A lot of people who have worked with projects have experienced the same thing: downtime. You have to wait for people to get back to you, wait for results and wait for decisions to be made. On top of that other actors are waiting for you to finish your task that you can’t finish because you’re waiting for something or someone.
Forecasts are made to coordinate work in a businesses and projects. These forecasts tend to be wrong, which has led to the acquisition of more advanced, and expensive, forecasting tools, often in the form of some sort of IT solution. However, the forecasts are almost always wrong and thus we wait.
When you make detailed plans you make a future forecast. It’s just as easy or hard to forecast what will happen in four weeks within a project as it is to forecast the weather at the same time. In practice it’s impossible; the same laws that govern the weather apply to an organization.
However, there is an alternative to forecasting: visual management (also referred to as pull, lean or kanban).
Visual Management
Visual management was invented within production to solve the problems of wait time for materials due to errors in forecasts. When using outdated methods, if production cell A produces materials that are used by B a forecast is made of this use and A is allowed to produce according to the forecast.
When there are many active production cells complex forecasts are created. In practice it’s impossible to make these kind of forecasts (see the book Chaos for an explanation as to why this is so). The forecast will lead to a lot of disruptions which forces management and workers to constantly run around, putting out flres. All this extra work is called waste.
On the other hand, visual management is based on how A can see by himself/herself how much material is used by B and produce more as needed (and not more). One example of this using boxes is when the material in one box is used, B sends the empty box to A to be refllled. Often a so-called kanban is used, so that when the material is down to a certain level B sends a kanban to A who produces the required materials.
Visual Management and Pulse
Visual management within strategy and development follows the same principles as production. A job’s current status is made visible using a whiteboard (a Pulse board) so that A and B can see the current situation.
The status on the board tells A and B what they need to do in order for work to progress without wait times. The meeting where visual management is used is called a Pulse meeting. These Pulse meetings form a network and we refer to this as an agile network organization.
Workload Limits
A good system for visual management also needs to set limits for how much work can be done concurrently. The aim of setting such limits to keep the operation from overloading in order to keep the lead times short. Appropriate workload limits can be calculated using Little’s Law.
Parmatur Pulse 