Brendon and I strayed from our normal user groups last week and went to a presentation on Agile development processes by some folks from ThoughtBridge at the Extreme Programming/Software Architects group. While most of the 25 person audience were Java programmers, the concepts we went over apply to any programming language/technology.
One of the core concepts for XP was how to manage your work items and your progress. The recommendation from our panel of experts from ThoughtBridge was to use 3x5 index cards to represent each work item. This way, when you're planning out your iterations and what to build in each iteration, you have something tangible to manipulate that gives you a real idea of how long something will take and how you're doing vs your project goals.
Of course we also talked about Pair Programming, having an onsite customer, small iterations with code drops after each iteration, etc. Most people seemed enthusiastic if slightly skeptical about how well management would swallow some of the ideas.
-- Matt Ranlett