Visuals Used in the Office

A couple of weeks ago during the Lean Series week, a comment was made on one of the posts about showing more examples of visuals used in the office.  That was a great question.

Below are some ways visual management has been used in the office area.

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The column on the right shows the tasks that must be done each day by the managers.  When the task is completed they put a check mark in the box.  There are 4 managers in the area every day so there are 4 columns under each day.  You can see that one manager is in a kaizen event all week so they put kaizen on the board to highlight the situation.

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The above picture is a board displaying which employees are working on what work for that day.  The manager updates the board every morning.  The green square shows where that person will work that day.  If an employee finishes their work they put a blue square showing they are available to help.  If employee needs help, they can put a red square up.  This has eliminated a lot of startup time in the morning when employees were trying to understand what work they were needed on that day.

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This visual training matrix board supplements the visual scheduling board.  This board shows who is fully trained in what skills.  Green ‘X’ means they are fully trained.  Purple ‘X’ means they are in the progress of being trained.  Red ‘X’ means the employee is not trained to do that work.  The manager uses this board to inform who they can have do what work for the day on the board above.

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This is a typical way visual management can be used in the office.  It shows the progress of work through stages of the work.  Depending on the type of work, the stages work goes there can be labeled differently.  For software development it could be Design, Develop, Test and Deploy.

I hope these examples spur thought on how you can use visual management in the office environment.  If you have any examples you would like to share please feel free to send them to me so I can share them wit the readers.

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