Management Obeya: How an IT Services Team Built Their Own War Room

An IT services agency director wanted to change how his management team worked together. He had a strategy and objectives. He also had talented people running operations, commercial development, and client delivery. What he did not have was a way to see it all in one place, discuss it factually, and solve problems before they became crises.

I designed and built a “management Obeya” with his team. It was not a “project Obeya” tracking deliveries. Here, it was an Obeya for the management team, connecting the agency’s vision, client voice, commercial pipeline, performance indicators, and structured problem-solving on the walls of one room.

The agency director had been managing his team through weekly meetings and individual check-ins. Strategy lived in a slide deck nobody reopened. Client issues surfaced when they escalated, not when they started. He wanted a way to run his agency with the same rigor he expected from the project teams delivering for clients.

What a Management Obeya Is

Most Obeya examples you find online focus on project management or product development. A management obeya serves a different purpose. It is the leadership team’s operating system, made visible.

A project Obeya room tracks work as it flows through stages. A management Obeya tracks the health of the entire business unit: clients, revenue, margin, people, problems, commercial pipeline, and strategy execution.

The distinction matters because the boards, the rhythm, and the conversations are completely different. In a project Obeya, you ask, “Is this task on track?” In a management Obeya, you ask, “Are we winning clients, keeping our people, and solving the right problems?”

Designing the Boards

I started by working with the agency director to answer one question: What does he need to see and understand every week to lead this agency?

We designed seven modules. Each one occupied a section of the wall.

Clients and Voice of Customer. Who are the clients? What do they say, both positive and negative? Satisfaction scores tracked visually, with clear signals for what needs attention and what is going well. The client voice lived on the wall permanently, not buried in a quarterly survey. It is updated weekly.

Vision and Objectives. The agency’s three-year vision: revenue target, margin target, client alert threshold, and HR indicators. All written on the wall with the current status next to each target. Green or red, without ambiguity.

Commercial Development. Every active opportunity tracked on a board: client name, offer, status, result, next step. The team could see at a glance which clients were buying, which deals were stalling, and where the pipeline needed attention.

Performance Indicators. Six charts covering client alerts, number of proposals sent, HR metrics (turnover, regretted departures), number of commercial interactions, and progress on key initiatives. Each chart showed the trend. Each had an owner responsible for updating it before the weekly meeting.

Problem Solving. A structured board divided by domain: clients, operations, commercial, and HR. Every problem listed with its cause, actions, results, and what changed as a consequence. It was a PDCA board where problems got investigated and solved.

Macro Plan. Major projects, roadmap items, and strategic initiatives plotted on a timeline. The management team could foresee dependencies, resource conflicts, and upcoming deadlines without opening a single spreadsheet.

Production Monitoring. Current activities, bench status, service delivery. The agency’s operational pulse, visible and up to date.

With the Director, we sketched the full Obeya layout by hand on paper first. That included every board, field, and signal system. When I showed the full prototype to the agency director, he pushed back on one point: he wanted the commercial pipeline front and center, not tucked away in a corner. That told me what mattered most to him. We rearranged the layout together and added a strategic action plan section he had not initially considered.

Building It on the Wall

I finalized the Obeya prototype first on paper, sketching every board with its layout, fields, and signal systems. Then, with the agency Director, we had additional rounds of fine-tuning together. We were trying to answer questions like: What belonged in the vision section? Which KPIs would the team actually update? What client data mattered enough to put on the wall? Those were the right questions for the Director to reinforce his ownership of the Obeya and for me to understand his focus and empower him with it. 

Once we agreed on the design, we built the physical boards. We used paper, markers, sticky notes, and printed charts. The whole room took two days to construct, with support from other managers.

When the entire management team walked in for the first time, the room was covered floor to ceiling. Some stood back and scanned the walls in silence. One manager walked straight to the commercial pipeline board and started reading the client names. Another asked, “Are we really going to update all of this every week?” I told him yes, and that most of it would take five minutes once the habit was in place.

