7 Benefits of Daily and Visual Management

Daily Management is in our DNA at PacSci EMC. It is how we achieve our targets and sustain our work. Measurement alone will not improve performance. Real impact is the result of continuous improvement rigorously applied to the way we work. Daily and Visual Management is how we ensure the success of what we do.

Visual Daily Management makes our work visible so everyone can see it and therefore effectively manage it. It is a way to visually communicate expectations, performance, standards or warnings in a format that requires little to no training to interpret.

There is no singly way to do visual management. it should be customized to the goal of what is to be communicated, how the audience will use it, or the organization that it will be used in. Think outside the box when designing your Visual Management to make it as simple and as clear as possible. no matter what the design is, there are some common benefits we see at PacSci EMC that our Visual Management provides:

1. Makes it Easy to Quickly Understand Information

Proper visual management allows information to be understood very quickly and easily. With good visual management, you should be able to tell the condition of an area in 5 seconds from 5 feet away. Often red and green or up/down arrows are used to communicate current status.

2. Reduces Miscommunication

Miscommunication is often reduced or eliminated by using visual management. Displaying the information and making it visual in the simplest way, the information is understood in the way it was intended. This is very helpful to communicate between different groups, functions, or shifts in an organization. Visual management can help eliminate mistakes, or even safety hazards.

3. Improve Employee Involvement and Morale

The purpose of visual management is to take the focus away from solely bottom line or number driven metrics and give each employee an opportunity to see and communicate their progress, and for management to give them the support they need to succeed. Visual and Daily Management links together the work of individual team members with the company's overall objectives, allowing the employee a greater sense of being part of something bigger. This becomes empowering and will lead to more engaged employees. Often, if we have a good grasp on what the goals are, we can actually slow down the pace to meet our customer's demands so that we ensure a higher quality product. This becomes more apparent as we get more engaged in visual management in small areas, like manufacturing and those employees' problem-solve quality issues out of their areas.

Visual management allows everyone to see how the team is performing and helps connect employees to the goals of the organization. When what is required to be done is displayed and is easy to understand it helps employees do their job and understand the current condition. Our daily meetings at the metric boards (SQDIP) is one example on how any given team is performing. It also facilitates discussion on what needs to be done as well as any ideas on how to get there. It can help change the thinking throughout an organization by displaying what once may have been considered bad or "reds" on a board to now be thought as an opportunity for improvement, or a challenge to brainstorm how to get back on track.

The response we received when asking an employee about using their Daily Visual Management for the first time on a new build; "I know what has to be done and I feel I did a good job when I get it done on time each day." This is how every employee should feel when they leave at the end of the day!

4. Planning Objectives Can Be Seen by Anyone

Visual management takes a plan from a spreadsheet or post-it notes and places it out "on the line" where everyone can see it. This created an environment where everyone can discuss it and agree on the goals. Changes can easily be made, and everyone can see the impact of those changes when a schedule is visually displayed. It also allows for on the fly decision making, versus having to refer back to a stand-alone computer or document.

5. We Can See Priorities

When a schedule is displayed visually, we not only see the priorities, we can see if they are the CORRECT priorities. Having team input helps solidify we are working on the right things at the right times.

6. Bottlenecks or Roadblocks are Instantly Visible

When the correct priorities are visually displayed, it's easy to not only see roadblock, you many also better predict future roadblocks. This allows you to plan for them so you have time to eliminate them before they happen.

7. Allows Other Function to See Why They Need to Step In

With a visual schedule, you can communicate with other parts of the organization when they will be impacted to play their part. This gives them vision to see what they need to do to be successful in helping the overall organization goals.