How to Visualize: Board, List, or Timeline?
A while ago I published an article about the benefits of visual thinking. Assuming that many of you are now aware of the advantages that visuals bring to the table, I’d like to give a few tips on how work can be visualized for management purposes. Visual reports would probably be the first thing that comes to mind in this context. That’s right, visualization is most commonly used in reporting. Everyone wants comprehensive reports, fast, and that’s what visuals deliver. All kinds of stats and metrics wrapped up in a nice graphical skin, just as in this process control chart:
My main focus this time is not on the visual reports, though. There’s a baseline dimension for visual choices in work management, as we’re looking for the most convenient ways to see exactly what we want to see. We might want to view our projects from various perspectives, and because of that we need a flexibility with visualizing things. Boards, lists and timelines provide this flexibility and cover most of our visualization needs. Let’s now look which of those three would be best suited for which purposes.
#1. Boards
You will want to visualize work on a board if you need to intersect 2+ properties of a card, or if you want cards grouped by any of 2+ properties. Unlike the classical Kanban board, this board is supposed to be a switchable 2D (or even 3D) grid of any properties of a card or a group of cards. Check this for the tips and tricks, and I’ll provide a few use cases:
You want to know who is doing what. Which person has which to-do’s assigned to them. Hmm, this is not something that you would easily see on a static Kanban board. You can dial in a custom people-work grid, and here’s how it might look as a board:
Then, you want to know about impediments, and how are they blocking progress in your projects. Switch the grids and you’ll see what those impediments are:
Visualizing a project with any of the switchable boards makes sense for anything drag-n-drop, and there’s more to this than moving cards between states. The switchability allows to fit almost any change to a drag-n-drop action, e.g. one can arrange user stories on a board for estimating (see below). The 1, 2, 3, etc. vertical lanes are points. A user story can be dropped to any of those lanes:
#2. Timelines
You will want to visualize something as a timeline if you need an activity or a group of activities plotted on a timescale, with some explicitly marked milestones. This technique is called roadmapping. If time-sensitive activities were to be visualized on a board with the intersected year quarters and epics as shown below, the feel of time would not “sink in” as well:
.. as with a roadmap shown on a timeline. The sense of time is more acute with this visualization:
Tracking work on a timeline helps get a clear picture in one look. A timeline would also work better than any other visualization if you want to check the individual allocations across several projects:
One absurd idea for using timelines, just to give you a strong anti-pattern, would be to visualize a tag as a timeline. Sounds weird. A tag is a tag, who cares, when and why has a user story been tagged. However, there still can be a realistic use case here, if one would want to see when this tag was first used, to which to-do’s was it applied, etc.
If you want to visualize with timelines, you’d hardly do without an electronic tool. Apart from the switchability, it takes quite some effort to draw timelines on a physical whiteboard. Guess how much time would it take to draw a timeline any time one wants to get a custom visualization?
#3. Lists
You will want to visualize work as a list if there are only a few to-do items, or if you need to trace the hierarchy of epics -> user stories-> tasks-> bugs as here:
A list also comes handy if you are hastily typing in the to-do’s, especially on the go, catching ideas before they flee. With no big screen for boards and timelines around, you might want to use lists on a mobile device:
As a summary, your visualization choices will depend on what you want to see, and/or on what you want to do. Switchable boards and timelines can visualize virtually anything.
Related:
DataViz 101: 5 Reports for Kanban
This story is based on an earlier article.
