Published on: 17 Oct 22  |  Reading : 4 minutes

Visual management: concept and implementation

Visual management facilitates the transmission and assimilation of information within a company. Find out how this concept makes team project management easier.

Visual management is a project management concept based on the power of visual perception. Its main objective is to make the information easier to understand and more memorable for the employees of a company. Visual management has many advantages for project management and contributes to inter-team collaboration.

 

What is visual management?

Visual management is an approach that belongs to Lean Management, a production management method invented by Toyota. It focuses on a set of communication techniques, based on the visual transmission of information and results. Its goal is to make the transmission of this information easier between the members of an organization, through a visual approach that simplifies and increases operational efficiency. Today, efficient practices have adopted the concept of visual management. They take advantage of its benefits to make the best of a collaboration that must remain close, between multidisciplinary teams and the client.

 

The advantages of visual management

Visual management is a tool that centralizes information related to a project to share it with the employees involved. It offers an overview, which leads to a better understanding of the issues and promotes the motivation and involvement of employees. Visual management has many advantages:

  • It makes internal communication easier and encourages feedbacks;
  • It improves the readability of information and thus makes its transmission easier ;
  • It encourages work based on collaboration, interactivity and sharing;
  • It increases the involvement of employees and promotes participative management;
  • It stimulates creativity and encourages decision-making;
  • It makes the detection of important information easier, but also the detection of possible discrepancies between the objectives set and the real results;
  • It allows you to evaluate your action plan in real time in order to become more responsive, improve the processes and orient your decisions better;
  • It provides an orderly, transparent, dynamic, updated and simplified work environment.

 

How to implement visual management?

To take advantage of visual management, here is a multi-step action plan to implement efficient practices to manage your project.

Form a multidisciplinary work team

Put together people from different professions within one same working group, in order to take advantage of different skills and points of view that will contribute to making the project advance. The interaction and collaboration of these different profiles can make your projects advance faster, more efficiently and in a more creative manner. In addition, visual management is a tool for employees; it could therefore be handy to integrate them in the process.

Determine the visual management setting

Determining the scope of a project allows you to establish a visual management method that concretely fulfills its objective. In order to do this, you need to prioritize the problems that visual management is supposed to solve and thus be able to answer different questions:

  • What is the scope of the project? ;
  • What are the elements to be communicated? ;
  • Who are they intended for? ;
  • Where should they be displayed? ;
  • What is your budget? ;
  • What are the actions to be implemented?.

Choosing your tools

Visual management can rely on a wide variety of tools that may even already be used in your company. The idea is to revise those already implemented by the company and to study the way to improve their efficiency. First of all, this involves thinking about their consistency according to the target. Eventually, this step can lead to the implementation of new tools that will meet its objectives better.

Determining the appearance and the way it will be displayed

After selecting your tools, it is possible to determine the visual aspect that you prefer. You should always try to make the transmission of information easier: the way the information is displayed must highlight it and standardize the display of projects in the workspace. Depending on its shape, you should then identify the place where you want to place the tool.

Verify the effectiveness of your approach

All along the project and once it is completed, it is necessary to make sure that the tools being used are allowing you to really reach your objectives more easily. If it is not the case, you must be able to make changes and adjustments in order to improve continuously, and regularly ask your employees their opinion about the solution to assess its effectiveness.

 

What are the visual management tools?

Visual management tools can take very different forms; they can be whiteboards, paperboards with post-its or even be digitized and accessible by the internet.

More about the solution

Digital signage is an ideal support to diffuse information in the context of a visual management project. It has a strong capacity to attract, promotes memorization and has the advantage of being always contextualized thanks to its real time updating. Screens can be placed in different places of the workspace and efficiently replace white boards. The Cenareo solution is a digital signage solution for workspaces and is an ergonomic, intuitive and inclusive tool. Easy to use, it can be automatically used with all the digital tools of the workspace and can help you include all the employees. It can allow you to diffuse information instantly on all the screens, for a more functional and updated project management.

More about the solution

In the context of a visual management project, the dashboard of the project must display a certain amount of relevant information, including:

  • The information relating to the operational process: This section is intended to show the advancement of the project and the tasks assigned to each employee at a glance. It provides an overall view of everything and an efficient daily monitoring; to easily detect blocking points;
  • Highlights: deadlines and milestones; meetings scheduled between teams and clients;
  • Performance indicators;
  • Feedback and observations: in the form of a list, a lot of information can be compiled for the continuous improvement of the management of future projects.

To illustrate this data, it is possible to use representations such as:

  • Color wheels;
  • Diagrams, such as the Eisenhower matrix, the PERT or Gantt diagram;
  • Mind map also called mind mapping;
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The important thing is to implement these tools with the aim of including all the employees and to simplify the management of the project. They must therefore make the transmission of information easier, accessible to everyone and engaging. The Cenareo solution dedicated to digital signage allows you to put in place an efficient, visual management, that promotes a better collaboration and more team cohesion to increase the productivity of your employees.

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