Standup Around Innovative BVCs -- The CNN Agile Tour

At the CNN Agile Tour put on last week through Agile Atlanta I noticed a couple Big Visible Charts (BVCs) of a sort I don't think I had ever seen before. One of them is a list of tasks that need to be done pertaining to delegating some responsibility and moving some permissions to other people. Multiple teams have a standup around this board. It looks nothing like a card wall. Other than the fact that it doesn't look like a card wall, what it looks like doesn't matter. So I'm not including a picture. No one should try to do what they did.

The point here is that they were innovative in coming up with a BVC that radiates status and helps them communicate. Too many teams get stuck in a rut, using the same old ineffective ways of doing their standup. And often abandon the practice altogether.

The Tours

It was neat to see the Kanban being used by one of the teams and to talk about how they were using it and what they were getting out of it. It was cool to talk about their facilities and compromises they made and how the layout impacts pairing and team size. And we had good discussions about estimating tasks and stories. And other stuff too.

We've had prior tours as well and in each the host has had surprising candor, discussing the honest state of their agile practice including their current struggles.

Alex Kell wrote a nice post about the earlier Agile Tour @ Allure.

And the RedPrairie Agile Tour was neat because we got to sit in on an end of iteration innovation demo, a kind of a technical show and tell across several teams of some neat new technologies they've experimented with or put into place.

I'm planning other tours as well. Follow me on twitter and subscribe to the Agile Atlanta yahoo group to make sure you don't miss the next one.

Each company that has hosted a tour has gotten something out of these tours as well. Let's set one up at your company. Give me a call or drop me an email today.