Sensemaking with a kanban board
Posted 9 months ago at 12:42 pm. 0 comments
Sensemaking is likely to occur in all organizations, particularly those that operate in ever-changing fields such as software development. Sensemaking is an action taken by organizational members in order to create and maintain understandings, sustain relationships, and enable collective action (Maitlis, 2005; Weick & Roberts, 1993). This is likely to occur during times of change (Balogun & Johnson, 2004), which are always present in the field of software development because of the speed of changes in technology. Sensemaking is, in essence, the development of a collective understanding in an organization as team members/employees actively try to collect information to better understand relationships among pieces of information. This is likely to happen on a daily basis as people constantly monitor their environment for new information. Trying to understand your environment can be tricky without some basis for collective knowledge.
This is just one more example of why using a kanban board for your team’s projects is so important. Employees want to know the status of what they are working on, what has been completed, and so on, because this information is used to help motivate them to make progress. Instead of making people spend time monitoring several different places (or waiting for meetings) to understand exactly what is going on, a kanban board makes the process easier because the status of a project can be understood at a glance. This lessens the need for constant communication among team members, so that people can focus on work rather than trying to piece together what is going on. People have the desire to understand how the information fits together, so why not make it easy for them? That’s why one of the biggest ideas we focus on with Zen is visibility and enhanced communication. Zen makes the sensemaking process easy, so team members don’t have to spend time looking for feedback from the environment. Instead, they can look at the kanban board at any point and understand exactly what is going on. You don’t have to spend time in meetings to figure out what everyone has done because Zen’s messaging system updates your team as important things happen in your project.
