Ecolizer Designwijzer’ is a simple tool for designers and product managers. It’s a set of cards bound like a Pantone color guide which let you use eco-indicators to analyze and compare environmental impacts of commonly used materials and processes. Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) for the people, and in a matter of minutes – Finally!

Ecolizer Designwijzer: Life-Cycle Assessment on the Go

This a great idea and yet another example of Card-Scale Knowledge (which is a term I will one day link to something about Oblique Strategies, Index Cards, Card Catalogues and the Tarot. Maybe I should just mention Gnostic Project Management here in case it gets to be a meme and then I said it first….

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Communicating that to a customer is more complex, of course, but that’s why XP puts such a priority on finding and articulating business value and keeping the customer so intimately linked into the progress of project.

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blogtalkdownunder

Adam Gurno’s worked out how to print onto blank index cards from his printer and spent the day going wild with cool ideas…

So we had an all-hands group meeting last week during which The Schedule needed to be discussed. I’d let people know that I wanted to try working with the schedule in a new way.

Cards are great for tasks (done in the style of Story Cards from Extreme Programming), but for a good planning discussion, we needed a calendar reference. I just printed out a stack of week calendars from iCal and laid them out on the conference table in a long strip.

Then I grabbed the task cards for each person in the team and got them to talk about each card in turn, what the dependencies were, how long they might take to do and finally got them to put the card on the big calendar within the week it might get done.

We focussed on better accuracy for the coming week or two and let things get a little less formal further out. We’ll come back to this exercise every couple of weeks to maintain a sense of where things are and what people need to keep moving forward.

Some Preliminary Results

• People seemed to enjoy walking around and handling the schedule better than working with a printed Gantt
• When a task is wrong (too fine, too coarse, just wrong) on The Beautiful Gantt Chart (TBGC) it’s annoying, necessitating a negotiation with the project manager, scribbling on TBGC, later updates to the project file, regenerate TBGC, etc… By contrast, when a task card is wrong you get the satisfaction of tearing in two yourself and then rewriting the canonical card yourself. Much more satisfying.
• Once the whole thing was done I needed to capture the layout… quickly accomplished by spending five minutes writing the week’s date on each card so I know where to put them next time.

Now, I need to work out how to send things to people. Might just type out a list, might put stuff in Basecamp… Optimal solution is really just to photocopy the cards and hand the photocopies out.

Have to do this sometime today, so I’ll let folk know what I do. I should have snapped a picture of the big calendar. Next time.

… via Flickr. You can click for bigger versions. All pics I put on this blog are liable to show up under the tag “cardthinking”.

Classical “XP-style” card scheduling kind of avoids the calendar, which is the main reason the other producer likes the Gantt, they’re fond of seeing things against a representation of time. So we agreed that a big calendar plus the cards might give a better scheduling game than we have. We’ll see at the next group meeting in a week.

Up until recently, we have managed the team (who are mostly contracted designers and programmers) via regular meetings, but in the last couple of months it’s been a bit nerve-wracking to stay on top of everything that’s going on just using face-to-face reports.

Enter The Gantt

The other producer has championed the development of a big Gantt chart schedule which lists all the known tasks, dependencies, rough schedules, resource allocations… the whole nine yards.

This makes us feel comfortable, but I have enough experience with XP to spot illusory comfort when I see it. The whole thing has flaws – in data capture, in accuracy, in usability – enough to make me want to replace it with something better as fast as possible.

So, today, I’m turning the Gantt schedule into a stack of index cards, a la Extreme Programming’s planning game and I’m going to take these along to the next meeting and see if I can bend the process a little and do a little action research.

I’m writing a little article on issues with Gantt charts for this project and how cards might solve them while maintaining the benefits. I’ll link it somewhere here when it’s done.

The more I started thinking about cards and how much I like them, the more I got curious about investigating the ways we use card-form information. That, my friends, is a craven excuse for me to invest in my own set of Oblique Strategies. Pictures to follow.

You can read more about the cards on the web. Despite the plethora of software versions though, the tangible pack of cards is irresistible.

Hence… Card Thinking. I’ll be trying to use this blog to talk about different ways we use cards – index cards, tarot cards, library cards, printed cardsets. If you’ve got favourites… send ‘em in!

I’d like to thank Merlin Mann for starting 43 Folders which is the inspiration for this blog.