Visualize Work for a Management Team

For so long, we were taught that silos—development, testing, UX, whatever you had in your organization—were the Right Way to organize. While I lean much more toward a product organization, that might not be a reality for your organization now.

Functional managers collaborate to create the project portfolio. They might collaborate as part of a program or to remove impediments for cross-functional teams.

Managers have deliverables across the organization. Managers provide the leverage that the cross-functional teams or work groups require. When managers can see their work—and show their work to others—the entire organization can benefit from the transparency. The transparency might help several managers see how to collaborate, possibly as a cross-organization program team.

Programs are strategic collections of projects with one business objective. (See Agile and Lean Program Management [Rot16] for more information.) While your functional group (HR, Sales, Finance) might not deliver projects, the group does deliver value on a periodic basis.

One way you can see the overall function deliverables is to use a kanban board similar to the one shown here. You might not use WIP limits until you understand all the work your function is working on.

This board has similar columns to the preceding one: Action Item Analysis and Resolution, Risk Management or Mitigation, Decision Needed, Waiting, and Done. However, look at the swim lanes below the big black line.

When managers explain they are working on facilities issues, such as team rooms or small private offices or the ability to collocate team members together, the teams can understand why it takes a while to resolve these issues. It’s the same for HR issues: when and how does an organization move to team-based compensation for product-development teams and what does that mean for work groups?

As soon as agile approaches move past the team level, the managers have a difficult time understanding and working through the issues. When managers take the bold step of creating a board and showing the transparency as they deal with the issues, the people on the teams have more confidence in an agile transformation. Your management team(s) might need different boards. There is no One Right Board for management.

People need to see their work to see their throughput and cycle time. And the organization needs more information and data to understand the implications of those details.