Governance Obeya

Feature show case on the ability to look at Flow Analytics through the lens of your Obeya. The Fitness Criteria is available at the bottom of your Obeya, but you can also click through to access the full capability of the Analytics Dashboard viewed through the context of your Obeya.

Continuing our conversation of visibility on the concerns related to initiatives, this time, we are talking about how you can view progress from several dimensions across initiatives. With Governance Obeya, progress can be viewed at various levels: Overall Progress of the Obeya; Progress toward each Key Result; Progress made by each Team and Individual contributor; Progress of work as an infographic in a Kanban view; Remaining work as a burn-up / burn-down chart.

Many might agree, it is good practice to identify and continually manage both risks and dependencies across the life of a program or initiative. Usually, they are documented in various methods and stored in disparate locations. Be it spreadsheets in a folder buried deep on a shared network; in a PPM tool which only a few team members have access to; or it may be recorded in a work management system which is difficult for your stakeholders to access. The problem is, information remains fragmented across various systems making it difficult for teams and stakeholders to have visibility to the information. We want to make this information more easily accessible, by bringing just the relevant Risk, Dependencies and other concerns of an initiative in one single view within an Obeya. ‍

Our flagship feature Governance Obeya addresses the problem around lack of visibility (know more about it from our blog). Each widget on the Obeya represents a concern you might have. The Objectives widget provides visibility on the progress of delivery towards business goals. The goal setting framework called Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has been gaining popularity as it encourages organisations to define actionable goals and track measurable outcomes. Our widget is loosely structured around that concept, but you don’t need to be using OKRs yourself to take advantage.

Governance Obeya is one of the flagship feature sets of Flomatika. The vision is to address the ‘visibility’ problem faced by many enterprises around their Initiatives. What do we mean by ‘Initiatives’? They come in several forms and have different names in different organisations, but ultimately they are a timebox with a scope of work to be delivered. They can be:Projects focused on a set of deliverablesProgram Increments, or Quarterly Plans to achieve a set of outcomesInitiatives with Mission Teams formed to achieve a specific objective or outcomeIt can be a team working within a Sprint to achieve a goalOr anything in between

If you're leading a high-performing team committed to the goal of continuous improvement in delivery, then value stream management (VSM) is the vehicle that'll get you there. From innovating alongside market needs, pivoting when necessary, and focusing resources where they're most valuable. VSM improves project transparency and empowers you to make better decisions about where interventions are needed and how people should be allocated.

As the world continues to see the advantages that lie in a shift to an agile way of working, the structure and format of software delivery remains forever changed. Namely, the decision-making power has shifted. Where the responsibility once sat squarely on the shoulders of the ‘leader’, trickling down through the hierarchy, this decision-making power now extends to those closest to the work—the agile teams operating and innovating rapidly to deliver it.While this provides for faster and more customer-centric releases, it’s clear that leaders don’t have the visibility they once did, which can inhibit your pursuit of continuous improvement. Instead of directives, they give their agile teams implicit trust, forgoing control and visibility for autonomy and speed. Which, in essence, sounds like a good trade off. Unfortunately, a lack of clarity around the end-to-end flow of software delivery can make it more difficult to improve the overall system.

The term ‘Obeya’ originated at Toyota in the 90s while the Prius was in development. Chief engineer of the project, Takeshi Uchiyamada, was fearful that his lack of authority when it came to decision-making could see him overrun by more experienced discipline leaders, to the detriment of the project. This need for senior support is what manifested in the very first ‘Obeya’, which means ‘large room’ in Japanese. Dubbed an area for mutual discussion with all leaders across the project, this space empowered Uchiyamada with full transparency and effective governance from conception to delivery.