#56-Utilize the Power of Information Radiators

Information radiators are extremely useful to an agile organization.  But often there are such radiators that have been missed.  This episode will investigate this problem.

Transcript

Utilize the Power of Information Radiators 

Consider the way an airport works. When you arrive at the airport you may well have printed your ticket at home, and so you don't necessarily need to go to the ticket counter to check in. At every airport there is a large digital display which lists all the upcoming flights and from which you can learn the status of each flight, whether it is on time or not, the gate where the plane will be leaving from, and often other details that may help you to successfully board your flight.  If that status changes or the gate is moved, you will instantly be able to determine this for yourself without harmful delays. 

Also, usually very nearby, is an airport map showing where you are and where each of the gates is. Such a map will also indicate where you go to check your bag if you're going to, and where to find food and other necessaries to make your trip a pleasant one.

When you land at another airport and you have a connecting flight to board, that airport will also have a readily-available display to tell you where to go and when that flight is scheduled to leave.  It will show you the gate you’ve just arrived at and the gate that you need to move to, with a clear path indicated. Hopefully, you don’t have to run to get there on time. 

Imagine if these things did not exist. Every traveler would have to visit the ticket counter to obtain all the necessary information for their flight to be successful. There would be a huge line at that counter virtually all the time because each person would have to interact with an airport agent, and most of those interactions would be mostly identical. Furthermore, those agents would be less available for those who need to take actions that they cannot take on their own, such as rescheduling a flight for a later time.

That large digital display and the airport map that accompanies it are information radiators. They are on-demand resources that allow people to obtain, at their choice, the information necessary to track progress and make decisions. 

In modern product development it is not unusual for teams to track their progress using some kind of visual indicator, like a kanban board or something similar. These can be information radiators as well if they are easily visible to all. 

But there are other information radiators that can be just as important and which are often missing from the organizations that I visit. Here are a few, though the ones that are important to your organization may well be different so don't limit your thinking to just these examples.

The team may have identified a list of risks that they cannot mitigate on their own. This should be readily available to all because it's possible that there are those in the organization that can help with those risks but the team does not know to ask them.

Also the team may be making certain assumptions which seem reasonable to them. If that assumptions list is also publicly posted, then anyone who can challenge those assumptions has an opportunity to become aware of them, again without being sought out by the team.

Every project has a large number of stakeholders involved with it. I always recommend that teams identify their stakeholders and list them in a publicly available area, so that that list can be updated and validated on an ongoing basis. Missing a stakeholder is often a huge source of errors in product development. 

If the team is doing test-driven development, and if they have identified a list of tests that have not yet been written, it's not a bad idea for that list to be publicly available so that, similarly, it can be added to or fleshed out by those who know more about the issues being tested. 

I often coach teams to perform commonality-variability analysis on any set of requirements that they are given. That process produces an artifact that can be extremely useful for others to see, add to, and ask questions about. 

Information radiators not only improve organizational coordination and communication, they can help to eliminate unnecessary meetings, or to suggest important ones that have been overlooked.  

They are a very low-cost way to support any agile process.