VISUALIZATION OF THE WORK 

Allow your team to visualize their working making both more tangible and manageable. Engage your team by engaging their visual brain.

Most office work is obscure and intangible (i.e. difficult to visualize). Consider these simple multi step accounting process:

  1. Upload payroll reports into the ERP;
  2. Check and confirm totals;  and,
  3. Email ERP payroll reports by department.

OR

  1. Post end of the month accruals; and,
  2. Reconcile accrual accounts.

OR

  1. Confirm all monthly corporate expenses are posted;
  2. Calculate corporate allocation ratio by branch;
  3. Post allocated expenses to each branch’s income statement.

How do you visualize obscure office and accounting tasks?  By making each task into a card and posting it on a board.  Now when the brain sees the obscure task on a card it activates the visual brain making the work more palpable and tangible

VISUALIZATION IS THE MEANS BY WHICH WE CAN UNDERSTAND THE WORK AND THE WORKFLOW BY USING A KANBAN BOARD TO CREATE A POWERFUL VISUAL MANAGEMENT TOOL THAT SHARES A MENTAL MODEL WHICH IS VISUAL, INTERACTIVE AND PERSISTENT.

– Karl Scotland (http://www.methodsandtools.com)

To make obscure work meaningful start visualizing it.  This allows team members to create a mental model of obscure tasks making the tasks more interactive and engaging, resulting in more clarity and persistence.  All of this results in the team providing more focus and energy to the most important tasks, essentially, you focus on what you can see.  Interested in more watch Tom Wujec’s TED talk.

When the entire team meets and reviews the entire board together it will be clear how much work needs to get done and where teammates are struggling with road blocks or bottlenecks. The entire team can then see the problem and can help by focusing energy and attention on a solution.

Teams that don’t visualize tasks:

  • Have difficulty focusing
  • Lack engagement in the work and process
  • Forget or miss tasks in a sequence
  • Seem to lack clarity and difficultly communicating with others
  • Difficulty identifying when teammates are struggling or bottlenecks