What you can see here is a standard moderation suitcase filled with all the good stuff I usually use during my meetings. The contents last for about a week, depending on the amount of moderated workshops. Let's take a closer look at what you can find in there:
- Invisible tape. Always helpful for tying stuff to other stuff or fixing sticky notes permanently to a sheet of paper.
- Magnets. Useful, if you want to pin paper charts to a whiteboard.
- Planning poker cards. For this customer, we could not use Story Points, so I switched to T-Shirt sizes. Whatever the metric, you should always be ready to estimate some Product Backlog items.
- Needles for pinning cards or paper sheets to a pin board. Note that the needles are ready-to-use and not in some plastic casing.
- A glue stick. Hard to see on this picture. You never know if you want to glue something to something else. I rarely use it, but I am glad to have it when I do.
- Pens. Those pens are whiteboard-pens, so they are easily wipeable. I never use flipchart pens, because sooner or later they end up on the whiteboard and I have to struggle to get it off again. The colors I use are black, green, blue and red. I always have at 20-25 pens with me.
- Scissors. You never know when you want to trim something. It happens more often than one might think.
- Very small sticky notes. They are good to mark off stuff.
- Painers' tape. You need it to fix bigger paper charts (flipcharts, brownpaper and so on) to the wall.
- Points in different colors. I use them for voting and sometimes for highlighting.
- Small round moderation cards. I rarely use moderation cards, but sometimes I need them.
- My lovely sticky notes. The size is 127x76 mm. You should find some that last for more than 4 weeks on the wall. I prefer bright colors, because they can be seen and draw attention.
- A kitchen timer. You actually can't see it, but I always have a timer with me. I usually timebox every single assignment during a workshop.