Stealing a couple cool ideas for managing project priorities with something you can touch.
Prioritization
Grillin’ in the Storm wrote an article about how his team tracks prioritization in their agile development process.
One of our development teams has a white board with two very handy visual indicators (I’ll bring in a digital camera on Monday and try to update this post with the image). One of the indicators is “The Brian Happy List”. It’s simply a prioritized list of what I want done. […]
Also, the board is really visible. Management, sales, other teams, etc can easily see it when they are walking around.
And finally, the team has made it their own tool. The other day I noticed checkmarks appearing as developers started marking off things that they had completed.
For teams that are able to colocate, this is a great idea.
Tracking
Grillin’ followed up with another post, that in addition to showing a photo of the prioritization list shows how the team tracks their tasks. Their team uses software from Rally to manage their project, but what’s really cool is how they track tasks. They create post-it notes for the tasks, and then track their progression through their process on a whiteboard. Here’s a photo from the article:
This is a more traditional scrum approach, and it has great value from a visual point of view as well. If the cards are moving along smoothly throughout the iteration (the two-week development and test cycle), it is clear on the board.
Some cool ideas from these guys. Stay on top of Grillin’s blog.
