The Visual Workspace

Airports are amazing places, especially hub airports. You can land on one airplane and leave on another a couple of hours later without talking to anyone, logging into a computer, or making a phone call. It's your job to get yourself from your arriving aircraft to your departing aircraft on time, without any help from people, technology, or communication devices. Instead of having someone or something tell you how to do your job, the airport makes it easy for youand all of the other people milling about the airportto figure it out for yourself.

First you look at your ticket to see what flight you are supposed to take. Your ticket tells you the details: the airline, the flight number, and the originally scheduled departure time of your next flight. (In manufacturing, we would call such a ticket a kanban, a card with the instructions for your next job.) Your job is to get on that flight before it leaves. Now your question becomes, where is that flight leaving from, and how do I get there on time? To answer this question you find a big display to help you out. You look at the display to find out what concourse and gate the flight will leave from and when it is currently scheduled to leave. In larger airports there will often be another display to tell you how many minutes it will take you to walk to that concourse or gate to help you decide if you need to run or flag down an electric cart. Next, you follow easily visible signs to your concourse and go down the concourse where gates are numbered in order until you find the gate your plane is supposed to be leaving from. Finally, you check the display at the gate to be sure that the plane leaving from this gate is really the one your ticket says you should be on.

Airports use tickets, displays, and visible signs quite effectively. But one thing that's missing in most airports is a dashboard, something that gives everyone a general idea of how the airport is operating. That's OK when things are going well, but it is missed when something goes wrong.

An Alternate Route Home

One morning some years back, I arrived at the Santa Ana airport only to find that an airplane had skidded off the end of the runway a few minutes earlier. No one was hurt, no damage was done, really, but landings and takeoffs were temporarily suspended. Now my job switched from catching my plane to finding a way home before midnight. The first question to get answered was how likely is it that my plane will eventually take off? Unlike most airports, the Santa Ana airport has a dashboard, a central board that shows the schedule and gates for all landings and takeoffs. By watching this dashboard, I could soon tell that my aircraft was not going to be able to land and was being diverted to Los Angeles, a 45-minute drive away. So I immediately got my ticket reassigned to a Los Angeles flight, hopped on a bus provided by the airline, caught the Los Angeles flight, and actually arrived home a bit ahead of my original schedule. Unfortunately, many people did not see the big picture in time to react as quickly as I did, and quite a few spent the night in Santa Ana.

Mary Poppendieck

Self-Directing Work

When lots of things have to happen really fast, the execution strategy must switch from dispatching to enabling. A taxi, for example, is dispatched. I call from my home; the taxi picks me up and takes me to the airport. But there are only so many taxis and only so much space on the highway. Therefore many cities, including our home city of Minneapolis, provide rapid transit to the airport. Now someone in Minneapolis can walk out of their downtown hotel, hop on the Metro, and quickly get to the airportalong with a whole lot of other passengers. It's no longer necessary for people to get involved in dispatching a taxi, picking up travelers at their hotel, navigating the traffic, and delivering themaloneto the airport.

Dispatching involves planning every step of someone else's job. Making work self-directing involves setting up an environment so people can figure out how to do their job without being told what to do. When a lot of things have to happen quickly, self-directing work is the only approach that works, and it works very well. In busy downtown areas, flagging down a taxi often works better than having one dispatched to your hotel. If managers really want things to happen quickly, they will focus their attention on organizing the work space so that work becomes self-directing.

When work is self-directing, everyone showing up for work in the morning can figure out exactly what to do without being told, and what they choose to do will be the most important thing for them to be working on. As people complete one job, it is immediately obvious what to do next. Throughout the day when people have questions, the workspace is organized so that people can look around and find the answers. Think of self-directing work as a package that you ship overnight. You attach instructions to the package, and from then on, every person and machine that handles your package can simply look at the instructions and know exactly what to do with the package.

If you are a manager who's been wondering what you are supposed to do once responsibility-based planning and control relieve you of a lot of your current dispatching workhere's part of your new job: Organize the work space so that work becomes self-directing. There are three key levels of information to focus on when organizing a self-directing workspace: kanban, andon, and dashboard.

Kanban

Kan is the word for card in Japanese, and ban is the word for signal. So a kanban is a signal card. In the airport, your ticket is the signal card that tells youpersonallywhat flight you need to catch. Index cards make good signal cards. Each card contains a small amount of work, say a story to develop and some clarifying testable examples. Cards can be organized and reorganized easily, so that when someone needs to know what to do next, they select a card from the top of a stack and get to work on it. Cards can be attached to physical message boardsperfect for a local teamor they can be electronicuseful for dispersed teams. The number of cards can give a quick indication of the length of the queue. When the queue gets so long that the cards become unwieldy, perhaps the queue should be shortened.

