In software development inventory waste is best represented in the queued activities in between the hand offs from individual to individual. If using a complicated board, you would represent the full flow or value stream for delivering stories. This would normally contain columns such as “Ready for Development” or “Ready for Testing”. A build up of one or two items in these columns isn’t necessarily bad, but when moderate to large queues start to appear it is symptomatic of constraint or flow issue within the team.

In teams doing Kanban well, they are limiting their work in progress across both the active and the queueing columns (ie “In X” and “Ready for Y” columns).

What a Hotspot board does is visually highlight the inventory waste areas of the team’s flow. Rather than structuring flow going across via the headers or columns, it balances the zones of the board so that the inventory waste areas are all in the center part of the board – ie the key focal area of your eye, highlighting the criticality of watching these waste points by backing the zone in red.

There are a few potential downsides to such a board:

1) Swimlanes become difficult to utilise as a visual technique (as flow bounces around the board)

2) Visual fixation on only the hotspot results in the “In X” activities having reduced focus. This could result in high WIP of in flight work being ignored which would definitely not be a good thing.

To overcome this second issue and to align more closely with one of Kanban’s key pricinples, limit work in progress, I extended the idea of the Hotspot board to become the Twister board (yes like the game with spots).

The Twister board re-introduces work in progress limits in three ways – 

1. In the hotspot zone itself
2. In the active flow states – visually highlighting the actual kanban availability through the existence of the circles
3. In the active flow states – visually highlighting the risk of hitting to top threshold of work in progress through colour – green =  all good, orange = getting close, red = upper threshold of work in progress being met

Note: pictures are examples only of flow and work in progress limits. As always, apply this contextually to your work and teams.

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.

Firstly, this is an odd sort of post for what I normally write. It is more a brain dump of a concept or idea I have and not necessarily a well formed one.

The audience was for Dave Snowden or anyone else who considers themselves a Cynefin or complexity thinking specialist.

I openly profess I am not. I am trying to learn and so some of the concepts I have within may be wrong. Please forgive me if I haven’t gotten a concept right. I am here to learn, be challenged/corrected and think differently.

These ideas and thoughts were generated from trying to extend the boundaries of a new movement called “Visual Management”.

Coffee and Cynefin

Coffee at home

When we make a coffee at home it is a very easy affair. We choose the coffee type from the store (probably your hardest decision), add it to a cup, add sugar if you desire, add boiling water, stir, add milk if desired and Bob is your Uncle.

In terms of complexity of the task it is Simple. The outcome is predictable. The process requires no domain specialisation. In likelihood the home “barista” is also the customer. The quality is…. less than desirable. I know that quality is in the eye of the beholder, but having been privy to some of the worlds top coffee makers and blends and I can say, in my experience, that a Nespresso machine coffee pales to a good barista produced cafe coffee.

Cafe coffee

When we go to a cafe for a coffee the domain expert, the barista, should be able to do a better job of producing a coffee from the commercial quality machines than the average person.

In terms of the complexity of the task it is Complicated. The outcome is still predictable. The process now requires domain specialisation. The barista is no longer the customer. The quality is dependent on the experience of the barista, the process they use, the quality and freshness of the coffee  itself, the roasting process applied, the milk and lastly the quality of the tools (machine, grinder, milk jug).

World Barista Championships

Last year my husband was Australia’s 5th top Barista (I am very proud of him). His passion and energy for a good cup of coffee has enabled me to learn a lot about the coffee industry. In order to be a rated barista in both Australia and the world there are competitions that are run each year. These competitions are very arduous and time consuming. This year’s barista champion for Australia spent three months, full time, training for the competition event. In essence, he was sponsored, ie paid for three months, to do nothing but ensure that he was ready for a fifteen minute performance. Judges go through a similarly arduous process. Technical, taste and presentation standards exist and are assessed against.

Baristas at this level are highly passionate, highly educated and use the best tools and equipment that money can buy. To be on top of their game they conduct a lot of experiments. For their twelve coffees in fifteen minutes they would make hundreds of bases, cappuccinos, and try dozens of experiments for their signature drink. Dozens of blends would be tested and a variety of roasting conditions tested. Baristas have to work closely with roasters because, in essence, their coffee is also showcasing the roaster’s ability too. The roaster’s domain experience can greatly affect the barista’s outcome.

All in all, a barista, when they start their journey, would certainly not be able to predict the type of the coffee, the roasting elements, the milk to be used and their signature drink. In terms of complexity of the task it is Complex. The outcome is not predictable. The process requires several domain specialists. Experts are now the customer. The quality is high and graded within clear and defined guidelines.

How does this relate to Visual Management?

When we make a coffee at home there is no value in visually managing this work. Simple work will happen with such predictability and ease that the effort to do visual management would be considered an overhead or waste.

When a coffee is made at a cafe there is some value in visually managing this work – value for both the customer and producer. Complicated work has the simplest of visual management techniques applied – the flow is usually limited to “To do”, “Doing” and “Done”. The variability of items inside of the flow is constrained to a subset of possible conditions,that is, a barista is not going to make you a smoothie or sandwich.

When a coffee is produced for the world barista championships the process to deliver that coffee would benefit from a more complicated visual management system. Complex work has complicated visual management techniques applied – the flow may additionally have a “Wait” column. The variability of items inside the flow are no longer constrained to a subset of possible conditions. Work may now become easily blocked. Work may now have dependencies and relationships to other work items. Work may now need specialization outside of the barista’s capabilities – ie other domain experts are likely required. All of these things can be visually managed. You don’t have to have a visual management zone for doing the world barista championships, but speaking from experience it certainly does help.

Conclusion

For coffee making (and maybe more?):

• There is a relationship between the complexity category and quality
• There is a relationship between the complexity category and process specialised relationships required to produce the work value or outcomes
• There is a relationship between the complexity category and variability of work items within the flow
• There is a relationship between the complexity category and the predictability of the end outcome (known)
• The visual management techniques applied sit one category of complexity below the actual work within the system