Speaker: Xavier Quesada Allue
Talk: “Visual Management for Agile Teams”

Xavier Quesada Allue
Belgium & Argentina, @Agilar

Xavier is an independent Agile Coach and Project Manager who keeps himself busy learning, developing and implementing Scrum, Lean and XP best practices. He is a CSC, a frequent international conference participant and speaker, and is active in the Agile communities of Belgium, Spain and Argentina.

In February 2009 Xavier started the Visual Management Blog to document his experiences with Scrum, Lean and the visual workplace. Xavier is also a founding member of the Agilar non-profit project, an initiative to create a worldwide network of independent consultants.

Talk: “Visual Management for Agile Teams”

Welcome to the world of Visual Management! Task boards, post-its, mind maps, burndown charts, kanban boards, lava lamps… information visualization techniques and the visual workplace play a fundamental role in creating visibility and helping build transparency and trust among Agile teams. Come to this workshop to experience in person the value of Visual Management, and help cooperatively come up with the ultimate task board!

In this exploratory workshop, teams will be challenged to come up with creative ideas for visualizing information typical of an Agile project. The workshop focuses on Task Board design. Participants will play the role of the project team. The goal of the workshop is to build an information radiator (a task board) that will help the team organize and visualize their work.

Once participants have been given a general introduction, they are divided into color-named teams. Each team receives 4 stories divided into 5 tasks each which will be their sprint backlog. Each team also gets a full set of office supplies and of course each team gets a blank taskboard. Teams will get a broad range of materials available (different sized post-its, tape, papers, magnets, colored markers, etc) that they can use to exercise their creativity and come up with innovative ways of solving the problems they will face.

We will do one iteration of 20 minutes and a review of 10 minutes. Teams are given guidelines and objectives such as “the taskboard must show who is working on what”. Teams will work on their boards and then present them to the other teams who get to review and criticize them. As teams come up with ideas, we will also discuss (and show) visual management anti-patterns that participants have experienced in similar situations.

The main goal of the session is for participants to experience how easy it is to come up with innovative approaches for visualizing information relevant to their projects, while at the same time sending a clear message about the value and importance of applying proper Visual Management techniques.

This session complements the Visual Management Blog, a space for the discussion of ideas and examples of Visual Management applied to Agile teams and Agile project management.

The workshop has been succesfully run in Agile 2009 Chicago and as an iLearn free session in Belgium. It will also be run in Agiles 2009 Florianopolis (October) and XP Days Benelux 2009 (November).

Learning Outcomes: