Visualizing the work outperforms a status report every time
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Agile deprioritizes the status report in favor of promoting the self-organizing team. Agile asks managers to trust a team of motivated individuals and give them the environment and support they need to succeed. Without the status report, in order to best support the team, managers and other interested parties still need a lightweight mechanism to understand key information about the team’s product roadmap, delivery trends, improvement needs, and impediments.
The first post in this series provided the context for why status reports no longer work for the needs of modern, Agile organizations. The second post encouraged managers to ditch the status report, get out of the office, and engage with the team.
This post outlines how visualizing the work outperforms a status report and provides guidance on getting started with big, visual boards.
Why Visualize?
Agile and Lean both emphasize people over tools. The first value of the Agile Manifesto1 is:
Individuals and interactions over process and tools
Agile also promotes face-to-face engagement over status reports and other documentation-centric approaches as mentioned in the following principle from the Agile Manifesto:
The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
Big, visual boards provide a lightweight mechanism for teams to radiate critical information about their work and what help they need. Formal and impromptu face-to-face conversations are held around these visual radiators. Big visual boards invite conversation. Through these conversations, management can easily understand how they can enable the team to succeed.
Additionally, big, visual boards are a primary principle of Lean systems for visualizing the work as it flows across the value chain. Work is hidden in software development. It is difficult to see where software code is piling up or when too much is in progress, resulting in inefficient context switching. By visualizing the work moving across a big, visual board such as a Kanban board, it is easier to access the necessary information, see waste in the system, and identify improvements.
After experiencing the benefits of big, visual boards—rich conversations with the team, visualization of the work, and easy accessibility of information—managers never want to go back to the inferior status report.
Information Radiators
Big, visual boards are commonly called Information Radiators in the Agile community. The term Information Radiator was defined by Alistair Cockburn2 as follows:
An Information Radiator displays information in a place where passersby can see it. With Information Radiators, the passersby don’t need to ask questions; the information simply hits them as they pass.
Two characteristics are key to a good Information Radiator. The first is that the information changes over time. This makes it worth a person’s while to look at the display… The other characteristic is that it takes very little energy to view the display.
There are some key elements or attributes of information radiators:
- Visual, big picture view
- High-traffic placement near the team area
- Regularly updated
- Visually appealing presentation
The benefits of an Information Radiator are numerous:
- Reduces time for assessing key information about the work
- Easy to consume the entire flow of work at a glance
- Improves the ability to see waste in the system
- Builds curiosity and invites conversation between the team and people passing by
- Provides a satisfying, dopamine-generating, tactile mechanism for team members to move work via physical cards to designate progress or completion
- When teams manually maintain the board, it creates a more intimate connection between the team and the work
Some examples of Information Radiators are listed below:
- Value Flow Kanban
- Story Maps
- Impediment Boards
- Continuous Improvement Boards
Information Refrigerators
Often, teams consider tracking and planning tools such as Jira and Wikis to be Information Radiators. However, these tools do not continuously display information for passersby to see and absorb. Plus, the energy to get to and view the information you need in these tools is non-trivial.
These tools fall more closely into the category of an Information Refrigerator3:
An Information Refrigerator is a chart you have to open up and dig around in before you find the “ketchup” you’re looking for.
Information Refrigerators are places for you to centrally store information and decisions for later reference or safekeeping. Unfortunately, in an unsafe environment, teams also are prone to use these tools to hide details about the project so that sponsors and interested parties have to work to find and consume the information. This works against transparency versus embracing it. In general, the information in an Information Refrigerator is more difficult to access than information in an Information Radiator.
However, there are certain details about a project and decisions made by a team that are not appropriate for an Information Radiator as they would clutter up the visual board and obfuscate relevant information. Therefore, detailed artifacts and detailed records of decisions arrived at through conversation and collaboration are best stored in an appropriate Information Refrigerator (repository) for later reference when needed.
