White Board, Flip Chart, or Notepad?
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Comments posted to this topic are about the content posted at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/awarren/whiteboardflipchartornotepad.asp>http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/awarren/whiteboardflipchartornotepad.asp
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Another nice topic Andy. I have used all types in different ways in different situations. I must admit I tend towards whiteboards for their versatility and either tranfers the contents direct to pc if possible or as you stated a digi photo and then transfer to pc. I almost always take a pad to meetings to make my own notes etc. I have also used a whiteboard with postit notes to do process flows. Have also used flip charts and covered many office walls with them (great for hiding thet yucky wallpaper
).I don't think any particular medium is best and people will use what they are use to or comfortable with (how many times have you been in a meeting and asked for a volunteer to write on a board to find everyone goes quiet and stare at the ceiling). I reckon to use whatever is best for the activity as long as some guidelines are followed, like the excellent guidelines with the article, some simple ideas that can easily be missed or forgotten.
Far away is close at hand in the images of elsewhere.
Anon. -
Excellent article. If it is a group of people I really like the whiteboard approach for the very reason you stated it gets people involved. The more ideas you have the better the solution in my opinion.
For electronic ideas we had for a little while and it was awesome to use is one of these:
http://www.smarttech.com/products/smartboard/index.asp
If you have a projector and a smartboard you can put your source code, table diagram, and white board drawings all on their. It is really nice!
Ross
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Great article. Very recently my boss purchased something called mimio. It's a device that mounts on any whiteboard and records what you are drawing/writing. He made it mandatory that we as a development team use it for all of our meetings. At first it was a little ackward but it's natural now. When the meeting is over I just download the device to our laptop and email the file to the team. It has been great for our design meetings since we can trace back to an earlier design we might have erased on the board.
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I agree that Flip charts work well. One additional low tech enhancement is to use the flip charts from 3M that are basically giant sticky notes. You can peel off a page and stick it on a wall while you continue to draw on a new sheet - that way both pages stay visible.
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Havent tried those yet - but I will!
Andy
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I've used all three and have tended to favor white boards, usually with everyone present spending a few minutes at the end trying to copy on their notepad what they need.
I'd be interested to see how a tablet PC goes over (HP feel free to send me one) since we have overhead projectors in all conference rooms.
I hadn't considered flip charts, but the few times I've used them, they've worked well. All in all, having something everyone can see is the best solution for group discussions.
Steve Jones
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/sjones
The Best of SQL Server Central.com 2002 - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/bestof/
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