The White Board Dance refers to the power of kinesthetic interactions often found in white board planning session as compared to project planning using software tools alone. This is the story of how one nuclear power plant tried to go electronic for outage planning, and why they went back to–if you’ll forgive the pun–the drawing board.
Nuclear Plant Outage Planning
I earned my way through college working outages in the nuclear power industry, mostly as a radiation safety technician (sometimes called a health physics technician). My task was to keep the machinists, pipe fitters, electricians, operators and other temporary staff safe when working in contaminated or radiation areas. These outages generally occurred every 12 to 18 months. I would go to school for a couple of quarters, run out of money, go work an outage, and go back to school.
While not directly involved in the outage planning, I had some exposure to it as I was involved in a concept known as ALARA, the acronym for As Low As Reasonably Achievable. This referred to sum of total radiation exposure received by all staff during the outage. The task was to both keep individual exposures and cumulative exposures as low as possible.
The first year I worked at the now decommissioned Trojan Nuclear Power Plant(1) in Rainier Oregon was in the late 1980s. The outage planning was done on a white board which stretched the entire length of a double wide trailer. A timeline was drawn on the whiteboard and tasks were ordered on the whiteboard with sticky notes, with task durations drawn in marker. Dependencies were noted with marker lines similar to how one would see on a PERT chart. Critical path was highlighted in bright red marker.
During the outage, each shift began with a gathering of the foremen for the various crafts and technical trades from both the off-going shift and the on-coming shift to discuss what had occurred the shift before, and what was expected during the oncoming shift, as well as critical issues, concerns or pressing matters. (Something to note for agile enthusiasts who believe they were the first to start doing scrums.)
That outage at that plant finished within a week of the original plan.
The next year they didn’t fare near as well. They had invested in what was then the top of the line PC, expensive project planning software, and a large format HP Plotter (before inkjet technology, one of the plotters with actual felt tipped pens). Outage shift turnover meeting were still held in the planning trailer, but the white boards went unused, except as a place to tape the plotted GANT charts onto. That year the outage ran significantly late, and significantly the ALARA (radiation exposure) over budget. I recall several instances of erecting scaffolding to service a piece of equipment, then decontaminating and removing it, only to have it erected again three days later to service a piece of equipment two feet away from the first one.
The next year, my third outage at that plant, the planning computer was gone, the plotter was gone, and the 50 foot of white boards with sticky notes were back. Even with some major challenges, the outage that year completed on time and under the ALARA radiation exposure budget.
The White Board Dance
This is an example of what I refer to as the White Board Dance. Yes, you can put all those tasks into a software tool, and yes it will make dependency scheduling easier, and yes you can schedule resources, and even print out very nice looking GANT charts. And those are important things to do. But the real art and science of project management is getting the right people talking about the right things at the right time, and the best way to do that is to engage them in the planning process. One very effective means of doing that is with white board planning.
When planning is done with sticky notes on a white board or butcher paper. The planners can discuss where each task belongs. The kinesthetic nature of drawing lines and moving real things makes it more than just an intellectual endeavor. In the case of this plant outage planning process, the visual nature of this activity invited questions and participation. During the outage, during shift turn-over meetings, the shift tasks were reviewed with the participants in a half circle facing the outage planner, and importantly the white board. During these activities it was not uncommon for someone to question why they were taking down scaffolding when, pointing to the sticky note two feet (and two days) down the board, asking why scaffolding would be taken down, and put back up in essentially the same location. The broader knowledge of the team was more fully engaged in the plan than is generally possible with a software tool.
Looking at this activity as a fly on the wall, it would sometime look like a choreographed mime or dance, with actors gesticulate at the sticky notes, moving in and out from the board, interacting with each other by physically pulling sticky notes off the wall, waving it at others, and placing it back. These are hard things to do when working off computer lists or printed GANT charts. This is the whiteboard dance.
I observed the same phenomenon at Hewlett-Packard. For one database migration project I was managing, I attempting to use Microsoft Project (because it is what good project managers were supposed to do). To create the project plan I had worked with my team to perform a work breakdown structure using sticky notes. These were then arranged in a PERT chart on the 9 foot long collection of white boards across from my cube. Every couple of days I would update the PERT chart across from me by crossing out in felt pen the sticky notes for the completed tasks, then diligently update the MS Project file and print out the updated GANT chart, posting it opposite the sticky note PERT chart.
A curious thing happened. People would walk by my cube, look at the sticky notes, and note, “Looks like you are making great progress.” If there was a problem or an obstacle, we would gather in the isle, and walk through the issues with the offending tasks, often pealing them off the white board to be used as talking points, only to be replaced, or moved to some more appropriate location in the PERT chart.
During that entire project, no one ever looked at my fancy GANT charts.
Alternatives Planning Dances
Of course, there are times when white boards and sticky notes just won’t work well, namely when you don’t have co-located teams. In these situations I have used on-line tools and spreadsheets with conference room projectors and webinar sessions to achieve similar results.
One of the most effective project managers I have ever worked with would run his project meetings through webinar software, using Microsoft Visio as the note keeping tool, essentially the equivalent of a virtual white board and sticky note fest.
While these tools are less effective than a white board and co-located team, if you stick to the same or similar principles found in using a white board, they can still be effective at facilitating the planning dance. The props in this planning dance can focus attention, the ability to zoom in or zoom out of a project space enable similar grand picture to detail pictures one gets from moving into, or away from a sticky note board.
I often use spreadsheets projected on a screen and a webinar session to facilitate this dance. I have a programming trick trick to create a bright yellow highlight on the current line of the spreadsheet so that the item of discussion is obvious both when projected or on a webinar. I make liberal use filters to zoom in, and charts when I want to zoom out.
The point of all of this is that while project management software can be valuable, the really valuable tools are the ones which facilitate conversation. Microsoft Project doesn’t do that very well. White boards and sticky notes, and yes, if used wisely, even Excel, can. Planning software is never a replacement for conversation however.
- The shutdown and decommissioning of The Trojan Nuclear Plant had nothing to do with project planning. It was shut down in 1993 when the cost of needed steam generator replacements were not economically justifiable in the highly political and hydropower rich region. The reactor vessel was removed in 1999, the cooling tower imploded in 2007 and final building removal, including containment, completed in 2008. The only remaining remnants of the original nuclear facility at the site are dry spent fuel storage casks, awaiting completion of a national spent fuel burial site or repository.