Information Radiators: Visibility Without More Meetings
A great deal of project communication exists to move information that people could simply see. Status calls, update emails, the twenty minutes at the start of a meeting spent establishing where everything is: all of it is transmission, and most of it can be replaced by putting the state of the work somewhere people already walk past.
Section 5 of the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition includes visual and communication techniques among the tools available, and the idea is simple enough to be dismissed as trivial. Executed properly, it removes meetings; executed carelessly, it produces wallpaper.
What makes a display a radiator
It answers one question. What is ready to start, what is blocked, where has the work reached, who is on site today. A display carrying four questions answers none of them at a glance, and the glance is the whole point: somebody walking past at normal speed should take the state away with them.
It sits where the work happens. Not in the programme manager's office, not on a shared drive, but at the door people come through, in the corridor between the office and the plant, above the bench. Visibility is physical, and a radiator that requires a decision to go and look at it has already failed.
It is updated by the people doing the work. A board maintained by a reporting function is a report that happens to be on a wall, and it will be a day late from the beginning. A board that the team moves itself stays current because being wrong on it is immediately visible to the people standing next to it.
Two ways they stop working
They go stale. A radiator that is three days out of date teaches everybody to check elsewhere, and once that habit forms it does not come back when the board is brought up to date. Currency matters more than completeness: a board showing three current things beats one showing twelve things as they were last Tuesday.
They get overloaded. Somebody adds a useful column, then another, and within two months the display carries everything anybody has ever asked for and communicates nothing. The discipline is subtraction: anything that has not caused a conversation in a month comes off.
A daily call and a corridor board
A terminal shutdown ran a daily coordination call at half past five each evening, twenty-five people dialling in for about forty minutes, most of which was establishing what had finished that day and which permits and isolations were in place for the morning.
The call existed because that information lived in four places: the permit office, the planning system, the discipline supervisors' notebooks and the scaffolding contractor's own sheet. Nobody could see all four, so everybody met to be told.
What replaced it was a board at the corridor junction outside the planning office, where everybody passed on their way to and from the plant. A grid of hooks, one column per discipline, a numbered tag for each work package, and three positions: ready, in progress, complete. Tags were moved by the supervisors themselves as they came off shift, which took each of them about ninety seconds.
The call was cut to fifteen minutes and then to ten, because the state was already known by everybody who walked past, and the remaining time went on exceptions. Two weeks in, the board caught something the call never had: one discipline's column stood stripped bare at eight in the morning while the others were full, which meant a crew had not started, and it was seen by three people in the first hour rather than being reported at half past five.
The board was kept for the next two turnarounds. Its only rule was the one that had been broken on a previous attempt, when a planner had maintained it on the supervisors' behalf and it had drifted two days out of date inside a fortnight.
Choosing what to radiate
Start from the questions people keep asking. Whatever gets asked three times a day is the first candidate, and answering it on a wall saves the asking and the answering both. The pattern of questions is a better guide than any view about what should be tracked.
Prefer state to history. A radiator shows how things are now; trends and history belong in reports where people can study them. Mixing the two produces a display that is neither glanceable nor analysable.
For a PMP® candidate, the point to hold is that visible information reduces the need to transmit it, so a scenario where a team meets frequently to share status is describing information that could be displayed. A response that improves the meeting keeps the transmission cost. Situations where the communication problem has a physical answer turn up more than once in a structured PMP exam preparation course.
Pick the question your project answers most often this week and put it on a wall by the door, in a form somebody can update in under two minutes. Then watch whether the asking stops. If it does not, the board is in the wrong place or answering the wrong question, and both are cheap to change.
Interested in going further?
A surprising share of project meeting time exists to move information that could simply be visible. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through communication as something to design rather than schedule.
Visual and communication techniques are among the tools in the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
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References
A187: Retrospectives That Lead to Change
A178: SWOT Analysis in Project Management
A180: Facilitation Techniques for Difficult Project Conversations
A161: Expected Monetary Value Explained
A182: Multicriteria Decision Analysis Explained
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