When the city of Gotham needs Batman, they will project the Bat-logo high into the sky for
everybody to see. Including Batman himself. Wherever he will be, he will get the information without a doubt (Unless it is clouded, he is locked in the Batcave, or gets problems with his eye-sight). The lesson from Batman is: to get information to people without locating them first, put it central enough so the changes that they get it, increases.
The agile community provides us with the concept of “information radiators”:
“An information radiator is a large display of critical team information that is continuously updated and located in a spot where the team can see it constantly… Information radiators help amplify feedback, empower teams and focus a team on work results.” from AgileAdvice
You can see some great examples in this article about Kanban boards.
Because of its “in your face” location it coordinates the movements of the team automatically. Team members can see instantly what they have to do next. This process is transparent, all the team members have the same information and therefor the same view on project reality. The social process of the team takes care that people who are lacking behind are assisted to keep up the pace, and if someone is taking a wrong turn the teams [TAG-Tec]collective intelligence[/TAG-Tec] can be used to correct this. So information radiators are all about feedback, empowerment and focus.
In essence this way of communication is really broadcasting; information from one member of the group is communicated to all other members. But the mechanism used is more of satellite broadcasting: you beam it up to one central place and the masses can consume it.
Tags: agile, broadcasting, collective-intelligence, information-flow, information-radiators, kanban, multicasting
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[...] not the kind of information you want your team to be staring at from day-to-day. That’s not in your face information! We live in a time where development teams use Continuous Integration systems to communicate Build [...]