The challenge with Kanban is not really figuring out how people might go about choosing what to do next. That's the easy part. The challenge is figuring out how to be sure that the content of the card and its location are correct, so that when the card is selected, it contains a sufficient description of a job that is the right size and is the right thing to do next. The card is not the specification of the job; it is a signal that the next job is to bring together the right people to create the detailed designs, verifications, and implementation of the story on the card.

Whatever mechanism is used to make work self-directing requires some thought and experimentation. Each job must be succinctly described, the set of jobs must be both complete and correctly sequenced, and the rules for posting and choosing jobs must assure that they will be done by people with the expertise to do them well.

Organizing the Work

How does this work in practice? Have we gotten to tasks yet?

Let's say that a company is spinning off a subsidiary in four months. As a first step, the looming deadline is broken into a set of relatively independent activities. One of these activities is to split all of the servers and data apart, so each new company has their own. A team of eight people is assembled representing every function that will be involved.

The first thing the team does is lay out on a wall, with Post-it Notes, all of the steps they can think of that have to get done to separate the servers and data. Their goal is to create a high-level picture of the work that needs to be done, not a detailed task breakdown. The best way to make sure that the overview touches on all of the affected functions is to have knowledgeable representatives involved. Managing this process means making sure the right functions are represented, the right people are there, they are mutually committed to meeting the deadline, and the process is organized so as to discover all the jobs that need to be done.

When everyone is confident that the notes on the wall adequately represent all of the general categories of what must be done, the team organizes them into a workable schedulebreaking whatever dependencies they can, and acknowledging the real dependencies.

This is just a high-level schedulethe next step is to agree on what must and will happen in the next month and break that down into more detail. (In the hectic environment of a spin-off, planning detailed tasks beyond a month is usually a waste of time.) Finally the team is getting to tasks. Development will have to writeand testscripts to sort out data and applications; operations had better get the new hardware on order, but first someone has to do some experiments to nail down correct sizing; security is going to have to create different permissions for log-in, and they may as well implement that right away so they can test it… and so on.

Managing these tasks means making sure that each job has a testable outcome, that everyone agrees what will be done and tested by the end of the month, and that the team meets every day to review how everything is coming along and who needs help. At the end of the month everyone gets together, their commitments met, to review the big picture and modify it if necessary. Then the next set of tasksand verification criteriaare addressed.

Andon

An andon is a portable Japanese lantern made of paper stretched over a bamboo framework. Toyota used the word andon to name the cord that workers could pull to "stop-the-line," since pulling an andon cord usually cause lights to flash, calling attention to the problem area. The idea behind andon is to make problems visible so they can be addressed immediately.

Over time, andon has also come to be used for any kind of visual message board or other display device that can be easily changed. The message boards at train stations that display departure tracks are sometimes called andon boards. An andon board calls attention to any abnormality that requires attention, dynamically displays changing status, and shows locations of things that are frequently reconfigured (for example, which sever is currently the test server).

Visible Signals

A software development andon system might be two lava lamps, one red and one green, which are triggered by the results of the build and test system. If the build is successful and passes the tests, the green lava lamp bubbles cheerfully. If the red lamp begins to gurgle, developers know they have just a few minutes until it begins bubbling rapidly to either find the problem or back out the code they just checked in. Of course, an andon system might also be a simple e-mail, but where's the fun in that?

Dashboard

People like to be on successful teams. It's interesting to succeed at local goalsfor example, developing an electronic control system for the 777. But it's truly exciting to contribute to the overall success of a programfor example, watching the first 777 take off with the control system your team developed. Alan Mulally tried to bring the whole team working on the 777 together frequently to see how the aircraft was coming along. The biggest event happened two years before the first scheduled flight, when the first airplane rolled off the assembly line on its own wheels. He invited 10,000 or so workers and their families to a dramatic event to congratulate everyone on their progress and inspire their continued dedication to the cause.

It is important for teams to see the overall progress of their work in its context and in the context of the broader goals of the company. For this we use various kinds of dashboards. Every team room should have big, visible charts on the wall that show off to everyone how well the team is doingor notand make status visible to anyone who walks in the room. Things like burn-down charts, graphs of acceptance tests written and passed, and so on are very useful. Charts of the overall status of a multiteam effort should be available in the main "war room," as Boeing called it, for everyone to see. Dispersed teams should have visibility into status also, and here an electronic dashboard might be the perfect tool. Electronic dashboards are also useful for key metrics that are easier to generate electronically than manually.

We often ask our classes, "In your organization, how do people know their progress toward meeting the overall goal of their work?" (See exercise 4 at the end of this chapter.) We have been surprised by the number of times the answer is, "Actually, that information isn't readily available." Organizations that do not engage people in the ultimate goal of their work are squandering a great opportunity to inspire people and teams to enthusiastically contribute their best efforts to the cause.