A couple of chaps from Best Brains gave a talk on using Google Docs as a project management tool. We use Google Docs an awful lot ourselves, so there weren't many surprises here - and I'm ashamed to say my notes are pretty nonexistent, as most of the slides were video-demos or very visual in nature.

They had some lovely cumulative burndown charts which nicely showed the flow of work between development, testing and done - an improvement on the charts we've been using which I might steal^H^H^H^H^Hbe inspired by.

And they gave an interesting looking demo of how to use a Google Spreadsheet to operate a retrospective with a remote team - having individuals fill in and colour cells as a substitute for writing on post-its. As with many practices involving distributed teams, I suspect it's not as good as being in the same room... but it felt like it might have been significantly better than dropping the practice of retrospecting altogether.

The speakers are awarded 7 (seven) Hume Points for beginning their talk with Jazz clarinet.