Post-It Notes aren't Agile - they're wallpaper
Post-it® notes are the life-blood of Agile. So we're told. Those little flaps of paper, usually hastily scribbled on, are the only way to prove you're Doing It Right™.
I'm not a big fan. They're environmentally wasteful, inaccessible, and a bit crap for remote workers. But some people love them, so who am I to judge?
Recently, I visited a fairly large company who are making the painful transition from providing mega-software into to being a nimble, digital supplier. Their walls were plentifully decorated with multi-coloured Post-it® notes.
Decorated being the operative word. A quick glance at them showed titles like "To-Do 2018" and "Easter Fire-Break" and "FAO Jerry".
"Who is Jerry?" I asked.
"Oh... I think he left a few months back," came the reply.
Now, not all of the Kanban Boards were outdated - some were obviously in use and had teams performing their daily rituals in front of them. But the majority seemed abandoned.
Perhaps abandoned is too strong a word. They were like cave paintings. Evidence of the hunt, sure, but now decorations to be marvelled at. A way to indoctrinate new members of the tribe.
Perhaps the Post-it® notes were good-luck charms. A steady stream of investors would have walked through the hallways and seen "evidence" of an advanced civilisation.
Perhaps the Post-it® notes were to ward off evil spirits. A cranky manager would have been mollified that his team were truly agile, and then left them alone in peace to carry on their waterfall development.
What I'm trying to say is this. You can't put up wallpaper and pretend it is structural transformation.
The technology isn't the methodology... or the culture.
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Andres Hermosilla says:
rmvt says:
From my experience post-its are usually a sign of something else – the “we’re agile” mentality. The problem is that it’s just that, a mentality. There’s not much “agile” going on and people that work this way usually just push down their vision of what agile is on everybody else. They have their interpretation of the agile values and defend it as religious belief, even when it’s clearly not working. They cannot fathom that just like a lot of things, you should question those principles and find out if they’re really working for you. It’s not because it’s written and a lot of people force it that it works for everyone, all the time.
The act of huddling round this self adhesive wallpaper is the rapid collaboration ceremony that inspires inclusion. The very act of scrawling a few notes on a piece of coloured paper and handing it to other members of your team is a way of taking joint accountability. As an agile coach introducing these concepts I deliberately ask members to hold the cards before positioning on the boards, or pass it between the team as they add acceptance criteria.
Yes it's wasteful.
But there are interesting magnetic alternatives for professionals. This approach almost guarantees their use because of the extra cost. That is at least until a screen solution fulfils the tactile bond between work items and the team members that are handling the stories.
Inclusivity means making sure it works for everyone - not just people who are similar to you.
I'm not convinced that digital is the only alternative.
I was on a team where I swear the leads were in bed with 3M, they used so many. We had a whole conference room COVERED in them. No matter how often we begged them to put it into something easier to share, they insisted that this had the best "energy."
One long weekend, the AC went out at the building. No big deal, no one's in, so they weren't in a rush to fix it... When it came back on, something was weird and it got BLASTED, turning our floor into an icebox.
Something about this combo caused all the stickies to NOT be sticky. We came in to a meeting room carpeted with notes... The leads tried to convince us to spend a day transfering them and putting them back up, but we ignored them and transferred the notes where they should have been: A set of shared docs.