Visual Management (VM) in its many forms needs the 3Ds (Discover, Design, Deploy)

Welcome back to 2024, as I am pretty sure that by now most of you will be back at your offices, worksites or home desks. I hope your festive season excesses are being worked off already…I know mine are (?).

At the tail end of last year, I did some work with two very different clients from two very different industries. Both, however, were in need of the same thing: moving existing deployment of Visual Management (VM) from the working teams’ environments into the leaders’ spaces. The methodology between linking different levels of VM together is a topic on its own, and one I may cover later this year. For now, I simply want to focus on the steps that I took both leaders through to get their Visual Management Boards (VMBs) up and running.

Let’s first start with some clarification though. VM is just a VMB right…well not really. VM is best broken down into 4 key themes, which all have their place on a VMB or in a work area. These are:

• Visual Metrics: How are we performing right now and do we know if we have a problem? A problem may simply be a ‘gap’ between current and desired states and is best shown with graphs, charts and tables.
• Visual Controls: Do you know when to take action? Is there a clear signal? Does everyone know how to respond to that signal? If a box turns red, or a chart exceeds an upper or lower control limit, who does what?
• Visual Order: How is our workplace organised? Is information or equipment easy to locate? How do we know if something is missing? Typically this will be shadow boards, foam inlays or other good outputs from a thorough 5S exercise.
• Visual Standards: Do we know what good looks like? How are we maintaining quality? Do we have any customer complaints?

If what you have in your VM arena cannot be categorised into any of the above, then the chances are that you’re just showing visual information. Challenge yourself or the team as to whether it needs to be up there, because if it doesn’t, then it is just drawing the eye away from the more valuable VM aspects of the board, the wall or the work area.

Right, back to the examples of moving from VM at the workplace to additional VM for the management teams.

Story 1: The first company had a mature Lean environment on the various lines, so you could visibly see if they were winning or losing. The issue was one of the front-end processes in the office was leading to choking of the flow of work through to these operations team. Both insufficient and uneven schedule loading meant obvious waste (or Mura) in the E2E flow of value adding work. By using the 3Ds with the team leader, a VMB and Huddle has transformed both the work focus of his team and (more pleasingly) the output improvements which the operations teams now benefit from.

Story 2: The second example was with a Manager who had previously not been overly supportive of a VMB which one of his team members had designed. When people and workflow changes in the company meant he had to take a keener eye on the flow of work through his main process, this presented a second chance to try and make VM stick in his area. Again, the use of 3Ds was followed and we are now well on the way to landing a sustainable VM approach for his team.

I first tried this 3Ds approach about 4 years ago when I was working with a Field Maintenance Team in Southern Queensland, and I don’t think I have strayed too much from that first version. Following the maxim of “what gets measured gets managed”, this should help you focus on only measuring what matters.

DISCOVER

1. Establish the measures that matter

a. Gather the current KPIs

b. Understand how data is collected

c. Understand how data is analysed

2. Align, simplify & improve

a. Link to strategy measures

b. Agree what matters most

c. Make it stand out

d. Improve the data collection

3. Engage the whole team

a. Introduce the VMB concept

b. Agree the content

c. Carry out VM awareness training

DESIGN

4. Design the Huddle process with the whole team

a. Either SIPOC or Process Map to draw out the VMB Leading and Lagging KPIs

5. Create the draft VMB

a. Only a rough version is needed

b. Place it near where the works get done

DEPLOY

6. Hold a dry run

a. Clarify the intent and test it

7. Pilot the Huddle with the team

8. Review after 4 Huddles and refine the data & process

a. It may take 7 iterations or more to land the VMB/Huddle you need

9. Lock in the design

a. Only now consider permanent markers, tape and VMB aesthetics.

As you look around the work areas near you look for those VM gaps and see if the above helps you help those teams. Even if they have VM in place, we can always improve, so again the above steps may be useful. Please feel free to SWIPE(*) them, and if you want to discuss it in a bit more detail then please get in touch as I love talking about VM.

(*) Definition: swipe (pronounced ‘swa?p’ ) / verb / to Steal With Integrity, Pride and Enthusiasm