Steve Maine tells us about his favorite project management methodology, wall-Gantts.  A wall-Gantt is a Gantt chart that is created with paper, string and note cards on a wall.  How's that for low-tech?

Speaking from personal experience, there's nothing like a nice big visible physical artifact.  Probably the main benefit comes from the communication it enables.  Since we were living in a cube-o-minium at the time we couldn't make wall-Gantts, so we made do with white boards everywhere.  The" team cube" had 2, and 4 more were shared among six other people.  Very similar to Steve's experience, we would list all the tasks, who was assigned to them, whether they were not started, in-progress, or complete, and whether they were integration-testing complete.  Our tasks were up to 2 days, but it still worked very well.  Just the ability to mark something new, to show completion each day, seemed to be important.  Different colors also helped.  Green was reserved for complete, red for problem areas, black for the list of tasks (as unobtrusive as possible), the countdown for the iteration was in orange, blue for separating similar tasks by person, and yellow and purple were used for special stuff.

I could look over at any time without leaving my desk and gauge whether we were on-time, behind, or ahead-of schedule (don't laugh, we often were!).  Sadly, my boss never figured out how to do the same thing.  So he would come down and ask me how the work was progressing standing right next to the chart.  I tried several times to explain it to him, he would say he understood, and would then wander off.  Two days later, right when I was in the middle of a task, he would interrupt to ask how the work was progressing.

Being computer geeks we always try to create a software solution to this, a la Microsoft Project.  But the visible wall-Gantt is more than just a Gantt chart, it builds morale, serves as a social focal point for the team, and allows the celebration of success on a daily basis.  Until we can digitize all that, the low-tech solution will continue to reign supreme.