An Idea on Visualizing Changes at All Levels
I originally published this blog here: https://kanbanzone.com/2023/visualizing-changes/
About 2 years ago, I took a course from Jason Little, the author of Lean Change Management, more recently Change Agility: A guide to help you think about change management differently and founder of the Lean Change Organization website. I have to say that this course was one of the best courses I had taken. It was very refreshing to learn how to leverage Lean and Agile practices around Change.
Change in regards to business is a collective term for all approaches to prepare, support, and help individuals, teams, and organizations in making organizational change. Many of the current popular Change Management practices, like Kotter and ADKAR view change as a linear model with a start and an end. LCM on the other hand, views change as an evolutionary or experimental approach that has its foundations in measuring outcomes through empiricism.
Now that we have some of the history down, I want to talk about a challenge that I encounter with most of the clients that I have worked with. Individual teams or even lower levels of scaling of Agility have been leveraging visualization of the work for a long time. I can even say that many teams are very successful. On the other hand, leadership have challenges to practice what they encourage at the team level. This is where a Change Board can be very effective.
What is a Change Board?
Simply put, a change board is a method of visualizing changes that are happening at the strategic level. Below is a sample that I created in Miro:
Miro does a wonderful job in helping to create a visual representation or even helping to design how your change board want to look. But if you want to translate it into something that you can track and measure, Kanban Zone can do that! You can visualize your strategic board like this:
And in fact, you can easily bring it down to Portfolio and Team levels! Here is a sample of an organizational group within a large Financial Institution:
This organization has 5 portfolios or specific product lines that is supported by one or more teams. With Kanban Zone, you have full control of being able to work with multiple levels and multiple interdependent teams! In fact, the middle portfolio level is not needed to track, as you can track the portfolio Kanban directly with the team boards.
The parent-child relationship is visible at all levels, and you can see/track progress easily at the card level
Kanban Zone is not only one of the very few tools out that there that can scale throughout an organization, but it does it better than any I have experienced. One of the things that differentiates itself from other tools is how intuitive and easy Kanban Zone is! If you are interested in Kanba Zone, please reach out to us.
Once you start visualizing your work in Kanban Zone, you will be surprised how much faster it gets done!
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About the Author: Stuart Oakley
Stuart is an Agile Coach, Accredited Kanban Trainer, ICAgile Authorized Instructor, Change Management Trainer, Educator, Conference Speaker based out of the Greater Toronto Area in Canada. Constantly looking to build his Alphabet Soup of certifications. An active member of the Agile Community and Founder of the Halton Agile/Lean Network Meetup Group. To find out more about Stuart and Useful Change, please check out usefulchange.com.
