Extremely Useful Whiteboard Templates For Efficient Workshops — Part 2

Learn easy to use models to make your meetings productive and an awesome experience for everyone

Visual thinking becomes less of an exotic method mastered by a few and more of a widespread way of collaborating and communicating complex concepts. The method has shown great results in the technology field, especially in software development. It is an integral part of new booming things like design thinking.

There are many visualization and facilitation templates available, but those are not good enough to equip you for dynamic meetings where innovative and creative solutions are born next to a whiteboard.

With this series of articles, I am giving you simple recipes to visualizing common situations you find when solving technology-related problems and many others. I hope you find these valuable and share your templates to make this list even more comprehensive.

Part 2 covers the three templates (check Part 1 if you haven’t done that yet!):

• Organisational design analysis.
• Organisational design in the context of a work process.
• Value stream mapping.

4 — Organisational design analysis

An example of a hi-level organization map where a researched mapped readiness of the organization to adopt a change with smilies denoting support or resistance; with an additional layer of analysis of where the change is happening and where lies the biggest challenge.

When

If you are a management consultant, business coach or just an enthusiastic team player who is trying to understand how your team/company could do better, the first thing you look at is how is your organization structured. You basically need a map.

Once the hierarchy is mapped, it is easy to tie the challenges to where they belong and sometimes to identify unexpected (or even highly anticipated) insights.

How

An example of mapping a quite classical organization structure with hierarchies. Use colors, emotions and call outs to capture important considerations during the organizational structure analysis workshop.

1. Start with the underlying structure — map the organisation top to bottom.
2. Supply all of the individuals and groups/departments with labels for easier navigation.
3. Denote future parts of the organizations (the ones that are missing at the moment of the analysis but are important to be considered for whatever reason).
4. Draw a border around the areas that are affected by the change/initiative or are in the focus of the analysis.
5. Map individuals/areas that are constituting the challenges for the change/initiative.

Practical hints

Quite often we deal with matrix organizations. You can use vertical and horizontal structures to visualize the departments and then the communities of practices, for example. Similarly, you can visualize people belonging to a product or an initiative. Do not forget the basic tools — style of lines can convey a meaning of strong and weak relationship; emotional tokens can enrich your visual map with qualitative analysis of such relations and simple charts can be handy to compare teams on a given set of parameters.

• Draw people, do not draw departments and teams as boxes. It is gross! And besides, it is simple to draw a person — just draw a circle and the upside down letter ‘U’. A group of people could be just three persons put close to each other.
• Many organizations are matrices of different kinds. Introducing an extra dimension might create visual clutter. Avoid that by either using a different style of a line (dotted or dashed lines) or a different color for a weaker organizational component.
• Use various kinds of icons and emotional tokens to express peoples attitude, level of energy and their emotional state. Do not forget that organization is genuinely a group of people in the first place!
• If you need to assess groups and compare one against another appearing on the same map, you can use simplified charts for that.
• When it comes to using colors, my opinion is that the main underlying org map should be done in the same, preferably black color. The other colors should be used to mark up significant aspects — like relation to a product of an initiative, areas of focus and impacted zones, challenges and areas for improvements, etc.

Other uses

This template can be used on a smaller scale. For example, if you want to analyze how your team is structured and what is your team’s relationship with the external worlds. This might be useful when there are issues in the communication; this method will help you show explicitly, who is responsible for those failures and give you some ideas how this could be helped.

This template featured in Gamestorming blog under the name of ‘Friend or Foe?’. Check out many more valuable games there!

5 — Organisational design in the context of a work process

Mapping the hi-level organizational structure to the end-to-end process of delivering a product (or a service) to the company’s customer.

When

In my experience, the biggest challenges come from the segregated nature of the design of the most of organisations — a lot of things ‘fall between chairs’ when separate departments have to work together. Surprisingly enough, those vulnerable areas are not always obvious to people inside of the organization who often think in terms ‘goals of my department’ and forgetting about the fact that we all are seated inside of the same boat. The boat sinks, we all sink, no matter how if your particular department boded well.

