Visual Management Tools
Our adoption of Agile practice now spans about 3 years. Over those 3 years we have learned a lot about what works (and what doesn’t) and have seen elements such as visual management (e.g. Kanban) tools crop up around our organisation.
Whilst I would have to concede that the rate of Agile adoption has been fastest within the information services group (which is so often the case) I would say that we’ve seen increasingly agile-esque behaviour from the majority of our business units & stakeholders. For example, the concept of a Mimimum Viable Product is reasonably well understood and supported.
Over the past few weeks we have been thinking about what else we could be doing to improve the way we work and continue to drive business buy-in into Agile. We already use a range of operational dashboards using the Splunk tool so moving this into the product/project space felt like a natural extension.
Wall space for visual management has started to become premium real estate, and our reporting needs have grown as our practices have matured, so we thought moving to digital visual management tools as a next step made sense.
Using the tools we already have we were able to replicate the Kanban and activity boards on a large display in the team stand-up area. Whilst there’s definitely something tactile and rewarding about moving post-it notes around the digital equivalnet allows us to see work in real-time from anywhere as well as offering us a richness of reporting we never had before. We can see up to the minute views on the progress of work requests, what is in the pipeline at any point in time and make the best possible resourcing choices we can.
The current trial is focussed on one team but it it proves successful we will be rolling out digital visual management tools to most of our other teams over the coming few weeks.
Unsurprisingly the trial has also caught the eye of a number of business stakeholders who are starting to think about the potential visual management tools may have in their respective business units which has to be a plus if it helps us to further drive Agile adoption.
