Agile Rocket – Illustration by Nicolas Verdot
Agile Rocket is the modular, progressive and respectful support approach described during the Boooksprint carried out at the end of last year with 4 colleagues from Goood. Following the series of articles on the form, here is a series of articles on the substance describing an example of concrete implementation of certain modules.
Today, it will be the Visual Management module! 🙂
Study background
At the end of last year, I spoke with a manager (excluding IT) about the problems she was encountering within her team. She had just taken up her duties a few months ago and felt a certain discomfort in people to which she was keen to respond. Lack of visibility, overload, lack of cooperation and of communication… these are the terms I hear during our discussion.
I then offer to help him create a dynamic of collaboration by describing the objectives of the first module of the Agile Rocket:
- transform a sum of individuals into a collective
- rely on this collective to make the right decisions
To do this, we will rely on the implementation of visual management allowing the team to:
The proposed framework
The advantage of the approach is to make the effort required by all the parties as transparent as possible. Thus, I have presented the following accompanying structure based on 6 workshops half a day:
Awareness of Visual Management
Workshop 1: Kick-off
Intent: to lay the foundations for collaboration
- What is the state of the situation today?
- What is the objective to be achieved?
- What is the role of the coach?
- What is Visual Management support?
- What am I personally committing to do for the team in this support?
- …
This list is of course not exhaustive but can give you a guideline.
I had described this workshop in a previous article: "Half-Day Kick-off Structure"
Workshop 2: Visual Management
Intention: raise awareness of the notion of Visual Management
The workshop was divided into 2 parts:
- A training part between 30 minutes and 1 hour,
- An experimentation part with the “On the Board” workshop ofAlexandre Boutin about 1h30.
The objective is to make participants aware of the power of Visual Management, its uses and the benefits they could derive from it.
Note: The fact of not getting into the concrete right away is a way of making the participants assimilate the notions without encumbering themselves with the constraints of their context.
Practical application in the field
Workshop 3: Implementation (part 1)
Intention: initiate a first visual management and practice the Daily Meeting
Most of the workshop is centered on the construction of a first Visual Management but the objective here is twofold:
- work on the background (content) to obtain a usable result when leaving the workshop
- work on the form (process) to already have the participants collaborate together in the construction of their tool
We also present the functioning of the Daily Meeting in order to be able to activate the dynamic until the next workshop. Indeed, even if I'm not used to imposing things, this is one of the elements that I ask the team to experiment with for a week so that they can really practice.
I described this workshop in the following article: “ Visual Management Module: Implementation (Part 1) »
Workshop 4: Implementation (part 2)
Intent: improve the existing visual management
Following the team's experimentation with their version of visual management, this workshop is an opportunity to take a step back and improve it if necessary.
Several axes can be studied:
- Improve : color system, type of tickets, swimming lines…
- Extend : upstream process, downstream process, responsibilities according to the activity of the process…
- Areas : team, metrics, objectives…
The objective being once again on the merits AND the form in order to allow the team to appropriate their new work tool as much as possible.
I described this workshop in the following article: “ Visual Management Module: Implementation (Part 2)"
Follow up
Workshop 5: Free
Intention: to discuss the issues encountered by the team
After leaving more time for autonomous experimentation, this workshop really aims to discuss the issues encountered by the team.
This workshop can be separated into 2 parts:
- Questions answers
- Contribution of additional concepts
Note: this requires a certain flexibility in the animation because we don't really know the content in advance!
Fence
Workshop 6: Retrospective
Intention: take a step back on the road traveled
Like any retrospective, the objective of this last workshop is to look back and raise awareness of the team's learning.
This is a good opportunity to come back to:
- the objectives, commitments expressed during the Kick-off
- the feelings of each during the accompaniment
- the benefits obtained
I described this workshop in the following article: “ Visual Management Module: Retrospective and closing »
Pace
THE Workshops 1 to 4 are spaced a week apart in order to maintain a sufficiently sustained pace at the beginning.
THE Workshop 5 comes in support after a month of autonomous experimentation by the team.
THE workshop 6 closes the support, a month later, by capitalizing on the lessons learned and projecting the team on the next steps.
Conclusion
The description of the framework proposed for this support is an example of what can be done when setting up a Visual Management module. It has the benefit of being clear from the start in terms of investment, whether for the team but also for the coach.
The approach is characterized by learning in the field and a contribution of theory over time, thus reducing the effort for all parties. We focus on the maximum contribution of value over a fixed period of time: does this remind you of anything? 😉
A more precise description of workshops 3, 4 and the results obtained in the retrospective of the context studied will be the subject of future articles!
