Obeya Room – Digital vs. Physical: What works best?

By Published On: March 16, 2021

The office as we know it has changed severely over the last year. Remote working is here to stay. Obviously this has had an impact on the use of visual management and Obeya Rooms.

We see organizations replicating their physical Obeya Room in online whiteboard collaboration tooling such as Mural or MIRO. Or we see companies starting out with Obeya digitally from scratch, without ever having had the full blown experience of a physical Obeya.

So what are best practices in setting up a digital Obeya? And what are the pros and cons considering digital vs physical Obeya Rooms?

“A digital Obeya really speeds up starting to work with Obeya. No more hassle in finding the right room or walls in the office to claim as the Obeya.”

Upsides of using a Digital Obeya

  • A digital Obeya really speeds up starting to work with Obeya. No more hassle in finding the right room or walls in the office to claim as the Obeya. No more printjobs and putting paper on a wall. Anyone can join anytime. So all of this makes it really easy to start working with Obeya quickly.
  • We have had multiple, geographically dispersed, teams working simultaneously on the same wall. That would have been a real challenge had we tried this physically in one room!
  • It is much more easy and fast to design and redesign your walls in a digital environment than in the physical world.

Build your Digital Obeya

AgileWalls.com

Pitfalls of using a digital Obeya

Although there are many benefits working with a digital Obeya, there are some pitfalls to take into account:

  • Missing out on ‘live’ face-to face communication. No matter the quality of the visuals in your Obeya: The real magic of Obeya lies in the exchange of information through real face to face conversations.

Using video conferencing tooling it is easy to miss the non-verbal communication through body-language, which takes up to 55% of all communication (Mehrabian, Albert (1972). Nonverbal Communication). In my personal experience; sometimes real conversations and people are reduced to ‘voices in my ear’ while I am focussing on something else on my screen. Behaviour I would never show in a face-to-face situation!

  • Losing sight of the big picture. Inifinity whiteboards are awesome… However, we also miss the choices we are forced to make when we have to take the physical restrictions of Wall space into account.

We have seen digital Obeya’s that are so packed with milestones, metrics, data and information that we would be totally lost and miss seeing the big picture that we are used to see in a physical Obeya.

About AgileWalls

AgileWalls is on a mission to make life easier and collaboration more effective. Good visual management leads to better collaboration. Using modular design as basic principle we can bring great visual management to your doorstep. Both physical and digital.

PHYSICAL OBEYA SOLUTIONS

The AgileWalls concept consists of modular, easy fix Wall Elements that can be combined to design and build physical Obeya’s.

Image source: AgileWalls - https://agilewalls.com

DIGITAL OBEYA SOLUTIONS

AgileWalls uses tried and tested designs and structures on online collaboration tooling such as iObeya, Miro or MURAL. The modular Obeya Set-up is ready to use and aided by our experience, you are up to speed in just a couple of iterations. AgileWalls:

  1. Transforms a existing Obeya’s to a digital one
  2. Build custom Obeya’s from scratch.

Once the design of the Obeya is satisfactory, it is really easy to convert the digital Obeya into a physical Obeya.

Digital Obeya Room by AgileWalls

Source: AgileWalls.com

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