We use magnetic planning boards . When a pair starts work on a story card they take the card away to their workstation, but when they return the card to the planning board they often forget where it was located. The coloured dot on the card indicates which column it was in (Not Started, In Development, UI Review, QA Test Review, Customer Preview, Done), but they don’t remember the vertical position. This is a problem because the story cards are arranged vertically in business value order, with the highest business value card at the top of the board.
To overcome this we used personalised magnetic placeholders to occupy the space left by the story card. The magnets were in the shape of a running man (of sorts) logo and we glued team members faces to these. However, due to a global rebranding exercise, we couldn’t get hold of enough of these magnets for the entire team.
In his blog post about build-o-matic and the visibility of the build results , Ivan Moore recalled using South Park Studio to create pictures of everyone on the team for use on the planning board . Great idea! I remember seeing links to South Park Studio circulating some months back. So I had each team member create a character of someone else on the team. This was lots of fun. I followed Ivan’s description and printed the pictures out in colour, laminated them but I stuck magnetic squares to the backs instead. You’ve seen the team on the wall . Now meet the team on the planning board.
Saturday, 11 November 2006
Team on the planning board
Posted by Simon Baker
1 Comment
Here's a more versatile South Park builder: http://www.sp-studio.de/