Information Radiators Are Agile’s Most Underutilized Tool
“Wait, What!? But we use them every day!” Yes, almost all teams do. But how often do you think senior leaders and executives use them to make the most important work of the company’s strategy transparent and visible? First, let’s discuss why they’re a great tool, then I’ll cover some ideas I why wish senior managers and teams of teams used them more.
What Problems Do They Solve?
Most people learn about information radiators as they learn the basics of agile. It’s how a new team learns to transparently show their work. And that’s either through stickies on the wall, a JIRA board, or information on a virtual Miro or Mural board. Maturing agile teams will include various charts and other helpful information like Working Agreements, Burn Down Charts, Cumulative Flow Diagrams, Team Happiness, Lead Time and Cycle Time trends, etc.
Over time, teams learn that the information radiator is as much for them as it is for others to keep up with what’s going on. Managers (if they’re taught anything about agile) know that they enable them to “go to the work”, which is great and often encourages the right kind of conversations. Generically, information radiators solve three important problems for an agile team:
- Awareness. The team stands around the board once a day to talk about the work, where team members might collaborate, who needs help, and what challenges the team are facing.
- Progress. The board shows what work is ready to be started, the work getting completed currently, and what work has recently been approved and marked as done. They also help make sure the team isn’t working on too many things at the same time.
- Accountability. Perhaps less obvious, the team’s board helps the team function by holding each team member accountable to the work, which in turn, reinforces the process of uncovering unknowns, not letting people get stuck, and generally encouraging active and healthy communication.
The team’s board, as an information radiator, is why we say things like “There’s nowhere to hide in agile”. The nature of this transparency is that the team focuses on communication as a key responsibility and not just for themselves but for those around them including stakeholders, business sponsors, and senior leaders. This allows us to see problems earlier, make necessary decisions sooner, and ultimately leads to better business agility.
Information Radiators for Teams of Teams
What I don’t see enough of are boards that make work transparent in other parts of the organization. Starting from teams and going up, next is the teams-of-teams level. Do you use information radiators for a portfolio or program level? Agile Release Trains or S2’s or Scrum of Scrums or whatever your team-of-teams layer looks like can benefit greatly from using similar boards.
The trick is targeting a granularity of information that is appropriate for the audiences. Think outcome-based roadmaps; easy-to-read summaries of epics in progress vs. those started or finished recently; progress against Objectives and Key Results (OKRs); or summaries of recent events. Also, don’t forget the obvious utility around escalating blockers, staff shortages, third party influences, and various big picture target dates. Alignment between strategy and execution only happens when the right facts and truths are communicated in a timely way in both directions.
If you’re using SAFe or some form of Program Increment Planning or Big Room Planning, an information radiator might start with the PI Goal and show monthly progress against that goal.
If a stakeholder or an executive or anyone that was curious about your team of teams showed up, that specific information radiator would be wise to answer all of their questions at a glance. How’s the overall effort going? What work has been completed recently (in easily readable English, not JIRA ticket numbers or build numbers)? What challenges are coming up? Where is the work going next? What sort of quarterly or annual goals are being targeted from the collective vision and which measurable goals have seen progress?
Information Radiators for Executives and Senior Management
Most people’s experience with information radiators stops there, only related to teams. But what if the entire company’s strategy was readily available to all employees? Is there a vision for your Business Unit? Are all of the teams of teams aligned under one collective set of Objectives and Key Results? What progress is the company making on its goals? There are a myriad of uses for how boards at this level could be used.
Frankly, most companies that are involved in an agile transformation of some kind are desperately in need of a way to expose important strategic information, intent, and progress in this way. Having an information radiator dedicated to the progress of the transformation itself is critical. What information would be most useful to see there? Would it be helpful to consider a concept such as a Transformation Sprint? What progress has been made on the transformation so far? What key steps will happen next?
All too many companies seem to act as if they have infinite people, resources, and funds to start as many initiatives as they like instead of behaving the way we train and coach the average agile team to behave with a reasonable Work in Progress limit so it doesn’t take on too much. What does the allocation of teams even look like at your company? Is anyone keeping track of how many teams are working on which products, services, and support functions? Are your budgeting and financial conversations completely separate from the strategic team allocation conversations?
What if there was one central place to see a visualization of which teams (and how many) were focused on which initiatives at the company? Then, should you have a strategic coalition of leaders discuss what the right size might be, month to month, for those initiatives it would accomplish multiple things at the same time. In one conversation, looking at a wall of teams assigned to initiatives, the company’s leadership could have a strategic conversation that included the right-sizing of efforts by counting teams and people, the relative effort and importance of initiatives, as well as the financial budgeting and level of investment (based on, at a minimum, team headcount + average overhead). It’s then, of course, natural to consider trends over time and what strategic influences might do to the nature of the teams assigned to initiatives over time. Do we still want X teams working on initiative Y next quarter, or are there more important things to shift our focus to working on?
There are some common names for this kind of visualization, such as an Executive Portfolio Wall or a Kanban System for Initiatives and the Flow of Work. Consider this video on “Flow: Taking Agile Forward” by Fin Goulding (and to jump to the Executive Portfolio Wall section start here).
It’s perhaps easy to imagine other facts and figures that would be monumentally useful to share on a company-wide information radiator:
- Pending initiative requests, or ideas delayed by resource availabilty
- Recent successes with customers and successful product launches
- Quarterly and annual goals, vision statements, and divisional OKRs
- Key dates for product increments, launch dates, or customer expectations
- Headcount and understaffing challenges
If your company has not yet utilized the amazing power of keeping summary information updated on high-level information radiators, I’d like to encourage you to instigate your leaders to consider providing them. Ask them to embrace the simplest of agile principles of providing transparent data to help create engagement and drive decision making. I guarantee you it will make a difference in the work that you, your team, your team of teams, and your company are striving to achieve.
Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the practices and frameworks of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense. I offer fractional agile coaching services to help teams improve affordably. See more at FractionalAgileCoach.com
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