Somewhere in your facility or virtual office, you probably have a big, beautiful whiteboard filled with brilliant ideas, plans, and notes. Whether you’re tracking safety incidents, sales wins, fundraising goals, or production phases, relying on a visual management board like a whiteboard — a highly visible, collaborative, graphic communication tool — is a proven technique for analyzing and driving performance.

What are some of the best practices for using this tool, so it doesn’t become just a glorified bulletin board, a place to post to-do lists and intra-team memos? How do you build a visual management board to help improve performance measurement, meet your current business goals, and forecast future targets? The key to a solid visual management board is to use it strategically, building meaningful metrics and opportunities for agility while avoiding information overload.

An Organizational Leaderboard

Think about your visual management tool like a leaderboard, a place to apprehend actionable information at a glance. Just as a leaderboard quickly conveys a meaningful metric to the viewer (who’s on top now), a visual management board should immediately telegraph its purpose (for example, tracking phases of production) and provide quick status updates (how well the team is meeting a time-based target, for instance). And just as a leaderboard suggests opportunities for improvement — such as which relay team member needs to make up time in the next leg of the race — a visual management board provides live performance feedback, spotlighting bottlenecks, delays, and other potential issues.

There are various organizing principles for a visual management board, depending on your enterprise needs and key performance indicators. Among the most common are:

• SQDC(P) – A daily operations monitor that tracks Safety, Quality, Delivery, Cost, and (Productivity or People)
• SQDIP – Similar to above, but tracking Safety, Quality, Delivery, Inventory, Product
• PDCS – Plan, Do, Check, Act improvement protocol
• DMALC – Define, Measure, Analyze, Implement, Confirm improvement protocols
• Standards | Problems | Actions
• Six Sigma – A process improvement approach that emphasizes improving quality, removing defects, minimizing variation, and specific value targets
• 5S/6S – A production approach rooted in improving efficiency and eliminating waste
• Kanban or Scrum board – Staging for product developments or new projects
• Root Cause Analysis

Regardless of the organizing approach, information on a visual management board is best presented according to the 1-3-10 rule. A viewer of the board should be able to assess the board’s purpose in one second, understand the status of the items on the board in three seconds, and identify challenges and bottlenecks within ten seconds.

Building in Agility

Toyota pioneered the efficient production standards later known as Lean management, which incorporated visual management. Contemporary visual management boards take a nimble approach to information sharing and process improvement. Because the information they share is meant to be understood at a glance, team members can use the board to analyze progress and act quickly to help meet short and longer-term goals.

Technology has helped visualization become even more agile. In addition to traditional physical boards, smartboards and digital or app-based solutions make visual management boards accessible from various points in your facility or even in multiple locations worldwide (including team members’ home offices). This is particularly helpful for tracking daily, weekly, and monthly goals sorted by team or responsible party. Many vendors now offer proprietary visual management solutions. A consultant with expertise in workflow analysis and visual information presentation can help you navigate all the options if they become overwhelming.

Avoiding Information Overload

When building a visual management board, one challenge is resisting the temptation to include so much information that it ceases to be easily digestible or manageable. There’s an old business adage that suggests that “what gets measured gets managed.” The implication is that if you can measure it, you should measure it because then you can manage it. But this is an abbreviation of a statement made by academic V.F. Ridgway in the mid-1950s.

According to British business management commenter Simon Caulkin, the full quotation is: “What gets measured gets managed – even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organization to do so.” Caulkin adds, “Just because you can measure it, doesn’t mean you should.”

Although a call center manager can diligently track the number and length of calls made per hour, that information doesn’t actually tell you if the call center is meeting substantive goals: “Thus, a call [center] may boast high productivity and low costs per call, but that’s irrelevant if most of its activity is mopping up customer complaints about poor service.”

A related issue is including information that applies to too many different goals or business units on one visual management board. When that happens, the viewer cannot digest the data quickly enough for it to be actionable. Production issue reports pile up. Notes between shifts go unread. Goals get lost.

It is helpful to think critically about the quality and volume of data points you introduce on one single board. This approach will help avoid information overload. It might make sense to develop several separate, decentralized boards based on specific goals or silos rather than one epic visualization of all activities throughout your organization. Treating the board as a living document that is regularly reviewed and tidied, rather than a static bulletin board where notices might pile up unseen, maximizes its utility and, together with appropriate processes, improves operational efficiency and eliminates redundancy and misinformation.

Decoding Visual Management

There is an art to building a visual management board that can help you measure and improve performance. Momentum can help you decode visual management to create a graphic tool that empowers your team to understand how well they are meeting objectives and what they need to do to keep moving the needle forward.

Drop us a line to discuss your visual management needs now.