The power of the phone camera
Whats the quickest way of recording data? Write it down? Take a recording?
A printout of a whiteboard? (We’ve all seen those, and if you haven’t they look poor at best).
This is where the humble camera comes in. Yes you could could purchase a digital one and it would be very good, but even the humble phone camera is averaging over 4-5 megapixels these days, easily enough to take a picture. Even the iPhone 3GS’s 3.5 megapixel camera would be enough. (Finally the iPhone 4 has caught up a bit with its latest offering at 5 megapixels). The good news about the phone camera is everyone has one on them, so you can take a pic and email it, or synch it with your pic (make it act as an external hard drive) and WHAM your pics are there for all to see.
This is exceptionally good for recording the board status and sharing it on the wiki for distributed teams.
Point 6 (above) 🙂
In fact here is a list of them, feel free to comment and add your own ideas as I am sure I am just scratching the surface:
- Recording Story Board statuses
- Recording retrospective board
- Taking pics of teammates so you know what they look like (distributed teams)
- Recording the results of breakout sessions
- Taking ad-hoc pictures of design drawings (if they are still useful)
- Taking random desk pictures of coffee 😉
Meaning you help on communication, recording data, and if you take daily pictures of your board you can have a flickbook of progress that tells a story that other burndown charts can never do. When showing them back to people it can really spark memories of what happened which can help in retrospectives.