Visual Project Board (Intralinks UX Team)

As our team at Intralinks grew, we needed a way to keep in communication with fellow team members--as we often worked on a diverse range of projects and seldom had time to interact. The previous strategy was to have a daily "stand-up" which consisted of going around the room (or phone) and each person listing off what they were working on and what work they had coming up. As I observed my colleagues, I noticed that many said their update and then disengaged (checking email, texting)--due to the long meeting time of what seemed nothing more than a glorified daily status update. I felt that no one was benefitting from the meeting and people often felt the need to "embellish" their status in an effort to sound "busy" to their managers. In an effort to selfishly ease my own dread of the daily check in, I conceived this project.

In the spirit of Agile/Scrum boards, I decided to make a board for our UX team that accomplished the following:

• Quick & easy daily "walking of the board" focused on PROJECTS not individual efforts

• Cross-team communication to keep us all "in the know"--especially for projects we weren't involved in--good for not duplicating design efforts for common requests coming from multiple sources or establishing consistency in interaction patterns
• Easy to update

• The ability to see the "status" of projects at a glance (no more daily & weekly status reports!)

• Socialized to other team and upper management the projects we were working on

• Make it easy to schedule resources

I am particularly proud of this project due to the fact that no one asked for it or even knew they wanted it, but I credit myself with the ability to see a problem and propose a tactical strategy and process to address it.

Visual Project Board: Concept

This is the concept that I presented to our team for feedback and input. Our VP of UX presented this to gain upper management buy-in.

Visual Project Board: In Action

Here's the board in action. Due to the large number of projects; Research, Tech Writing, Upcoming projects, vacation, design lunch topics, etc. were moved to the back of the board.