The happiness of priorities

First of all thanks for the encouraging comments and a special thanks to Brad Feld for mentioning my fledgling effort here.

It has been rainy the whole day here in Denver, so I haven't even considered firing up the grill.  But as I walked around the office, I saw something that always makes me smile - even on a dreary day like this.

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.  I have (I think) a good relationship with the team, so the fact that it's my name is pretty much a shared joke.  But the really cool thing is that it makes it clear to everyone what should be worked on.

The other really cool thing is that there are some nice secondary effects to this format.  I can (if I need to) erase or add priorities or move something in the order, but it makes the board messier and it reminds me that shifting gears has a cost for everyone.  Also, the board doesn't get any bigger, so if I were to keep trying to add stuff I would run out of space - and this is a good reminder that the team has a finite capacity.

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.  I'm waiting to see what the QA team does with it.

I'll save the story of the other visual indicator that the team uses for a later post, but just to add a bit of suspense, here is the image that the team members added to that part of the board.