Getting Started with Visual Management

What is Visual Management?

Visual management is an external, tangible display of the activities of your team outside of any one individual’s subjective view. It allows everyone to work and learn together, looking at the activities of the team objectively. Externalizing the work is a key foundation for Kaizen – continuous improvement.

Visual management helps teams think about their work, prioritize the work, improve how they do the work, diagnose issues, communicate across teams, expose problems, eliminate waste, and inform management.

Visual management forms an “exo-brain” that forges team-wide understanding. It provides a forum for experimentation and data collection. It removes blame and focuses defect resolution on the visible articulation of the work, rather than “who did what”.

A team’s visual management system is itself an experiment that should evolve as the team improves its ways of working.

Without visual management teams tend to just . . . do stuff.

If you decide you want to pursue the benefits of visual management, what should you do?

Conduct a Visual Management Workshop

In order to improve, you have to know how things currently are. Once you know what your baseline truth is, you can think about what, where, and how to improve. But how do you figure out what your baseline is?

Step One: What do we do?

Get the team together (co-located if at all possible) for an hour or two, and brainstorm a complete “dump” of every kind of work or activity that anyone on the team does. At any and every level of abstraction. Use a large room, give everyone a pad of sticky-notes and a marker. Write each item on a separate sticky and post on the wall. [Use your favorite “sticky note” application if you have a distributed or remote team]

Do not filter your thoughts! It doesn’t matter how often something happens, who does it, what else it is related to or how big it is. Some of the work may be related to an artifact, such as “Create X” or “Eliminate Y”. Put both the action and the object of the action on your note.

For example:

• All Technical, Operational, Leadership actions and activities
• All the specific things we’re working on now
• All the types and categories of things we’re working on now
• Maintenance, defect resolution actions and activities
• Administration activities of corporate life
• Metrics recording
• Activities to perform your chosen methodology or framework (e.g., agile, kanban, scrum, lean, etc)
• Planning, including preparing plans, discussing plans, and adjusting plans
• Status (work tracking) reporting
• Improvements, experiments you are running, trying or want to run
• Learning and research you are doing or want to do
• Remote / distributed team coordination
• Communication: calls, email replies, corporate events, texting, chats
• Training classes and skills improvement activities
• Reviewing upcoming work
• Triaging incoming work
• Vendor interactions
• Customer interactions
• New employee onboarding
• Tool setup, updates
• All meetings!
• Accounting and HR activities
• “Minor” interruptions
• On the horizon looming crises
• Things we've done before
• What we're worried about
• Random fires to put out (each specifically as many as you can remember)
• Off the books, requests from “my old team”, un-official or un-sanctioned work
• Things we hate to do, things we don’t want to think about, “if we ignore it, they’ll go away”
• “This will only take a minute” things

Step Two: How do we do it?

The next step is to brainstorm process activities associated with items from step one. During the first brainstorming activity, your teams may start thinking of sequences of actions. That’s ok. During this phase, you may think of other items from step one. That’s ok, too. Go with the flow and encourage continual surfacing of thought.

The types and categories change during this step - you want to shift to thinking about the "method" beyond the actual work artifacts. Again, don’t worry that some thoughts may be related to others as attributes, specific instances of categories, sub-parts, etc. Remember the goal is to get everything out.

For example:

• Milestones: as events, dates, conclusions, their significance, etc
• Decisions made or needed
• Best practices, current practices
• Gates (e.g., go/no-go)
• Approval or Review Meetings
• Checklists
• “Meta” tasks
• "Getting ready" activities
• Upstream complications
• Downstream expectations
• Remote / distributed work split and join
• Professional behaviors
• How we “run the business”
• Sister team dependencies
• Tribal knowledge, “everyone knows”, “that’s how we do it here”
• “Pre-work” and “Post work”
• Previous known tasks, “must do’s”, “don’t do’s”
• Beginnings, middles, ends
• 3rd party dependencies
• Warnings and boundaries
• Regulatory, compliance, governance
• Stops and aborts
• Engineering Principles
• Patterns and templates

Step Three: Organize your thoughts

As a team, look at all the ideas and thoughts that have been generated.

