There’s an excellent article about the Toyota process on fastcompany.com. Most of the behaviours described are also desirable or necessary in teams or organisations trying to be[come] agile, but the key point is in the conclusion:
3 January 2007
The death of the Big Blue Notebook
Ever since I started work, people have had big blue (or more recently black and red) books that they wrote stuff in. I’ve always called them lab books, but that seems to cause amusement to some people, presumably because I don’t work in a lab.
Some of the things that were written were notes from meetings, to do lists, or rough design notes. The most important ones though, the ones that you kept referring back to (if you could find them), were the little snippets of secret knowledge that everyone accumulates as they learn the intricacies of their particular job, whether it’s useful unix commands or instructions for using a particular build system.
Personal whiteboards
Agile teams tend to favour whiteboards for instant collaboration when discussing design etc, but if you’re working in a pair you might not always want to keep walking over to one on the wall. The answer? A4 whiteboards!
They only cost a couple of pounds each (including a pen), and at the risk of attracting ‘XP isn’t for grown-ups’ comments, the best place to buy these seems to be primary school suppliers – for example Class Ideas or EasyTeach. At that price, you may as well have two or three each.
[tags]agile, tools[/tags]