Project management tools can be a great help in managing a project. They assist in workload balancing, help identify critical path, and help visualize project execution. One thing I’ve never found they do well is helping the elicitation process for the initial work breakdown structure, or for establishing an initial initial project implementation plan.
I’ve tried, using Microsoft Project, projected on a screen in a conference room, trying to collect tasks for an initial work breakdown structure. The typical outcome is maybe a couple dozen tasks. By contrast, when I use the Blue Wall method I’ll describe here, I get much richer results. In one case where Microsoft Project elicited 24 or so tasks, a subsequent Blue Wall method elicited nearly 300 actionable tasks.
The Blue Wall
The more common name for a Blue Wall Exercise is a sticky note fest. The concept is the same, the tool is slightly different. The problem with sticky notes is that they tend to curl as a result of being peeled off the sticky note pad. Because they curl, then tend to fall off butcher paper or white boards. One solution is to use full stick sticky notes. The downside of full stick sticky notes is that they stick so well, they are then hard to move around. A large magnetic white board, with 3×5 cards held on the board with small magnets works well also. A blue wall avoids the falling sticky note problem, doesn’t require a white board or magnets, and can be rolled up after the meeting to be taken back to your office to update a computerized PM tool.
A Blue Wall is a large sheet of ripstop nylon, with one side coated with spray-on repositionable photo mount adhesive. Once hung on the wall, it is easy to stick 3×5 cards, 4×6 cards, or even half sheet letter size pages on on the nylon, and because the adhesive is repositionable, the cards or sheets of paper are easy to move around.
The image here is an example of my blue wall in use. I chose blue nylon because it is a good contrast with the white card or paper stock I typically use. Unfortunately, any images I have of the blue wall in use for actual project planning contain information I cannot share, so in this particular image, it is being used for an affinity diagram, but the concept is the same, titles across the top, items placed on the sticky wall, which get moved around part of group discussion.
The critical point, regardless of medium you choose, is that the medium should be something which engages people in physically moving items around. There are tools like EverNote and some project tools which create virtual sticky note boards, and I’ve even seen Visio used for this, but I use these as an absolute last resort because they loose the important aspect of team member manipulating items themselves. I suppose you could use touch sensitive electronic tools, though I’ve not had the opportunity. The critical thing is that if it takes the facilitator to manipulate something, you have lost a great deal of the value of the tool.
The Blue Wall Process
I prepare the blue wall by creating cards, one each for each time period of the project schedule. I almost always use weeks, but you could do this as months or sprints for example. I add these to the top of the blue wall as a timeline as shown in the image here. Sometimes it makes sense to use actual dates on the cards, other times it makes more sense to do a T-n timeline, where n represents a time block. T-0 (tee minus zero) is go-live, the time blocks which precede it are labeled T-1, T-2, T-3 to T-n sequence, for as many time blocks as you expect the project to run.
Now that you have a timeline, you ask your project team to write down on 3×5 cards, or half sheet standard paper, all the things they can think of that need to be done to get to T-0. Give everyone 15 minutes or so to work by themselves or in small groups. When it looks like individual activity has settled down, ask for a volunteer.
Ask the volunteer to put their cards, one at a time, on the wall in the appropriate timeline location. As each card goes up, ask them to turn around to face the team, and describe what they are putting up, and why. This does a couple of things, first, it gives people who have duplicate tasks the chance to remove those from their card deck, and second, it is an invitation to ask questions. The rule is, one card at a time so other team members have a chance to process the content and placement of each card.
Note that the image here is conceptual, the cards shown contain only Lorem Ipsum, I can’t share any real project data for nondisclosure reasons.
When the first person has placed all their cards, before you let them sit down, ask the team if there are any questions and if the timing seems appropriate.
Follow this process for each person on the team.
What typically happens is that first set of cards goes up with little discussion, however as more cards go up, dependencies tend to pop up, requiring prior cards to be re-positioned. As cards go up, there will also tend to be clustering of cards at certain time blocks, which indicate high levels of effort for those time blocks. This may result in more re-positioning of cards to even out the workload.