Look for patterns, groups, similarities, and cluster those.

For example:

• Categories and types
• Class/subclass
• Artifact/attribute
• Precedence, earlier/later
• Simultaneity, while/during
• Special cases
• Defects
• Research
• “Executive focus”
• Run the business

You will probably find there is a lot more going on than you realized.

Step Four: Identify wastes and areas of improvement

Don’t be surprised to see a lot of unnecessary activities, wasteful practices and just plain friction.

You should expect to see a 30% improvement in cycle time from “just stop doing dumb stuff”.

Step Five: Choose an area for deeper analysis

Select one of the sticky-note groups for further analysis. At this point the choice of which group to delve first is not as important as practicing the exercise. You might pick some high-priority work, or the most time-consuming work, perhaps well-understood and well-defined work, or even something simple to try out this step of the workshop.

Step Six: Articulate the flow of that work

Using the sticky notes of that group, and see if you can organize a “flow” that sequences the work.

What happens to the work from “beginning” to “end”? Don’t worry if you have many sub-clusters for different types of work. Don’t worry if it is not strictly step-wise linear. Don’t worry if some activities don’t even really seem to have a precedence order at all.

You don’t need to drill all the way down to “step by step” at this point, unless you can.

This flow is your baseline for this type of work. It represents only your current best understanding of the work.

Repeat this deeper analysis (steps five and six) for as many different types of work as you can (or are worthwhile examining). You may find that some are simply versions or variants of others. There may be “sub-flows” that they have in common. And there are some that are completely different and need to be in their own separate area.

Some types of work may be just a few steps or even just a single activity box (for example, On Vacation). Others might take an entire room to explain.

Step Seven: Build your first-pass Visual Management System

As a team, based on everyone’s thinking about the information now seen, lay out your display to capture these flows.

For Example:

• Swim lanes, zones – stage/state columns
• Separate areas, boxes, colors
• Arrow, links, connectors

This is where a physical team space has an advantage. You can be creative. Use all the walls in the team room. If you are not able to co-locate, try to use a tool that gives you enough freedom to be creative.

Step Eight: Create space for Kaizen

There is just one more element to set up. A space to track your experiments, your kaizen - continuous improvement activities.

Capture the things you want to improve. You can start with everything you’ve uncovered during this exercise. This will be your kaizen backlog.

Don’t separate it from the rest of the VMS. Make sure it is a part of your daily discussion of the work – it becomes part of the regular work you do.

Pick an item from this backlog to use in an experiment:

• State what the context is (as specifically as you can)
• Why it is an issue (how do you know? Are there metrics?), what would be the preferred state of things
• What you think is causing the problem (perhaps a root cause)
• What actions you could take to address it
• Which of those do you want to try first, and for how long
• How you will know if you are making progress, or when you should quit
• And as you progress, what did you learn and how will you incorporate that learning?

Step Nine: Review the result

Challenge the team to take a hard look and see if they can answer the following questions:

• If I had to “mark” all the work I do, does this visual management system capture it all?
• For each work item or element we have, can I see each activity that item goes through? Can I tell what happens next?
• What is missing? What “should be” missing (wastes we can get rid of)
• Where is improvement needed?
• Where do we need to explore the work more thoroughly?
• Can I tell “at a glance”: What is the most important thing for the team to finish today?

If you can’t tell, then improving the VMS so that you can, is your most important thing to do today.

Going Forward

Use your visual management system to track all the team’s activities. Use it as a meeting place for your daily standup. Keep all status information on the board, updated continually, for all to see.

Remember this was your first pass. Expect it to be ”wrong”. ?As you use it, you will realize you did not exactly capture how work is actually done.

Expect to completely rebuild (completely tear-down) the entire display multiple times before getting “comfortable” with it.

Now you are ready to improve.