Improvement Mapping: Using Visualisation to Support Continuous Improvement

Visualisation is a powerful technique. In all walks of life it can aid us in achieving many things, in directing our thoughts, in becoming better at what we do and working towards our goals. Visualisation is often a mental technique but we can also use it in a more practical and physical sense. It's this practical visualisation which I explore here in terms of supporting a team's continuous improvement.

One thing I've often wondered about over the years when working with Scrum teams is how best to keep track of the agreed improvements that come out of retrospective sessions, in terms of things we've tried and their effectiveness or otherwise. How do we keep track of the possible improvements which we think might be useful, but which we won't yet implement?

At the most basic level we can include a review of the most recently agreed improvements at the beginning of each retrospective, we can keep the things that worked and ditch the things that didn't. Going forwards we can maintain a list of those things so that we can revisit and consider as appropriate to support our continuous improvement.

Long lists can be hard work and difficult to interpret though, and they're never very engaging. So I wonder whether there's a better way, a way which quickly enables the team to visualise improvements, things they've tried, things that worked and things that didn't. A way that helps increase the team's understanding of how their process is evolving. Moreover, can that increased visualisation and improved understanding be used to support a greater buy in and ownership of their process?

Impact mapping is an emerging tool used to help visualise and shape what's being developed my mapping outputs back to outcomes, i.e. features back to the required impact/value. Gojko Adzic describes impact mapping as follows:

"Impact mapping can help you build products and deliver projects that make an impact, not just ship software. Impact mapping is a strategic planning technique that prevents organisations from getting lost while building products and delivering projects, by clearly communicating assumptions, helping teams align their activities with overall business objectives and makes better roadmap decisions"

If we can map and visualise product deliverables back to their impact then is it also possible to map process changes back to impacts? In line with the above definition could this help us align our team activities against the overall objective of continuous process improvement?

Another pattern which I've often observed in retrospectives is a focus on the negative, or a sole focus on trying to fix the things which aren't working so well. An effect of this is that teams can often lose sight of understanding what's working well and, more importantly, why those things are working well.

Ed Catmull in his recent book, Creativity Inc, describes how one of the core principles at Pixar Animation is to understand what works well as part of making any particular film. Not just noting the 'what' but truly exploring the underlying factors that enabled that success. If we can understand something then we can be better positioned to replicate and benefit from it again in the future.

Hence if we can better visualise the things that are working well as part of our development process and we understand the impact those things are having then will we be better positioned to protect and continue to benefit from those things going forwards?

My experiments with adapting impact mapping to improvement mapping aren't at all scientific and so far are rather limited in size and scope. I look forward to developing and experimenting some more with this and will report more findings when I have them.

My feeling though is that if we can see how our process is improving, if we can visualise and understand the impact/effect that changes on the process are having, if we can use that to shape future changes, if we can be more mindful of possible changes that we haven't yet tried and if we can be more aware of what's working well and why, then overall we'll be better positioned to work effectively as a team towards the goals of continuous process improvement.