When all cards are on the wall, it is time to do some analysis.
- Are there any tasks which will take more than a week (or other time period) to complete?
- Does every task have an accountable person?
- Are there dependencies between tasks?
- Are there risk factors which need to be considered?
My rule is always that if a task takes more than a week, it needs to be broken down into smaller tasks which can be completed in a week. The reason for this rule is to avoid the 90 percent problem. “Yes, this week I’m 90% done,” next week it is 95%, the week after that it is 97.5% and so on. Tasks are either complete are they are not. As Yoda advised in the second of the Star Wars movies, “There is only do, or do not, there is no try.”
Limiting task duration to a week also facilitates burn-down or burn-up carts during project execution. This will likely results in tasks being broken into multiple task cards, which will require re-positioning of cards on the timeline.
Each card needs an accountable person assigned. There is only ever one accountable person. They are held accountable for doing what is needed to get the task completed on schedule. There may be multiple people who work on the task, which may be fine, or it may be worth breaking those out to individual tasks so each task is the responsibility of only one person. This may lead to more repositioning.
Are there strong sequence dependencies in these, as in, you cannot do this work until scaffolding has be erected, which requires coordinating material delivery and crew, for example? If so, you can usually arrange cards to align the sequence similar to the way you would see it in a PERT chart. If you have a lot of these, it may be time to number each of the cards, and then note dependencies based on preceding task number.
The last thing I ask about is risk. Are there tasks on the board for which people have low confidence of completing in the assigned time block? If so, can and should those items be moved up earlier in the project schedule. I ask people to mark these with a red mark, and that often leads to more task reshuffling.
When all the tasks are on the board, I encourage everyone to actually get up and look at the board, to spend 10 minutes in talking with each other on the tasks, the timing, the risks.
At this point you should be pretty close to an actionable schedule. If you have a collocated team, you could manage your project entirely from the blue wall. This is often referred to as a form of Kanban board. I’ve never had the benefit of a collocated team, so at this point, I collect the cards in timeline and dependency order, (or I roll up the blue wall to take to my office) and transpose them into an actual project management tool. I then use that tool for managing regular project meetings and reporting.
What Makes this Work
The Blue Wall exercise is an active exercise which requires participation from all team members. It encourages questions and dialog. It drives home that it is the team who determines what needs to be done, not the project manager. The project manager’s role is primarily holding people accountable to their own commitments.
I think the reason project planning sessions with project management tools are less successful is that, for all but the project manager, the session is a passive activity. The only person actually “doing” something is the project manager. The blue wall exercise, by contrast, exercises the kinesthetic connection between how we move and how we think.
Even in situations where leading a project which was a near repeat of a prior project, I found the blue wall exercise to be critical. The first time I tried working directly off a prior project plan, I received little input on task ownership, schedule or learnings from the prior project. So I took all the tasks from the earlier project, printed them on business-card stock, and handed them to the team members corresponding to the accountable person of the prior project.
In the blue wall session, we went through the exercise again, each person placing a card, describing the task, and placing in the appropriate location on the timeline. In this case however, there was significant dialog. What worked well in the prior project, what should be changed, what ended up being high risk, what ended up being easier than expected. We ended up with a lot of cards, representing tasks from that prior project, in the trash. We also added a lot of new cards to the wall. We went from silence when working from a projected plan. to significant discussion when working with cards on a blue wall.
There are of course limitations to this technique. It probably won’t work if you are planning large high complexity projects, say the construction of an aircraft carrier. It may however be useful for planning subsections of those large projects. I have had very limited success in doing this with distributed teams and web based collaboration tools, unless I can get all team members in one location for the planning meeting, in which case, subsequent project meetings go much smoother.
This isn’t the cure all for project planning, but it is an effective process for eliciting a work breakdown schedule.