The boards were not decorative. Every sticky note had an owner. The charts had an update cadence, and every empty field was a question the team had to answer.

Running the Obeya

The agency director ran a weekly Obeya session, limited to 60 minutes. That was the structure we fixed.

First, the client’s point: what feedback came in this week, positive or negative? If a client raised a problem, the team qualified it and moved it to the problem resolution board.

Second, a performance review. There was a focus on two or three indicators, not all of them every week. The team reviewed the trend, identified gaps between target and actual, and initiated a PDCA when the gap was significant.

Third, problem-solving: Any new issues to surface? For existing problems, what progress has been made this week? One team member presented a PDCA. The rest challenged it and suggested improvements.

Fourth, commercial development. Which offers were moving? Which ones stalled? Why? What changes to the approach were needed?

Fifth, the team set the focus for the following week.

The first session ran long. The agency director tried to cover every board, and the team was not used to discussing performance data out loud. It was also necessary to explain the principles. By the third session, the rhythm clicked. He learned to pick two or three indicators to focus on, not all six. The team stopped waiting to be asked and started presenting their own updates. I coached him after each session on how to challenge the performance, what to let go, and the required attitudes.

What Changed

Before the Obeya, management meetings covered whatever felt urgent. Discussions circled and depended on who argued the loudest. Problems resurfaced month after month because nobody tracked whether the fix worked.

After the Obeya, the wall set the agenda. The data triggered the conversations. When client satisfaction dipped, the team did not debate whether it was a real problem. The chart showed the trend. They moved to causes and actions.

One early win came from the client alerts board. A recurring complaint from one client had been mentioned in meetings for months, but never formally tracked. Once it hit the PDCA board with a named owner and a deadline, the team found the root cause in two weeks: a handoff gap between two departments. They fixed it, and the client noticed. That was the moment the management team stopped seeing the Obeya as overhead and started using it as their tool.

The commercial pipeline became visible for the first time. The team could see how many proposals went out, how many converted, and where deals died. Conversations shifted from “we need more revenue” to “why did we lose this specific client, and what do we change in our approach?”

The problem resolution board forced closure. A problem entered the board with a cause, an action, a deadline, and an expected result. If the action did not produce the result, the team investigated further. Problems stopped recycling through meetings without resolution.

Project Obeya vs Management Obeya

I have built both. They are discovery tools, but they solve different problems.

A “project obeya”, like the one I built for a BI team managing 18 projects, tracks delivery: milestones, defects, timelines. The question is always: are we delivering what we promised?

A “management Obeya” tracks the business. It’s all about clients, revenue, people, and strategy execution. The question is: are we running this organization in the right direction?

Both use the same principles: make work visible, track performance against targets, and solve problems with structured methods. But the boards, cadence, and audience are different.

A project obeya serves project managers and their teams. A “management Obeya” serves the leadership team of a business unit. If you lead a department, division, or service line with 20 or more people, a “management Obeya” gives you what no reporting tool provides: a single place where your entire business is visible, your team is aligned, and problems are solved before they grow.

How to Start

You do not need a perfect room. You need wall space, paper, markers, and a leadership team willing to update the data every week. There is no one-for-all Obeya. Start and adapt continuously as needed and as challenges arise.

Start by answering: What are the five things I need to see every week to lead this team? Client health, financial performance, people metrics, commercial pipeline, and open problems are a common starting point. But your Obeya should reflect your reality, not a template.

Build the first version in a few hours, with your team. Run your first session and adjust after every meeting. The Obeya is never finished. It evolves as the team learns what information drives better decisions.

The agency director continued to run the Obeya after I left. The boards evolved, some modules were simplified, others expanded. But the weekly rhythm never stopped. 

The obeya changed how he leads: less time chasing information, more time solving problems.

The method works the same whether you lead a 10-person agency or a 200-person division. The walls change, but the principles stay the same.