Visual planning in a product development context

Paper in proceeding, 2015

Product development organizations face increasing uncertainty and in a response to that, they strive to improve their information processing capability. In this endeavour, visualization has proven to be a viable strategy; efforts to visualize products and concepts are increasing along with improving visualization technology. However, visualization has not gotten the same traction when it comes to task communication within development teams. In this study, Visual planning, a method for visual task communication, has been studied through a survey. The purpose is to contrast the different goals and effects of using the method. 321 product development managers were asked to participate in the survey, and 160 did so. Through statistical analysis of the responses, we could conclude that our hypotheses that increased communication within the team would be a significantly more important goal and be significantly more affected by the implementation of Visual planning than other aspects of the method can both be partly confirmed. The analysis also shows that the respondents perceive that Visual planning affects all the potential goals of Visual planning that have been tested in this study positively. This means that Visual planning seems to enhance certain aspects related to communication and coordination such as increased communication, team alignment, earlier problem solving, resource allocation and follow up on activities, but none of these aspects stand out as significantly more or less important than the other aspects.