--- title: "Step #2 – Use a big visible board with post it notes" url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/step-2-use-a-big-visible-board-with-post-it-notes.md" canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/step-2-use-a-big-visible-board-with-post-it-notes.html" published: "2009-09-05T19:37:25+00:00" updated: "2009-09-13T22:04:49.022000+00:00" tags: ["First Steps during chaos", "Shu"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "How a team lead can use a big visible whiteboard with sticky notes to track tasks, expose developers juggling several tasks, and show management the load." usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Step \#2 – Use a big visible board with post it notes Most team leads really have no idea how many things their developers are doing at the same time. There is a very simple tools that you can use starting **today**. Take a white board and place it in an area where your whole team can take a look at it. It's **not supposed to be in a computer** so don't try to use software for this. It's supposed to be a **big visible board**. Give it columns for pending tasks, tasks in progress, tasks done (waiting for approval) and tasks approved as done. In the case down below “Accepted” means that a customer has seen a demo of this functionality and said it’s OK. [![image](https://www.5whys.com/img/posts/7c9e3870-WindowsLiveWriter-Step2Useabigvisibleboardwithpostitnotesk_13E0C.jpg)](https://www.5whys.com/files/WindowsLiveWriter-Step2Useabigvisibleboardwithpostitnotesk_13E0C) Next, you can start out by placing post it notes or index cards with small tasks. you fill the left most side with tasks that you are planning for this week. This is not an “iteration”. it’s just the amount you think you can make in a week. Any tasks that don’t fit in this board belong on an excel document [![image](https://www.5whys.com/img/posts/c237cbb8-WindowsLiveWriter-Step2Useabigvisibleboardwithpostitnotesk_13E0C.jpg)](https://www.5whys.com/files/WindowsLiveWriter-Step2Useabigvisibleboardwithpostitnotesk_13E0C) Once you’ve done this, ask team members to put on the “in progress” column any tasks they are currently doing, or to add any cards which do not exist that represent work they are currently doing. Ask them to put names on cards they are working on, or, assign the in progress part in the groups by the team names: what ends up happening in a lot of teams is something like this: [![image](https://www.5whys.com/img/posts/fa622a8e-WindowsLiveWriter-Step2Useabigvisibleboardwithpostitnotesk_13E0C.jpg)](https://www.5whys.com/files/WindowsLiveWriter-Step2Useabigvisibleboardwithpostitnotesk_13E0C) this board represents the fact that you have people working on multiple things at the same time. [That’s not a great thing](http://www.ayeconference.com/convincing-management-that-context-switching-is-a-bad-idea/). the good thing is that at least you’ve found out about this and can do something about it! you an also use this board to show management just  how busy your team really is. Try to have no more than one concurrent task for developers on your team, as a thumb rule. ## Read next - [Daily Standup Meetings - Introduction and 5 useful tips](https://www.5whys.com/articles/daily-standup-meetings-introduction-and-5-useful-tips.html): How to run a daily standup meeting with the three questions, why each question matters, and five hard-learned tips for keeping it under 15 minutes. - [Step #1 – Claim Your Territory, Own your team](https://www.5whys.com/articles/step-1-claim-your-territory-own-your-team.html): Why a dev lead must claim the team's territory: keep implementation decisions inside the team, be its single entry point, and ask why outsiders interfere. - [Step #4 - Start doing code reviews – Seriously](https://www.5whys.com/articles/step-4-start-doing-code-reviews-seriously.html): A team leader's guide to serious code reviews: what to look for, reviewing every check-in yourself at first, then training the team to review its own code. ## Topic - [Survival Mode](https://www.5whys.com/topics/survival-mode) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/