My presentation from the Agile Encore 2013 conference called “Visual Management: Leading With What You Can See” is available on Slideshare.

Renee Troughton was unfortunately unable to join me to present this reprise of the talk we presented together at Agile Australia 2013.

Using task boards or story walls is a key Agile practice, but are you making the most of it? Visual Management is more than just putting cards on a wall, it is a growing style of management that focuses on managing work only by what you can see rather than reports or paper being shuffled around. Visual Management allows you to understand the constraints in the system, mitigate risks before they become issues, report on progress from the micro to the macro. Visual Management can also be used to demonstrate to customers and clients where the work they care about is at. This presentation is all about taking the management of your work to the next stage of transparency. Discover:

* How to identify when your story wall isn’t telling you everything and how to adjust it
* What the three different types of story walls are and which one is more suitable to certain circumstances
* Different ways to visualise your product backlogWhy queue columns and limiting work in progress is so important regardless of whether you are using Scrum or Kanban
* How symbols and tokens can be used to give more information
* What else can you use other than story walls to visualise information
* How to ingrain Visual Management into both the team and management structures of your organisation
* Visualising Your Quality, Testing and Team
* What is systemic flow mapping and why is it important

Unfortunately the talk was interrupted about three-quarters of the way through by a rogue video conference call into the auditorium. My attempt to try and answer questions why people were trying to fix the problem were interrupted by audio coming through the call. We soldiered on – but it interrupted the flow.

And here are some feedback from the feedback forms – much appreciated!

• Lots of ideas
• Very informative with real world examples
• Delivered as per advertised. Was relevant and interesting to listen to. Some great take outs
• More relevant to where we are as an organisation
• Big wall
• Most applicable as I am a newbie
• Kept the audience engaged from start to finish
• The task based techniques most relevant
• Gave more understanding of how to do better Agile