Some examples of Information Refrigerators are listed below:
- Electronic files
- Excel
- Planning tools
- Jira and other ticketing / issue-tracking systems
- Wikis
- Repositories
- Status reports
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The Pattern for Visualizing the Work
As a manager, do not request status reports; rather, encourage your teams to create big, visual boards (radiators) to show their work and its flow and to limit electronic tools and reports (refrigerators) to reference and historical analysis use cases. By using big, visual boards, teams will enhance collaboration, radiate information external to the team, and anchor conversation in Scrum ceremonies.
This is not to say to Information Refrigerators don’t have their place. Information Refrigerators are great for storing details for later reference or for enabling historical metric analysis. However, when it comes to visualizing the work, enhancing collaboration, and radiating information, visual boards are superior.
There are many things a team could visualize. To get started, work with your teams to try some of the more common visualization options below within the team and external to the team.
Visualization Options Within the Team
Information about the health of the Sprint is primarily utilized by the team. When the team visualizes this information, it is primarily for their consumption. However, it is still available for those external to the team if they happen to walk by the team room and strike up a conversation around the boards. Figure A illustrates some of these key Information Radiators for teams to try within the team boundary:
Sprint Backlog Kanban
The team uses a Sprint Backlog Kanban board to track the work of a Sprint, including Stories, tasks, impediments, and improvements. The board typically tracks work moving across three states—Not Started, In-Progress, and Done. This board is a central collaboration point of the Daily Scrum ceremony.
Sprint Burndown
A team uses a Sprint Burndown chart in tandem with the Sprint Backlog Kanban when it uses tasks to outline the work of the Stories in the Sprint. Either the number of tasks or task hours is burned down to assess progress against completing the Sprint Backlog by the end of the Sprint.
The team will reflect on the Sprint Burndown during the Daily Scrum to determine if they need to change the way they are working to pivot and get back on track.
Sprint Burnup
A team uses a Sprint Burnup chart to assess the completion of work (Stories) throughout the Sprint timebox by burning up Story points when a Product Owner accepts a Story. Incremental Story completion is the goal.
The team typically assesses the Sprint Burnup in tandem with the Sprint Backlog Kanban and Sprint Burndown during the Daily Scrum to assess progress towards the Sprint goal. A flat Sprint Burnup with no points accepted until the end of the Sprint is a warning sign. A team will use this warning sign to change the way it works or reduce the size of its Sprint Backlog Stories.
Interrupt Tracker
Teams that plan for and have a strategy for managing interrupts perform better than those that do not.
For teams that are employing the Interrupt Pattern to track and limit interruptions, an Interrupt Tracker is a useful radiator. Teams will track their consumption of their interrupt allowance using this tracker during the Daily Scrum. When the team uses its entire interrupt capacity, all interrupts go through the Product Owner. This protects the achievement of the Sprint goal and attainment of the Sprint forecast.
Teams will often use the Interrupt Tracker during the Retrospective to identify improvements for preventing similar interrupts in the future. Some of these improvements become requests to management to help remove.
Happiness Trend
Happiness is a key indicator of future performance. Teams will often track their happiness level throughout the Sprint on a big, visual board and record salient events that impact happiness along the way.
The team discusses their Happiness Trend during the Daily Scrum to adjust rapidly to address problems, and they use it in the Sprint Retrospective to solve for recurring themes that negatively impact team happiness. The team will raise some of these improvements to management to assist in making them happen.
Andon Boards
Andon boards come in many forms and are patterned after the Japanese Manufacturing Andon Cord4.
One common use of an Andon Board on a development team is to radiate the status of the Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. This board can be automatically updated on a large, centrally located monitor through a CI/CD tool or manually updated. Essentially, the status presents as either “Green” or “Red.”
If it is “Red,” the team or a subset of the team, “Stops the Line,” and fixes the problem.
The team uses Andon boards in this manner for any type of issue that qualifies as a “Stop the Line” problem.
