Lean Project Management: How a Pop of Color Motivated a Team

In a world filled with minimalist designs and text heavy slides, teams crave tools that are new, fun, and effective to use. My team recently became Lean enabled which involved adopting team huddles and huddle boards. The huddle board template was a starting point, but there was room to evolve it to fit the needs of my team. My contribution was to update our huddle board with a bit a flare and color.

Huddle boards are visual tools to get a temperature check of your team. The goal is that they are easy to read and low effort to update. The template given to my team was text based: an overwhelming wall of updates that required significant effort to write out statuses. It was also a bit dated with the clip art and format. My idea was to rely on visual icons and modern design to make our huddle board a conversation starter instead of a written update tracker.

The first item to tackle was status. How is the team feeling about their amount of work? I added a visual status tracker for “drowning, treading water, and lifeguard” to help the team communicate capacity and stress.

At a glance, the team can see who is available to take on more and who needs support.

Another topic for the huddles was progress on development goals. Goals include training and self-paced projects meant to upskill. I turned this topic into a visual with a plant icon to symbolize growth and a tracker for off track, at risk, or on track. By moving our tokens, we can see who needs motivation and who is ready to share what they have learned. This tracker has already helped my team share their strategies for prioritizing goals each week and impactful courses. What would have been a bullet point in a sea of other updates became a useful conversation.

Another visual I added was a calendar to communicate PTO, town halls, due dates, upcoming holidays, and birthdays. Rather than tracking date driven items in a list, it makes sense to organize it in a calendar. The visual makes it is easy to see what is coming up in the next few weeks.

The final touch was adding conversation tiles which include spaces for hot topics, roadblocks, questions, goals, celebrations, and icebreakers. By splitting these items into color-coordinated tiles with corresponding icons, the team can easily digest valuable information. The tiles also create a visual agenda rather than writing it out linearly. We can jump from tile to tile which allows for a dynamic meeting and easily updated agenda.

Before I enhanced the board with these visuals, the huddle would have revolved around written updates read off a slide. Plus writing out all the updates would have taken away valuable time from project work. Now, each visual prompts team members to share where they are truly at with their projects and relevant tasks. With built in moments to ask for help and answer questions, our huddles are efficient and effective. My team especially appreciates the room for an icebreaker as part of the meeting. Icebreakers do not have to take a long time; it can be as simple as a 2-minute poll while everyone gathers on the Teams call.

To replicate this in other PM situations, I would recommend evaluating templates to see if a visual element would make it more effective. Furthermore, as PMs we must remain purposeful in our meetings. We should strive to facilitate conversations and problem solving instead of falling into the monotony of written updates. Think about the purpose of meetings and understand if those goals would be better shared in a visual tracker or potentially in a completely different way like a calendar. Lastly, don’t be afraid to add a little flare to your solutions, your team will appreciate it!

Angela George, CAPM