Continuing on the theme of breaking the self imposed rules, I heard a wonderful story about a team working in an environment that involved a customer requirement to provide an audit trail of all project design decisions.

This was a real rule.

Many teams would interpret this as a requirement to have lots of heavy documentation and associated traceability. This would have been a self imposed rule.

This team solved the requirement in a wonderfully low energy way. They simply attached a long roll of brown butcher’s paper around the room. Whenever people on the team made a decision, they made a note of it on the paper, dated it and signed it. This acted as a short term information radiator of team decisions. Once it was full, they rolled it up, marked it with the date range and filled in it the corner of the room.

The auditor loved it as it was quick and easy to see what was happening over time.