Agile Forest

On Thursday the 20th of June I had the pleasure of co-presenting with Craig Smith (@smithcdau) at Agile Australia on “Visual Management: Leading with what you can see”. For the slides you can go directly to slideshare or click through the embedded contents below.

The presentation was video taped so when that is released I will update and provide a link.

Because it was a presentation on Visual Management I felt that it was quite important that visually it looked slick. I spent almost two hours a night, most nights for almost two months to get the 70-odd slides in the presentation. Some slides were cut due to the time constraints of keeping to 35 mins. Also due to time constraints we didn’t get the opportunity to cover items in more depth, in essence it was a slidefest of ideas and concepts, enough to say “hey, that’s a good idea, I could use that” but armed with the information to be able to seek out more.

To this extent I wanted to add to the slide deck some bullet points of thoughts that we didn’t have time to cover or extend further on. For those who were unable to attend I also wanted to iterate some key elements of the slides.

• Firstly, I would like to thank a few people who made this slide deck happen. Four pictures were taken from @craigstrong and one from @caza_no7 (Ian Carroll’s) work. The Usability section of these slides was worked on with Usability expert, Matthew Hodgson @magia3e of ZenExMachima fame. Some photos were taken from the Dandelion and Driftwood cafe in Brisbane with the approval of Penny and Peter Wolff. Lastly, a number of pictures have been taken from where I am currently working at Superchoice, I am thankful to Ian Gibson for his permission to use them.
• Slide 14, which discusses Value trees is an extension of Luke Hohmann’s Product Tree work. I have been using Value trees for a little while now to represent backlogs and am finding them more useful then a standard backlog, especially for identifying critical paths. Compared to a normal backlog they allow for recognition of the existence of dependencies and parallel processing. I am currently working on a whitepaper for these and with Luke Hohmann’s help should have it released fairly soon. The whitepaper will go into a lot more detail about what they are and how they work, so stay tuned!
• Slide 16, the Timeline Board is sometimes considered an anti-pattern in Agile circles. It is an advanced form of a Gantt chart, but unlike a Gantt chart it is quite adaptable to real time change and exists for the whole team to have transparency and ownership of the work. I don’t use this type of board often but I do tend to use it for complex move sequences and have done so a few times. The x-axis and headers represent time. Usually this is done as a two way exponential timeline. The key milestone sits roughly 2/3 of the way across the x-axis. From that date it logarithmically goes forward in time. It also reverses logarithmicaly in time as well. For example, the headers could be 3.5 months, 2 months, 1 month, 2 weeks, 1 week, milestone -4 days, milestone – 2 days, milestone -1 day, milestone, milestone + 1 day, milestone + 2 days, milestone + 4 days, etc. Once the wall is constructed items generally don’t move. Cards do have a tendency to be added. The main thing that moves is the current time point. Anything behind it should be crossed off done, anything on it is in focus for the standup and anything in front is visibility of what is coming up.
• Visual management isn’t just about software development. I have spent a good amount of time in my career applying it to other knowledge work areas.
• Visual management’s audience isn’t just the team. It is about re-enforcing everything visually – for both the team, managers and customers.
• Visual management isn’t just about a flow zone, it also incorporates many facets of other information.
• There is a direct relationship between the level of complexity of the type of work that you are doing and the manner in which it is visually managed – generally the visual management is one degree of complexity less than the work itself. This is a new concept that has not been previously explored.
• The application of software usability rules and how they apply to Visual Management is also a new concept that has not had a considerable depth of exploration. I am sure we will hear more from Matthew on this in the future (he felt it could have easily taken up the full 35 mins and I would tend to agree).
• There is a misconception about the purpose of the readability of cards on the flow zone. Most think that the information needs to be retained. The key purpose of usability relating to cards is to be able to find it quickly and to be able to read it easily, not retain it. You want to be able to find it with little thought in stand ups. You want to be able to find the right card quickly when talking to the Product Owner. This is where usability and Visual Management becomes highly important. We don’t spend enough time being consistent and writing clearly when writing cards. As Lynne Cazaly beautifully mentioned in her presentation, if you don’t take the time to write neatly what someone else has told you then you are not showing respect for their thoughts that they have given you.
• Achievements – I have mentioned them a few times on this blog. As part of this exercise of getting a slide up I somewhat simplified the generation of the tokens and the Agile Achievements playbook. If you are interested just send me a tweet and I can DM you a direct link to the content if you want to re-use it.

Lastly I want to thank Craig Smith for his help and support in doing the presentation.  I may be the Penny to his Brains (check Craig’s uploaded slide deck for the in-joke), but he is really the Will MacAvoy to my Mackenzie Mchale.