Hi all,
Thank you Yves for creating this list.
I am Christophe Thibaut, agile coach, facilitator, manager @ OCTO, Paris (a lot of friends call me ToF).
I'm also instructor in training with the McCarthys CP
In my work I'm mostly interested in team dynamics, TDD, agile in general, code reviews, and programming.
I discovered visual management with my first XPish project in 2001. Using a todo-box on the wall, burndown, and post-its with the funniest thing said during the week (those were the days!...)
A story of visual management in my personal life, is that day when I took pictures of every places, corners, furnitures, walls, tub, sink, desks, beds, wardrobe etc. in our flat and made an album to browse for pleasure and edification. Afterwards our flat was much cleaner. It was easily done, but not continued. My strategy was to take new pictures at each new level of tidiness, but it was geopardized by another decision about cleaning our home (visualizing the decision process would be an interesting, if time consuming, exercise :-).
At work my typical visual managements problems are :
- Autumn : postits falling from the wall because they don't stick anymore because nobody don't bother anymore, including bothering about the bothering. Deprecated Inventory, maybe, or nostalgic vestiges.
- Technocratic Rescueing (inflicted help) : someone influent rallies the ecologists in the team, claims the postits an ecological disaster and install new computerized mutlti-dimensional secure taskboard management systems (CMDSTMS) with enough whistles and bells to explore for 20 iteration debrief at a rate of 30 mn per debrief. also called : Push-to-Pull Slide Back, because of the way information radiators are thus changed into information safes.
- Nudge the SpeedoMeter : people unhappy with The Way Things Are (tm) regarding the result/effort ratio of the team, try to change this via some percussive maintenance on the speedometer , trying to adjust the estimating rules so that the figures going out at the end of the iteration contributes to a better shape of the global (and local) advancement curve (a.k.a burndown, burnup). Frequent case of a visual management problem degenerating into a management problem. ("what is it that you want/need exactly ?")
- Brocoli principle (Weinberg) : visual management tools correctly set up, not used by managers declaring they "lost ALL visibility" (of their project committee report gantts usually sent by email). It doesn't matter that brocoli are good if the children won't eat them.
What would I like to add ?
Begging for an indulgent read of the way I stated the problems. I intended to make fun of systems, not people.
Eager to read from you guys.
Cheers.
ToF