One of the phrases that intrigued me most when I first read the famous Scrum & Xp From the Trenches was the one about excel files: forget them, stop using them, they suck. Nobody uses them, nobody reads them. Still belonging at the moment to a company with a strong CMMi culture, reading that is a bit like reading an erotic novel in the middle of an abbey, as much a revelation as blasphemy.

But the facts are there. The radiators (big falsely messy boards on which we deploy post-its) Scrum possess enormous benefits. Visibility: within the team, but also a lot to others: what the team is working on, at what pace, what it has already achieved, etc.Usability: That little yellow piece of paper is surprisingly practical: easy to stick, easy to move, the right size to force us to get to the essential in our descriptions. If we write too much on it, it’s a sign that we need several and not one. If we have aggregates that are too large it’s a sign that we need to deploy them, disperse them, rethink them. Another essential instrument: the camera. It allows us to historicize the project. I remember a top level high board manager mentioning to me: this is all well and good but a) you’re making holes in my wall and it’s going to cost us dearly in partitions if we move (I switched to tape), b) how do I access the historical consumption of the project’s workload? (hence the photos).

The post-it is really not at all the preserve of Agile projects. Its properties (concise, visible aggregation, flexibility of use) are exploited in many cases. Web agencies for example… and card sorting. Same causes, same effects: we break down a tree structure, a categorization by function, by content, we perform logical groupings. The “big blocks”, the imbalances emerge. We organize easily, visually, the sets, the subsets. The balance is visual.

So much for this little post (it). I also find in it a very pleasant thumbing of the nose at all that expensive and plethoric tooling behind which we too often seek to hide. But above all, above all, it works. It’s effective. It’s productive.