Visualisation Rules
I’ve achieved two of my objectives in implementing Kanban, and they’re both down to the visualisation of workflow.
The products stakeholders were introduced to the Kanban board yesterday.
All I had to say was “pink and purple are emergencies and support tickets, yellow is the coding you want us to do, and the flow is left to right” and they got it. They got a message that coders have been trying (unsuccessfully) to convey to them for many years. Yes, ad hoc stuff gets in the way of scheduled development. (The green, by the way, is tasks the team has found they need to do to facilitate other work)
The second success came at the end of the stakeholder meeting when they spontaneously decided (no prompting from me) that they needed to prioritise the ad hoc stuff against the scheduled stuff, and we walked over to the Kanban board to do it.
The power of visualisation.
Tags: agile, kanban, lean, visualisation, workflow
June 11th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
There are some green post-its near the middle … the colour is a bit too close to the yellow in the photo.
Some elements of the business heard the message, and took it on board to a degree. What was different this time was that ALL the product stakeholders got the message, understood exactly HOW MUCH the ad hoc work affected us delivering what they wanted, and they acted in response (the prioritisation). All that was new, and in sharp contrast to what went on before. How many repeats of the verbal message ‘Well, we didn’t finish all your stuff, because something more important came along” does it take before that sounds like an excuse ? Now the evidence is there AND things are being done.
I’ve seen the visual management blog … good stuff
Andy