Booty-shorts and bureaucracy: how roller derby helped us set up our Wall of What’s Happening
One thing we’ve learned in the Ontario Digital Service is that sometimes you need to take something off a screen and make it tactile. Our “wall of what’s happening” is one example of that in practice.
The “wall of what’s happening” (WOWH) is our paper visualization of our digital to-do list. Consisting of notes on a physical wall in the office, the WOWH displays the commitments and activities that are in the works for Ontario.ca.
The WOWH is a physical manifestation of the work we’re doing, and it’s one way we can better track our commitments and inform our ongoing road-map, deployment and resource planning activities.
The great thing about having all of this on the wall is that it helps us understand, at a quick glance, where our resources are committed, what launches are upcoming, and where and when we need to focus support. I wanted to have a way to show to anyone in the office, without having to hop onto a device, what work we were already delivering, how varied that work is, and of course, how much of it there was. The WOWH is already helping as we start rethinking how we schedule and deploy our teams to work. It’s not quite yet a road-map, but it’s a start.
A slow start
The idea to create the WOWH came from a product management workshop this summer that was hosted by Tom Loosemore. Tom’s advice was that a road-map should be tangible, tactile, and in your immediate environment.
Every week, our small team has a lot of moving commitments, so it’s important to be able to understand, at a glance, the type and volume of work to be done.
That’s why Tom’s advice made a lot of sense. Sticky notes on walls are part of the tools of the trade for many digital teams, but we hadn’t translated that to the work we were doing on our road-map. In fact, even the task of creating the WOWH ended up on my “to-do sometime later” list; somewhere it could be easily forgotten while we kept trying to figure out the best way to manage the intake of new projects and deploying project teams.
Then, one night at roller derby practice, it hit me. (Literally.)
An aside about roller derby
A roller derby bout is made up of a series to two-minute jams. (Think of them as deployment cycles for a derby team.) During a jam, the “jammer” has to get past a wall of blockers to gain advantage. Jammers are the point scorers: they have to be able to skate fast, squeeze through holes, and take a hit. The most effective tactic for a jammer to get past a pack of blockers is to “visualize” the lanes that will naturally open up as each team work to block or make space on the track.
Essentially, being a good jammer is all about training yourself to be able to see past the chaos of the jam and identify a path of least resistance. In our work, we are more familiar with this concept as the Agile principle: simplicity — maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential. In product development as well as roller derby, we need to work smarter and not harder.
Setting up the wall
As my coach talked about the importance of finding opportunities to find paths around blockers on the track, I was reminded again of Tom’s advice: our digital team needed to be able to take a few seconds in busy times to “see” down the track. We needed a visual representation of our track and blockers. Once that visualization was tangible, tactile, and in our work environment, we could more effectively see the spaces where we needed to go in order to get our work done.
I immediately moved the WOWH from my “to do later” list into my “to do now” list.
The next day, the Wall of What’s Happening made its appearance in our office. It is located along a hallway in our new workspace that leads to the main meeting room; everybody has an opportunity to see it every day. It has space for six months of work, broken out by weeks. Each initiative is written on a color-coded sticky-note along with the name of the partner we are working with, and assigned a category:
- Product: development of Ontario.ca or an associated feature
- Release: bi-weekly deployment of planned fixes and minor improvements
- Signature: commitment of the ODS as part of its mandate
- Partner: support for digital initiatives in other ministries
- Transitions: migration of content onto Ontario.ca
- Planning: developing digital strategies and providing advice
Each note is placed under the anticipated date of launch, whether that’s a fixed date tied to an announcement, or an estimate from the delivery team. We also have a ‘backlog’ and ‘ongoing’ queue to identify work that doesn’t have a fixed launch date.
Using the wall today
These days, with the WOWH in place, we are able to flag important things: when a planned release might conflict with a partner launch, a short week because of an upcoming holiday, or a series of projects that might put too much pressure on a particular team member.
The second day that the WOWH was up, I walked by and noticed that some of the projects had smaller sticky notes attached indicating how we talk about the launch — whether at an ODS All-Hands meeting, on the blog, or even through public announcements — of each project as we were working on them. Organically, the WOWH has developed a second use as a communications tool!
Nowadays, everyone on the team can walk by the wall and see what we’re working on, and also get a sense of pride in seeing how much we are able to accomplish. We also mirror the physical WOWH on a digital tool so that members of our distributed team can follow along as things change.
Like everything we do in the ODS, the wall is a new approach to working that we will test and improve along the way. We still need to figure out how to deal with sub-projects, identify milestones (alpha, beta, live, etc.) for larger projects, and find a way to track operational activities like content, DevOps, and reporting.
For now, our prototype has helped us develop better ways to prioritize, estimate, and schedule projects. We are learning what information is important to track, how to track that information more effectively, and how to report on that information. We’re also making sure that our digital version of the wall reflects this learning, as well.
For all the ability that a digital version of the WOWH can give us, we know that having the physical wall in the office is important: it’s a reminder every day of what we are working to accomplish in the Ontario Digital Service. It’s a reminder, even if just a quick one as people walk by, that even in the chaos, taking time to pause and visualize the track ahead of us will help us avoid our blockers and find the space to maneuver.
Ebony Sager is a team lead in the Product Chapter at the Ontario Digital Service. She is known as Elle Bowie when on the roller derby track.
