forces conversations about priorities and trade-offs.

Think of it as a control tramway: work enters at one end, moves through predictable stages, and exits at the other. Your job as an SRE team is to keep the line flowing smoothly, not to run in front of every runaway car.

Designing Your SRE Tramway: Columns and Flow

You don’t need an elaborate system to start. Begin with a wall, painter’s tape, and sticky notes. Then design a simple flow that reflects how SRE work actually moves.

A common starting layout:

1. Backlog – Reliability work you’ve agreed is worth doing, plus post-incident actions.
2. Triage – New items (incidents, alerts, requests) under assessment. The goal is quick decision, not deep work.
3. In Progress – Work actively being done by someone.
4. Blocked – Stalled tasks with a clearly stated reason.
5. In Review / Validation – Work that’s finished from your perspective but awaiting confirmation (e.g., monitoring updated, runbook reviewed, change deployed).
6. Done – Completed items. (Bonus: use this for retro reflection at the end of the week or sprint.)

A few key rules for the tramway

• Every card is owned: Each sticky gets a clear owner’s name or avatar. No owner → no card.
• Limit work in progress (WIP): Put a maximum number of cards allowed in "In Progress" (e.g., 1–2 per person). If you hit the limit, you must finish or move something out before starting new work.
• Blocked must have a reason: Every card in "Blocked" should state why (e.g., “waiting for schema change approval”). This drives focused problem-solving.

These rules turn the board from a decoration into a living control surface for your SRE practice.

From Firefighting to Proactive Reliability

Most SRE teams start from a place of reactivity: alerts fire, people scramble, incidents simmer for too long, and “real” reliability work gets delayed.

Your tramway helps you evolve by:

1. Capturing incident learnings as cards

After every incident, create sticky notes for:

• Follow-up tasks (e.g., "Improve alert for 5xx spikes on checkout service")
• Toil reduction items (e.g., "Automate log collection script used in recent outage")
• Reliability investments (e.g., "Introduce graceful degradation for search service")

Move these into Backlog, then prioritize them alongside all other work instead of letting them rot in a doc or ticket system.

2. Regular pruning and re-prioritization

Make the board the single source of truth for what the SRE team is actually doing:

• During planning, re-rank backlog cards directly on the wall.
• If something sits in Triage for too long, delete or escalate it—no zombie items.
• If you’re consistently over capacity, the wall shows it visually. That’s a negotiation moment with product and leadership, not a personal failure.

3. Shifting capacity from incidents to engineering

Because the board makes incidents vs. projects vs. toil visible, you can:

• Set targets like: “At least 40% of our time each week goes to reliability projects.”
• Use the board to see when incidents are stealing all your time, then explicitly rebalance.

Over time, this feedback loop leads to fewer emergencies and more engineered resilience.

The Tramway as a Modern Ritual Space

The real power of the paper ops tramway isn’t the paper. It’s the rituals you build around it.

Daily standups at the wall

Hold standup physically at the board (or with someone pointing a camera at it for remote folks):

• Walk column by column from right to left (Done → Backlog) to celebrate wins before tackling new work.
• For each card in In Progress and Blocked, the owner answers:
  • What did I move yesterday?
  • What will I move today?
  • What’s blocking me?

This keeps the focus on moving work along the tramway, not performing status updates.

Incident reviews anchored on the board

During incident reviews, use the wall as your anchor:

• Pin a card for the incident itself in a dedicated Incidents swimlane.
• Add cards for follow-ups and move them into the standard flow.
• Draw lines or group cards to show which incidents share root causes.

The board becomes a visible memory of what hurt you, and how you responded.

Planning and negotiation in front of the board

Instead of debating priorities inside a ticketing system, have stakeholders join you at the wall:

• Move cards up or down to reflect priority.
• Cluster work by service or theme (e.g., "database hardening" lane).
• Explicitly decide what doesn’t get done this cycle.

This transforms reliability from something SREs “just handle” into a shared, negotiated responsibility.

Connecting Physical Boards to Digital Tools

Physical boards are powerful, but most SRE teams are hybrid or distributed. You don’t want anyone to be out of the loop.

You can combine your tramway with digital tools like Trello, Jira, Linear, or any Kanban platform:

• QR codes on the wall: Each column or major lane has a QR code linking to the equivalent digital board view.
• One card, two representations: A sticky note corresponds to a digital ticket. When you move a card physically, you (or a rotating facilitator) update the digital board.
• Remote-friendly standups: Use a camera on a tripod or a permanent wall cam. Remote teammates watch the traversal of the physical board but interact via the digital tool.

The physical board drives focus and shared context in the office, while the digital system ensures auditability, searchability, and remote inclusion.

Lightweight Metrics on (or Near) the Wall

You don’t need a full-blown metrics stack to run data-informed SRE rituals. Start with lightweight, visual metrics next to your board.

Useful examples:

• Incident frequency: A simple chart of incidents per week/month, handwritten on a whiteboard or printed.
• Cycle time: Track how long cards take from Triage → Done. You can:
  • Mark creation and completion dates on each sticky, or
  • Use the digital tool to calculate and bring a small printed summary.
• Toil vs. project work: Color-code stickies (e.g., red for incidents, yellow for toil, green for reliability projects) and quickly eyeball balance.

Discuss these metrics during weekly reviews:

• Are we spending more time on incidents than last month?
• Are reliability projects actually reaching Done?
• Are some services or teams generating a disproportionate amount of work?

Metrics at the wall make sure conversations are grounded in data but not overwhelmed by it.

Continuously Refining the System

Your first tramway design won’t be perfect. That’s healthy. Treat the board and rituals like any other reliability system: observe, tweak, and improve.

Areas to refine:

• Column definitions: Maybe you need a separate "Observability Work" lane or a clear "Ready" column between Backlog and Triage.
• WIP limits: Start with conservative limits and adjust as you learn your real capacity.
• Card design: Experiment with smaller templates printed on sticky-paper: title, owner, type (incident/toil/project), date, and link to ticket.
• Ritual cadence: Try daily 10-minute standups, weekly 30-minute reliability reviews, monthly board retrospectives.

Importantly, measure success not by how pretty the wall looks, but by whether it:

• Reduces operational stress.
• Shortens time-to-resolution for issues.
• Increases time spent on proactive reliability work.
• Makes ownership and priorities clearer for everyone.

If the system is adding friction or anxiety, simplify. Remove columns, remove rules, and slowly add back only what demonstrates value.

Conclusion

The Paper Ops Control Tramway is not nostalgia for pre-digital workflows. It’s a deliberate, modern response to a real problem: reliability work is hard to see, hard to negotiate, and easy to let slip into endless firefighting.

By turning a wall of sticky notes into your SRE control surface, you:

• Make operational load and priorities unmistakably visible.
• Anchor daily standups, incident reviews, and planning in a shared ritual space.
• Connect analog visibility with digital traceability for hybrid teams.
• Use lightweight metrics to steer toward proactive reliability instead of reactive chaos.

Start small: a few columns, some color-coded notes, and one or two simple rituals. Let the system evolve with your team. Over time, you’ll find that the tramway doesn’t just move cards—it moves your culture toward sustainable, long-term reliability.