I have found when introducing a Kanban board to Sales and Marketing people that some find Kanban limiting from a planning perspective. They like the concept but have difficulty seeing the entire picture of flow and what the expectations and resources needed. This coupled with the fact that many of the teams are made up of cross-functional areas. They still like the traditional Gantt chart arrangement where the scope if created, a project is broken down and then tasks are assigned and scheduled.
What they wanted to see was how information flowed, not the scheduling. Scheduling in sales and marketing, outside of some event driven task, is about people, not time. A tool that I was familiar with was Four Fields Mapping. Four Fields mapping stems from Toyota and is a method of project planning. The mapping system connects four fields:
- Phases: This defines the “What” of the process. In CAP-Do, for example, it would be Check- Act – Plan – Do as the phases. Each phase has entry/exit criteria or in other words defining the handoff.
- People: This identifies the people or teams or simpler terms the “Who” of a process. The people are stretched across the top of the map instead of the typical time element in a Gantt Chart.
- Tasks: This is the actual map of the process and defines “How” or the activities that will be used to do the job. The difference in the mapping exercise is that it is vertical from top to bottom versus horizontal.
- Standards: This is the secret sauce of Four Fields Mapping. The standards define the “Why” of the process. It clearly states why we are doing this step and to what criteria constitutes acceptable performance. It brings consistency to the process.
Now, the problem facing most of us if we decide to utilize Four Fields Mapping is finding something other than Visio or Excel to create the process. Both of them have their positives and negatives. I did not have that problem since I had been using Deployment Flowcharting for over ten years. In the past, I had built custom equipment. We had found that managing our resources effectively by having the right people doing the right work was the most important constraint we had to manage. We scheduled entire jobs around this premise. The software tool we used was Team Flow. It is based on Dr. Deming’s work with Komatsu Tractor Company that resulted in a flowchart which showed the team members across the top of the flowchart. From the Team Flow Literature:
Each process step was aligned vertically under the team member or members who were working it. Process steps were connected by arrows as in ordinary flowcharts to indicate the flow through the process. The Japanese term for this new type of flowchart, which roughly translates into “management across the functions” was Anglicized into “Cross-Functional Management.” Dr. Myron Tribus, former Dean of the Dartmouth College Thayer School of Engineering and a disciple of Dr. Deming, popularized the new methodology in America and named it Deployment Flowcharting for the way it illustrates.
The difference in Team Flow and the actual Four-Fields Mapping process are that the Standards are embedded in the activities or tasks. So if you click on an activity you can find all the necessary material. In addition, Team Flow is much more powerful program than a typical Deployment Flow chart. It incorporates other features such as a Gantt and Org Chart.
I like the functionality and look of this process but have found it somewhat cumbersome working with clients when I have Trello boards that we can use for project work. However, for Team Deployment and gaining acceptance on project criteria, I still rely on this process over others.
Does anyone else use Four Fields Mapping? Or, Deployment Flowcharting?
Pictures are the courtesy of Team Flow
Doesn’t this style of flowcharting tend to institutionalize the siloes between people? I.e., by “fixing” activities to very specific people.
Or do you just use it to capture the “as-is” process, before converting to a less siloed project structure (e.g., using a kanban board)?
Thanks for the question, Jim.
I have actually used it to fix tasks to certain people but more often used it to assign tasks to teams, or even an hybrid model. You also have the ability to take task and spread them across several silos if need be. My primary purpose, in my original use in manufacturing was to balance flow across people/teams while trying to make sure the right people/teams were scheduled to do the activity we wanted them doing. It also assisted in making sure the documentation was in place before the person/team started the work.
This was before Kanban. Since Kanban, I have used it in a similar way but more like Get Ready board before moving the activities to the Kanban Board(s). This board will often contribute to several Kanban boards.
I found that matching the right people/teams to the right activity increase quality and flow. There were less questions, few mistakes and as a result time became less of an issue because things got done. In fact, it was great training for controlling WIP – that was what we were doing without knowing it.