Blues and Yellows

My agile insight of the week came yesterday. My colleagues Ben and Dylan had done a release a couple of weeks ago, then both went on holiday. We had a flipchart covered with blue sticky notes of features. We started moving the done features to one side, and added new features that were requested. It so happened that we used yellow sticky notes for the new things. We then put the tasks to be done next at the top of the chart, with the rest at the bottom. The seven tasks we selected to do were all written on yellow stickies. All of the blue ideas, which seemed relevant a month ago, were no longer important. We checked with the project sponsor and he agreed the priorities. A nice visual proof of why "responding to change" is to be preferred over "following a plan" (agilemanifesto.org/).