Visualization Options External to the Team
There is typically key information that is of interest to others external to the team. This information typically falls into categories of understanding long and near-term product direction, user learning and discovery, and current release completion forecasts. Figure B outlines some common visual boards that radiate information external to the team. The team also uses these boards internally.
Product Roadmap
Product Roadmaps provide the high-level strategic trajectory of the product over time. Typically, the team breaks the roadmap into three time-horizon buckets—Now (current release), Next, and Later. Each time horizon provides coarse-grained information on whose needs are being addressed, an overview of the solution options to address the needs, and the value that is expected to the user and the business.
The team potentially updates the roadmap every Sprint during Backlog Refinement as new information emerges and they make new decisions.
At a glance to passersby, this board provides a snapshot of the team’s purpose and invites further discussion with the team about why the roadmap has taken its current trajectory.
Learning Canvas
The Learning Canvas comes in many forms, such as user learning canvases, architecture learning canvases, or improvement canvases. A team might choose to radiate any or all of these. A key part of Agile is the empirical aspect of finding the right product and building it right. This type of canvas puts that learning front and center.
The User Learning Canvas is a common canvas that radiates information about user discovery experiments. As teams engage with their users to deliver the right solution, they will execute various experiments to arrive at the right solution.
To synthesize learnings, the User Learning Canvas highlights several salient pieces of information—user persona empathy maps, the current state and target state situation, experiments being performed, and the insights the experiments have generated.
Teams update learning canvases during the Backlog Refinement ceremony and before and after user experiment execution. However, the team often discusses insights during Sprint Reviews to highlight how the product strategy and feature set are evolving based on learning.
Story Map
Story Maps allow a team to focus on the current minimum viable product release. A Story Map is a key collaborative tool during sprint 0 and delivery sprints.
Story maps provide the use case flow of activities across the top of the map with feature (story) options below. The Product Owner and the team identify the minimum viable product (MVP) by moving options above and below the “line.” This “line” represents the MVP for the release to achieve the target outcomes.
Teams collaborate on a Story Map during Backlog Refinement and often refer to it during Sprint Reviews to highlight items planned next in the release.
Release Burnup
A Release Burnup is a tool used to forecast a date range for delivery of a release backlog based on recent team performance evidence and current levels of uncertainty.
Teams typically calculate a Release Burnup in a Backlog Refinement ceremony toward the end of the Sprint. In the Sprint Review, the team typically reviews the forecasted date range for the release. The team usually posts the Release Burnup next to the Story Map for the MVP.
Release Burnups help avoid date-driven behavior since the team generates them based on the evidence of their recent performance and their projections for the future.
Conclusion
Without a status report, Agile teams migrate to big, visual boards as the superior, lightweight choice for radiating information about their work. Storing details in a repository is sometimes necessary for later reference, but it should not replace the big, visual Information Radiator.
Through the team transparently visualizing the work, a rich flow of information will be available to any interested party regarding the ground reality of the team. As a manager, you can use this information to start up a conversation with your team or determine ways you can support your team in getting their work done.
This concludes this series on surviving Agile without a status report. It is time to embrace Agile, and move past the status report. You will find that engaging with your teams and visualizing the work outperforms the status report every time.
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Other Posts in the Series
- Surviving Agile Without a Status Report—An Introduction
- Surviving Agile Without a Status Report—Engaging With the Team
Related Posts
- Limit What You Start to Go Faster: Swarming and Interrupt Handling
- Remove Date-driven Behavior to Achieve Agility—Forecasting Dates Amidst Uncertainty
References
- Agile Manifesto, agilemanifesto.org
- Information Radiator, wiki.c2.com
- Information Refrigerator, wiki.c2.com
- Andon (In Manufacturing), Wikipedia.org
Todd Lankford unlocks Lean Leverage in organizations to cultivate powerful, engaged product teams who maximize outcomes and impact.
His articles share his experiences and learnings along the way. Join the mailing list to get them in your inbox.