Obvious or not it is important to involve parties into a visual conversation to appeal to holistic view and customer-centric mindset, again and again. This template could be handy to analyze cross-departmental issues. It is built on a combination of a process and organizational map with the process serving a backdrop function, more as a map to show where the organisation is the most vulnerable to the challenges.

How

You could use one of the two approaches: 1) map the org structure to the holistic hi-level end-to-end process or 2) show how the process flows through your organization emphasizing the areas of improvement.

1. Define the start and the end of your process.
2. Map the process.
3. Map your organizational structure to the process (alternatively, start with the organizational structure and then map the holistic process to it).
4. Define the vulnerable areas.

Practical hints

• This template is dense with information. Make sure that it is easy to read visually. Since the process is serving a backdrop function, it is smart to make it appear on the layer below the organizational structure. You could use blue color or dotted/dashed lines to give the process a lesser visual value.
• Choose the level of detail as appropriate to the topic of your discussion with the audience. Do not map out all of the details if those are not necessary.

Other uses

This template can be scaled down to analyze challenges with smaller groups, for example, you could use it to discuss issues of the process with your team or your project group.

6 — Value stream mapping

An overly simplified structure of a value stream map with a lot of elements missing (which were not important for my adoption of the method to the problem solved).

When

Value-stream mapping is a lean-management method for analyzing the current state and designing a future state for the series of events that take a product or service from its beginning through to the customer. (As defined by Wikipedia).

Value stream mapping is a whole method for analyzing and transforming a process of creating a product or a service and comes from lean manufacturing. I have been inspired by the method when we needed to find an answer to one of our customer’s question “Why does it take so long for our company to go from idea to mass production of a new digital device?” We then used the elements of the method to analyze the design process and find areas where the lead time (the time between the initiation and completion of a process) could be shortened.

Basically, every time you are analyzing any process with an intention to shorten the lead time, you could use the method in its entirety or its elements tailored to the specifics of your situation, just like we did for the customer I mentioned above.

How

Three essential elements of value stream map as I see it: 1) the holistic perspective on the process with a customer in the center of it — from the customer’s need to the moment of the final product or service delivery, 2) process of the product delivery breakdown and 3) the analysis of time spent both inside of the process steps and in waiting between the steps.

1. Map out the process of creating value for your customer.
2. Discuss and capture average time it takes to complete each process step.
3. Discuss and capture average time it takes to transition from a step to step.
4. Map the challenges and agree on the action points.

Practical hints

Not exactly a whiteboard, in this case, we used a matrix of 2x5 flip-chart paper sheets to compose a full wall of space for the exercise. Sticky notes with numbers designate improvement areas where numbers mean priority. This particular diagram is only inspired by the value stream mapping method as there is no lead time diagram in it.

• When the process is quite big, you might run out of space on your whiteboard. Try to estimate how much space you require for the analysis and whether the available space can hold it. Sometimes you might need to organize a make-shift solution like a lot of flip-chart paper sheets stitched together like in the example above.
• Agree on a format for what you want to capture for each process step and capture the discussion carefully following your group’s conventions — this will simplify the analysis and navigation through your map later on. Especially if it becomes too complex.

Other uses

As you can see, I have quite freely interpreted the original method to adapt it to my own needs. You can do the same and adjust it further. All in all, this template could be used as a skeleton method for any other situation where you analyze process from the standpoint of precise timing and seeking for acceleration. Have fun!

Do you want to explore more of the whiteboard templates? Follow me on Medium to get notified when the next portion of templates is published. Catch up on the previous batch of templates in Part 1 of the articles series:

Extremely Useful Whiteboard Templates For Efficient Workshops — Part 1: Analysis of roles involved in a work process. Customer journey mapping. The visual way of handling retrospectives.

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You might want to explore other whiteboard related articles:

Whiteboard tips and tricks

All you need to know about whiteboard markers

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About the author

Yuri Malishenko is an active practitioner, an author and a trainer on the topic of visual thinking and visual facilitation. He works as an agile coach for the Danish company and uses visual skills every day to co-create better software products and to become a better person. Check out his recent practical guideline on mastering basic skills of visualization. If you like this type of content, follow Yuri on twitter @YuraMalishenko and facebook.