Visual Management Blog

Announcing Vima, the Visual Management Framework

Mon, 08 May 2023 11:22:52 +0000

It’s finally here! After so many years of iterations, and delays due to the pandemic, I am proud to officially announce and publish the first version of Vima (formerly pre-published here as VMF or Visual Management Framework).

www.vima.cc

I hope to offer the community a real alternative to Scrum and Kanban, tailored to business teams or any environment that is a little bit chaotic in nature.

VMF Core Patterns

Tue, 03 Sep 2019 15:34:45 +0000

#1 Calendar taskboards and date-constrained work

The most important, visible and distinguishing pattern in VMF is the integration of calendar aspects into a classic agile taskboard that allows us to visualize the time dimension when planning and executing work. Concretely, this means a VMF taskboard design will have date-related rows or columns in it instead of (or besides) a value stream, and we embrace that some tasks or PBIs will have date-related constraints.

Visual Management Framework (VMF) – Part 1

Wed, 20 Feb 2019 13:21:16 +0000

An Agile framework for teams outside of software, IT and product development.

This is the first in a 3-part series of articles describing the Visual Management Framework (VMF), a framework for creating Agile teams outside of software, IT and product development.

Part 1: Introduction and target audience

This article is for you if you are interested in Agile, Scrum and Lean and work in/with a team that has many of the following characteristics:

Visual Management Framework (VMF) presented at London Scrum Gathering 2018

Mon, 08 Oct 2018 09:49:49 +0000

Joke and I will be presenting our patterns for working with time-constrained work (deadlines, delegated work, recurring work, etc.) in an agile way at the London Scrum Gathering today. We’re calling it the “Visual Management” framework. Stay tuned for more information including slides and extra content on this blog after the presentation is over.

Xavier

Laser guide for building a taskboard

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:19:51 +0000

Building a taskboard using a laser guide

Here’s a high tech and original way of building a physical taskboard. (source: Agilar team @ Belgacom)

1 comment

Marian Spector on August 27, 2013 at 5:49 pm

Great idea – using a laser. Multi-colored lab tape is also extremely useful. We add a photo of each team member to the grid. Management loves to walk around and look at all the colorful scrum boards.

Visual Management workshop applied

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 06:53:21 +0000

Samir Hanna is a ScrumMaster at F-Secure in Bordeaux. He and his team felt they needed to improve their taskboard.

“The board is the mirror of the team’s daily work. The board was a mess… You could not see anything, everything was confusing… You can’t have clean water coming from a dirty pipe.”

He wrote an e-mail to the Agile Games mailing list asking for a suggestion and was referred to the Visual Management workshop I ran at Agile 2009 in Chicago. Read Samir’s account on how he ran the workshop within his team, with great results. Nice taskboard Samir! I particularly like the small pictures and the status tags. And of course the gun.

Team Calendar

Sat, 25 Sep 2010 20:47:05 +0000

How does a self-managed and self-organized team coordinate holidays and other planned absences? It doesn’t need to be more complicated than a Team Calendar. Print a blank monthly calendar on an A4 sheet of paper (you can do this from Outlook, or if you want to go fancy, Visio) and put it on the taskboard. Team members write their name on the days they will be out of office.

Visual Management for having a baby

Sat, 18 Sep 2010 13:03:27 +0000

Hello! I am Laura Quesada Allue. I was born in January 2010. Maybe you were wondering why my daddy hasn’t written anything on this blog for the last 8 months? Well, now you know!

This blog post tells the story of how my parents used Visual Management to coordinate the tough project of preparing themselves for my coming to the world. I leave you with them now…

Status tags revisited

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:24:28 +0000

Status tags are my preferred approach to visually attaching state metadata to work items.

In plain english, what this means is that if you have a task, represented for example by a standard size Post-it, you would add a physical tag, represented by a smaller colored Post-it, to indicate it has some particular status, such as “Blocked” or “Delegated” or “Bug” or “Please Test”. This creates visibility and awareness and enables the right people to react to that new status fast.

Build a taskboard in 10 steps

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 13:56:25 +0000

In this tutorial I will explain how to build a physical taskboard out of electrical tape step by step, for those of you who -like me- were not born with a gift for bricolage. I admit up front to this post not being my most intellectual piece of work ever, but I’m hopeful more than one of you out there will find it at least marginally useful.

I will demonstrate using a 120 x 90 cm whiteboard, the smallest format that will support a small team board. Magnetic whiteboards make great task boards because the surface is so versatile: you can write on it, you can stick magnets, post-its stick and unstick very cleanly, so does Scotch Magic tape, and -most important for this case- so does electrical tape, which is what we will be using to make the lines. That means that if you make a mistake, you can just unstick and re-stick the tape, though it will never be as easy as the first time around. The downside, of course, is that they are expensive and/or not always available for hijacking in your office. That’s why I advocate building boards wherever you can: I have built boards on the back of closets, directly on walls, and even on windows (looks cool at first, but later it’s very distracting – your attention always ends up going to what’s outside).

