First of all, let me introduce myself. My name is Rodrigo Yoshima (@rodrigoy). I live in Brazil and my job is to help knowledge work companies to achieve better results using Lean/Agile practices. I've been working with software development for 16 years and for the past 2 years Kanban is the tool of my choice to help companies and teams on their Agile transitions, specially big companies.

One of the key properties of an efficient Kanban System is Visualization. Some of you may think that "this white board with stick notes is not that important", but, believe me, if you really want to change the way you work and the way you manage the physical Kanban is just unbeatable. Let's explain some points.

When I'm training people on Kanban I tell a story about the Vado's Repair Shop. Imagine that you're a knowledge worker. You woke up this morning, had a great breakfast with your family and when you're driving to your office you realize that your car's engine has a strange noise and suddenly come out some dark smoke. The car is still working so you drive to Vado's Repair Shop.

You know that Vado's shop has room for 5 cars inside it, and you see that he's got 3 more cars waiting outside. Intuitively you came to the conclusion that Vado will not help you today. Vado is full of work. You talked to Vado and he said that tomorrow he will be free. Unfortunately you had to drive back home and take a cab.

That day you and your boss decided to go to Paco's restaurant for lunch. The best in town. Right after entering the front door you face something like this:

Definitely this is not a good day! The restaurant is full and you got plenty of people waiting for a table. You and your boss patiently wait and use that time to talk about some problems (usually when you have lunch together you talk about how other teams affect your work, and blame about lack of processes).

After lunch you and your boss get back to the office. Then you face something like this:

I bet that your office looks like this one. You've got people, computers, gadgets, desks... You may have email and tasks tools. Maybe you use Lotus Notes. Maybe you use Outlook. Hence, your team definitely got some huge challenges. Probably you've got a lot of work to do, have been working in a lot of things and have delivered a lot of stuff recently. I'd like to ask you to take a look again at Vado's Repair Shop and Paco's restaurant pictures.

Now take a look at the office picture again and answer the questions below:

- How do you know what your team is building right now?
- How much work they are doing at the same time?
- Is there anything blocking the work or a bottleneck?

I guess that somehow you've already realized that one of the biggest problems of knowledge work is the lack of work visualization. Most of the work we do today are virtual pieces of something inside a computer. Our work is not cars entering a repair shop. It's not people having meals on a restaurant. It's not cans, notebooks, bicycles or furniture. Knowledge work suffer from a lack of demand and work visualization. Most of the knowledge work management problems come from this tiny detail: if you can't see it you can't manage it.

The big question is: How can I visualize the work like Paco and Vado? One of the solutions is to fill up a balloon for every demand your team receives. This is quite simple: every time a manager or product owner ask the team to build something you fill up a balloon and release it on the office floor. When you finish the job you just blow the balloon. You can use multiple sizes and colors for different types of demand. Probably you'll get something like this:

Now you (and your manager) can see how busy the teams are, right? If someone come up with a new demand (a balloon) he will go back to his desk frustrated just like you did when you arrived at Vado's shop.

Despite I never tried this "visual demand using balloons" for real, I'm really looking forward to run this experiment. I engage you to try this with your shop and write your experience about it. What I've been doing for real is to turn the demand into something visible and palpable using Kanban card walls.

Physical card walls transforms your environment into something similar to Vado's shop. The demand is visible. The problems, blocks and bottlenecks are visible. Work will not hide anymore on email boxes, memos or tools. The work must be explicit and public. The team will create some interesting and creative ways to visualize the demand and flow using index cards, post-its and stickers. The team will benefit from a incredible tool to promote self-management cross teams, creating a shared vision about the process from the idea to the delivery. Managers will gain knowledge about the System and will help to optimize the flow removing top-level impediments providing guidance and leadership. Kanban has huge psychological impact on both managers and team members. Several times I saw managers changing their mind-set from "Work! Work!" to "Flow! Flow!".

Those are the reasons why I do not believe eletronic Kanban tooling. FlowKaizen is the result of the challenges I've been facing as Kanban coach. Physical visualization is one of the most valuable properties of a successful Kanban implementation.