Communication across complex project teams can be challenging. Having said this, clear and timely communication is the most critical ingredient to ensuring smooth and timely project delivery and keeping resources focused on the right tasks, at the right time.
Visual project and fit-for-purpose visual management boards -- when used with the right methodology -- can close the communication gap.
If are looking for a new visual management board to make critical information transparent and accessible to the entire project team, here are the requirements we recommend you flag as “must have” for your visual management board.
4 Essential Features of a Visual Management Board
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The visual management board shows the impacts of plan, priority, and resource changes — in real time.
Great teams learn quickly and create a feedback loop for the entire team to see. This means the team has the most up-to-date information at all times and can work on what is most valuable — critical chain project tasks.
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The visual management board shows resource loading and tasks across projects.
Optimizing resources to ensure the right projects have the right focus is only possible when you can see loading and tasks across projects. This enables you to effectively prioritize and move people where they are needed to keep critical chain tasks moving forward.
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The visual management board shows a daily view of the project as well as a longer-term planning view.
Kanban boards are great for daily actioning of tasks, but you and your team still need to keep a strategic view of the longer term plan and be able to engage in rolling wave planning on a weekly basis. Your visual management project board needs to support both.
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The visual management board allows the team to pull form a prioritized backlog.
In a previous blog, we showed that the biggest cause of project delays is daily slips due to working on the wrong priority. Because things change so fast in product development, the correct priorities are often shifting. So the only way to ensure that everyone has the correct priorities is to have a backlog that dynamically sorts these in real-time. That way, whenever someone starts their next task, they know they are always working on the right thing at the right time.
Do you know the number on cause of project delays? It's not what you think.
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