Visual Management Workshop at Agile 2009

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:23:30 +0000

This is my recount of my session at Agile 2009 Chicago. It was titled “Visual Management for Agile Teams” and was part of the Manifesting Agility stage.

The session went well, around 36 people came and left 27 session reviews. Many people found value in the practical, down-to-earth approach of the workshop, leaving comments such as “excellent hands-on demo”, “extremely applicable information”, “finally something hands-on practical” and “very helpful”. Review averages were: Met expectations 4.4/5; Would recommend 4.3/5; Presentation skills 4.1/5; Command of topic 4.6/5; Matched description 4.4/5 and Overall 4.4/5.

Agile 2009 Chicago

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 10:48:25 +0000

The flagship conference of the Agile community has come and gone. I had a great time and I’d like to post a short account of my trip with some pictures. I will later follow up with a post specifically on my Visual Management session.

We arrived with Joke a couple of days early in order to visit the city before the conference. Chicago is an amazing city with an incredible skyline full of modern buildings. I especially love that red one!

The science behind Visual Management

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:10:51 +0000

Recently, Portia Tung was reviewing my session proposal on Visual Management (with Laurent Morisseau) to the XP Days Benelux 2009 conference. She commented that it would be nice if I could give some scientific background for all this Visual Management and taskboard stuff that I write about. Since half my family and many of my friends are scientists, this is a challenge too tempting to pass. The only thing I ask of Portia is to understand that this is not something I can put together in a couple of weeks! I will try to (slowly) start adding some scientific theory behind these writings. Iteratively and incrementally, starting today.

Scrum of Scrums: Making it visual

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 10:10:48 +0000

In Scrum, the “Scrum of Scrums” is a way to ensure alignment and coordination across different teams, or among different sub-teams of a large Team.

How big is the Team?

A Team is a group of people collaborating towards a common goal. Sometimes it’s not that easy to pick your goal, and thus figure out who the Team is, or who it should be. On one hand, small teams are good. Small is simple, small is beautiful. So maybe you should pick a small goal, and make a small Team.

On the nature of Commitment

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 18:49:41 +0000

We hear a lot of talk about commitment in Agile circles lately. But what is commitment? As it turns out, there are several meanings to the word. Leaving aside being committed to an asylum (which is where many of us will end if the methodology wars go on), the two dictionary definitions we care about are:

2a**:** an agreement or pledge to do something in the future
2c**:** the state or an instance of being obligated or emotionally impelled (source: Webster’s Dictionary online)

Readability and the Thick Black Marker

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 15:14:37 +0000

In Visual Management for Agile Teams, I discussed the importance of usability and good design when building our taskboards. Today I want to focus on how we write our tasks, and try to make a case for increased readability.

Readability

Readability is defined as “how easy it is to read something”. There are two meanings, as in “a readable handwriting” and “a readable book”. In this case we will focus on the first definition as it applies to answering the following question: how easy is it to read the tasks on our taskboard?

Dreaming in Post-Its

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:14:39 +0000

Great video!

Any similarity between this guy and my desk is purely… frightening. I hope these things don’t start moving on their own!

4 comments

Tim McMahon on June 19, 2009 at 12:25 am

I am interested in your system posted at your desk. Could you explain it a little further to me.

Kanban boards

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:32:39 +0000

Here are some examples of Kanban boards I built for a friend. I was not coaching these teams, so I did not have any say on the process. My job was simply to build a board that would reflect their current process, using my Visual Management guidelines.

These boards are for a corporate unit that acts as a sort of “enterprise proxy product owner”. They receive business demands from multiple business units, they analyze and classify them, and make a proposal to the customer. They also make recommendations such as build or buy. If the proposal is approved, they send it to development and follow it up into production.

Daily Scrum against the board

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:19:50 +0000

A good way to know if your team is using their taskboard to really manage their work is to look at their daily standup meeting.

Does it look like this:

or like this?

A team that is using visual management to manage their work will always do their daily standup against the board. During the daily standup you update your team members on your work. Both work finished the day before and work still in progress should be clearly indicated on the board. It only makes sense to go over the board as you talk. This is both easier for you and easier for team members. It also helps to visually place what you are talking about in context.

Confirmed: Toyota does Waterfall

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 10:21:38 +0000

Mary Poppendieck, Henrik Kniberg and a bunch of other people are on a Lean Tour in Japan that might turn out to be historical. According to this blog post, a Toyota software development manager has spoken openly for the first time on how they develop software, and guess what? Yep, it’s waterfall. We’re waiting for more details on the Lean Development list regarding how they manage to pull this off and what they think of the Agile community, but I think we’re going to learn a lot here.

Team pictures

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 12:11:30 +0000

Putting team member pictures on the team taskboard is another good idea. This is particularly useful for large organizations that have many teams and lots of people.

Benefits of team pictures

Helps create team identity (together with a team name) “This is who we are. We are the Blue Team and these are our members.”
Helps you match faces to names when looking at the board, especially if you use nametags.
Eliminates all uncertainty regarding who is in what team. People get one picture and can only belong to one team.
Helps find people in large offices. “You have to talk to Susan from the green team. You can see her picture on their board”.
Changing teams, or going on loan to another team for a Sprint, is as easy as moving your picture and nametags from one board to another.
We turn around a picture to indicate that the person is not present today. This helps you not lose time looking for people that aren’t there.
We also put cell phone numbers of team members on the back of their picture. No more going crazy trying to find the number of Johnny!

We also use team pictures to do literal “team building” exercises. Every now and then you might want to reshuffle and reorganize the teams. You can take all pictures into a meeting room with a clean whiteboard and brainstorm how new teams would look like. This is a highly visual way of “seeing” and “building” a large team that has to be divided in sub-teams.

Unplanned items and legacy issues

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:29:59 +0000

“Unplanned items and legacy issues” is the top row on my scrumboards. Instead of a story, it is a placeholder for:

Unplanned work: stuff that we suddenly have to do and we can’t plan (meaning we cannot put into the backlog as a story). A typical example is reinstalling a PC after a hard drive crash. You might spend all day at this, and you are obviously not going to wait until the next sprint to fix your PC.
Legacy issues: this is any bug or issue that belongs to stories already delivered and accepted, and should be fixed.

Why do I put this on top? For unplanned items it’s rather obvious: this is for things you are doing anyways, and are not part of any story. Most teams simply don’t visualize this type of work, but I like all work to be visible, even if it doesn’t add value. Otherwise the day is gone and “nothing” was done. This way at least everybody knows what you are doing.

The DONE tag

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:14:43 +0000

Visual management is not just about having visual elements, how you use them is equally important. A bad process can render a good idea useless. And some trivial ideas, with a good process behind them, can produce interesting results.

The DONE status tag is a process related idea. It is a creative way to visualize flow, give teams a moment to celebrate their achievements, and to ensure team alignment and communication; all on a daily basis.

First Visual Management Workshop

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:55:21 +0000

Last Thursday I tried out for the first time my session proposal for Agile 2009, thanks to my friends at iLean who invited me to give their free monthly iLearn session in Kontich (near Antwerp). In this workshop participants are divided into teams and challenged to come up with the “ultimate taskboard” for the newly appointed CEO of their company. After a first iteration where basic boards are built, the work is criticized by the CEO and then it’s back to the drawing board as more requirements are added.

Nametags

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 07:00:43 +0000

The purpose of nametags is to be able to quickly and easily see who’s working on what. I love nametags. I haven’t been able to come up with a simpler, more practical and more flexible way of achieving this level of transparency and visualization.

I like nametags because:

Nametags are extremely self-explanatory.
Nametags are very readable if written nicely.
Nametags are small and unintrusive, but highly visible at the same time.
Nametags can be of different colors which adds some clarity without creating visual pollution.
Nametags are cheap and can be made in 10 seconds. And they last practically forever.
Nametags are flexible. Placing one is a snap. You can easily remove them. You can put one on top of another. You can bunch them together. They can overlap, hang out, or on the side of task and status Post-it’s.

Usability is very important when designing your visual elements and processes. It is important to distinguish between nice and usable. Both are good, but usable is more important. Let’s examine a couple of other ideas for achieving the same goal, and see how they fare against nametags.

Status Tags and the Three Columns

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 23:07:16 +0000

“Less is more”. You heard this before, right?

This applies particularly to visual management. It is very easy to generate noise by creating visual elements that are not strictly necessary. When designing our information radiators, we should always be careful not to create waste. And any visual element that doesn’t add value is waste.

Of course, sometimes it’s not that easy to figure it out. For example: suppose you run out of yellow Post-it’s, and you see some green Post-it’s lying around. Should you use them, or is this waste?

One day tasks

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 22:50:11 +0000

One day tasks are tasks that take -in theory- up to one day to complete by one person, or by a pair of people in the case of pair programming. Creating tasks of one day maximum size gives two benefits to the team. The first is that under normal conditions it creates visible daily flow. Meaning that if nothing goes wrong, one task will be finished (on average) per team member per day. So if a team has 8 members, theoretically they should finish 8 tasks per day. But in Agile teams, people work in pairs a lot, either pair programming, or a coder/analyst-tester pair, so in practice it should be around half of that that gets finished. And effectively, my experience is that in healthy 8-member teams, you should expect to see around 4 DONE tags per day.

Visual Management for Agile Teams

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 02:09:30 +0000

Introducing the Visual Management Blog, a space for the discussion of ideas and examples of Visual Management applied to Agile teams and project management.

What is Visual Management?

Visual Management is the practice of using information visualization techniques to manage work. A simple example is using sticky notes on a wall to manage a list of tasks, a better (and more complex) example is kanban. Many visual management ideas come from traditional Lean thinking and Toyota, but these techniques are also very popular within the Agile Software Development community.

About the blog