Visual Project Management - War Rooms

Big Idea

The concept of a war room is to physically gather an entire project team in a special designed room, where they can think big thoughts and visually communicate the activities of a project. The room is purpose-built for project meetings as a mean to handle and enhance decision-making and planning.

The walls in the war room is used for visualization of the project, whether this is low-tech with sticky notes and markers, or with a more high-tech solution with screens and projectors. The room is sort of a shared think box, in which the project team can develop projects and strategies, and organize complex programs. Thoughts, information and data can be visualized, which forms the foundation of finding linkages with impacts and multidimensional information. [7]

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The war room enables a collaborative team to

• break down complex programs and information processes into comprehensible parts

• promote structured dialogue and brainstorming

• comprehend program intricacies

• establish program concepts quickly.

A project is changed thought-out its lifetime, and the project team must be ready to cope rapid changes. The war room is ideal to make quick and clever decisions, as all the information is literally painted on the walls. If the project manager can navigate the expert knowledge of the project team, major delays etc. can be prevented. Vice versa, if the project team can navigate the rest of the team’s information, and understand the tasks and deadlines of their co-workers, they might work towards a common goal.

A visual tool

A project contains an enormous amount of information, where the most is often very complex. It is therefore of great importance to ensure the employees understand this information, in order to secure an as straight-line process as possible during the project. Time wasted on miscommunication benefits no one, and can in worst case lead to great financial loss, delays and even failures. Miscommunications should therefore be minimized.

When information on the overall process and project is not delivered or understood by the employees, they start to work in silos. This can become dangerous to any project, as employee A can work towards a completely different goal than employee B. According to Mark Woeppel [4], the primary problem in project execution is that the teams do not have any situational visibility. They don’t know where they are in the process, and they can’t see clearly what to do. They need a map to guide them. This is where the war room comes in handy.

Traditionally, the teams would have meeting upon meeting where they try to figure out the status of the project, where they are in the process, and what they need to do. But, with all employees working in silos, the left hand, does not know what the right hand does in the project. No one gets the whole idea of the project. Meetings like this will often end up in fingers pointed, and questions are asked in hindsight. This is of course too late to take these discussions, as work already has been executed. This breeds an environment of blame rather than one of cooperation.

Visible information is the shortest route from understanding to action [4]. Humans receive approximately 90 % of all information through visual perception, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text [5]. Visuals are much easier to understand and remember than written words (reference). Text are a linear flow of arguments, which are a heavy and un-dynamic. Visuals are non-linear, and can therefore cope with more complex relationships between entities. [2]