12:30 p.m.
Visual Management Essentials for High Performance Global Development Teams
  • Chad Mitchell HDD R&D Engineering Director
  • Timothy Schmalz HDD R&D Principal Engineer
  • Western Digital
Engineer lockdown and distancing has fosters team communication for persons and collaborative teams in different time zones, different countries and different cultural practices. The focus is project communication: people knowledge, project decision making, and the tasks resulting from decisions made to speed up workflow. The flow depends on making visual: the right people, the right (timely) knowledge, right decisions and integrated workflow. A robust visual management system enables collaboration so the team can see, learn and act. Chad Mitchell and Tim Schmalz will describe a few essential use cases that Western Digital Development have seamlessly allowed for in-person teams to switch to full remote. They will share the ongoing transformation of their team as well as examples of scaled-Agile. Virtual boards & software tools integration have allowed WDC to continue with the human engineering aspects without co-location. This method of interaction continues to enable personal ownership, decision enablement, and self-organizing teams whose true virtue is a highly functional team whose members can all work from home. Chad and his team along with their colleagues from Western Digital are continually improving usability and functionality that high performance teams rely on for their work.