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Building trust with visible work
The brief
A critical public-facing government application was incomplete, over a year late, and riddled with defects. The incoming new CTO had decided to replace the existing team: they cherry-picked the organisation's four most experienced developers and brought in a new product owner and project manager. The CTO contacted me and asked me to coach the new team.
What I saw
The product had an awful reputation with the internal government client, with the department being referred to as “the worst in government”. Product meetings with government representatives were fractious, and negotiation of scope and priorities was undermined by previous broken promises and the application’s poor quality.
What I did
I introduced an innovative progress tracking tool for the
software features:
A whiteboard map showing the product's architecture.
Each week we added a set of sticky notes for each task in that week's user story. And as each task was completed by the developers, it earned a prominent green tick.
When the user story was completed, the team removed all of the stickies. And then together they used the diagram to plan the tasks needed for the next user story.
What happened next
This architecture map became the focal point for all meetings. We held all standups and planning meetings around this board, using it to visualise progress and facilitate shared understanding. Next time the government stakeholders visited, they were shown this board, as a way of describing the team’s current status.
The transformation was immediate. The visualisation allowed everyone to engage with technical progress, and thereby restored trust in the team. The government stakeholders, who had previously been reluctant to engage with the project, began inviting themselves to team stand-up meetings,
"I used to hate coming here, but this is now my star project!"
The tactile nature of the board also encouraged everyone, including client stakeholders, to physically move ideas around in planning meetings. Scoping and prioritisation became an engaging activity that involved everyone.
Less than three months after I introduced this visual tool, the same stakeholders who had described the project as “the worst in government” now published a report describing the project in glowing terms. They described how much they enjoyed visiting the project space, and the project itself was taken off the critical list.
Related resources:
I did a 10-minute lightning talk at the Lean Agile Manchester meetup
in January 2017 called
Evolving the Kanban board
which looks in more detail about how this visual board works
I covered the same material as the lightning talk in
an article on LinkedIn in 2022, again called
Evolving the Kanban board