Digital Lean

KEY TAKEAWAYS A management Obeya is the leadership team’s operating system made visible. It tracks the health of the business, not project deliveries. Seven boards on the walls of one room replaced opinion-based meetings with weekly data-driven sessions in 60 minutes. The agency director continued to run the Obeya after the engagement ended. The boards evolved, the weekly rhythm never stopped. 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. ...

KEY TAKEAWAYS A BI team managing nearly 20 projects across several continents built an Obeya room and doubled on-time delivery in 3 months. The Obeya surfaced milestone collisions, quality failures, and ownership gaps that no status report had ever shown. Three PDCAs run inside the Obeya rescued a go-live, halved defects per delivery, and created a standard that the team still uses. Get the Full Project Obeya Template with all the boards layout: Strategy, performance, macro planning, and problem-solving. Ready to print and fill in. [Download Free Template →] ...

KEY TAKEAWAYS An Obeya is a physical or virtual space where the project lives on the walls, and the team meets weekly to decide what to change. Toyota built the first one during the Prius program in the 1990s. The method now runs in software, hospitals, banks, and creative agencies. A BI team I coached went from 24% to 55% on-time delivery in three months, cut defects in half, and raised customer satisfaction from 5.5 to 9.4. Across my engagements, I’ve used three types: project Obeya for delivery, management Obeya for business health, and product Obeya for customer fit. Pick by what you are trying to manage. The wall is not the point. The weekly conversation in front of the wall is. Without an animator running it, the room becomes wall decoration. A BI (Business Intelligence) team went from 24% on-time delivery to 55% in three months, using one room and six visual boards. ...