May 13 2008
Green Story Card
Vincent Xu recently invented a “Green Peace” style story card that I think might be a great innovation! The idea is quite simple, he laminated a plain story card which is made of paper with sticky back plastics so that the card can be reused. The motivation of creating the card is that he wants to write down some “To-do lists” or have simple technical discussion with other devs, so he can write or draw anything he wants to then erase the print and reuse the card.
I think the idea is brilliant and will contribute value for diverted project stakeholders. Let’s have a look the following story:
As a project manager/environmental protector, I want to reuse my story card, so that I save money and save environment.
As a project manager, I want to use limited number of story cards, so that I can take advantage of them as a tool to keep the project in a good shape.
As a developer, I want to a card to hold some information for an instant, so that I can use the card to communicate with other devs.
As a business analyst, I want to a story card which I can easily add or remove information without wasting the card, so that I save my time and save environment.
As a CEO/CFO, I want all my projects in the organization use the reusable story card, so that I can cut down the cost across the organization.
We can see, it is not only about saving the environment. Imagine, if we use limited number of cards in a project, when there is no enough cards to be used for writing stories, or bugs, it is possible that we are having too much stories in blocked, in this case, the Signal pushed the project manager to deal with it. If we have only 10 bugs cards, when we do not have a blank card for new bug, it is probably the right time to cut down the number of outstanding bugs. Have some brainstorming, you might be able to find more interesting usage of the “Green card”.
Some tips of making “Green card”:
- Get a wider Sticky back plastics, so that you might need only two rows of them to cover the whole card.
- You can use a shanpie but permanent marker to write on the cards.
- You might need a piece of tissue or eraser aside, so that you can eraser the print whenever you want.
More suggestions?
