Virtual Sticky Notes

Tools of the Trade

I spend a lot of my time with sticky notes in workshops, helping organisations run better.  There are two parts to my job.

1. Working out what needs fixing
2. Persuading people to fix it

Part 1: Working out what to fix

This bit is straightforward.  You work on the gaps.  People are very good at optimising their own little bit of the process, but most processes run across several departments. Failure is in the handoffs. 

What is good for one department — a nice well-ordered queue of work with service level agreements and clear rejection criteria — isn’t nearly so good for the customer.  That poor fool has to wade his way through four or five departments, with for or five queues. Each will have different reject reasons and mismatched SLAs.

It takes a persistent customer to make it through.

Improving a process is easy, draw it up — stick a lot of Post-it Notes on a piece of brown paper —  and have a good look at it.  Once you have done that the opportunities will be obvious.

Part 2: Persuading people to fix it

The second bit of the job is much more difficult.  There is plenty of departmental ego buried in those SLAs and targets (not to mention performance ratings and bonuses). 

Even then, a well-structured piece of brown paper, with a confusion of Post-it Notes sprayed all over it, is invariably enough to persuade even the most cynical departmental manager that there has to be a better way.

The fly in the ointment

This only works if you can get:

1. A group of people in a room
2. A piece of brown paper on a wall
3. Post-it Notes in everybody’s hot sticky hands
4. A conversation flowing

This is not so easy in today’s lockdown world.  When you have a facilities manager bristling at the cost of “deep cleaning” the meeting rooms, or worse, a bunch of delegates spluttering over each other, things are never going to go well.

The solution

There is a website called Mural that provides virtual sticky notes.  You can find it at https://www.mural.co/.

With an internet connection, a teleconference and Mural, a group can play with their virtual sticky notes, reposition them, vote on them and change their colours to their heart’s content.

It is brilliant, I wish I had invented it, I wish I was being paid to plug it — I am not, but I am open to offers. 

You should give it a go. 

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Image by thierry.genevois