What is an information radiator in Agile?
Simply put, it is a screen or board in a prominent place that provides information – i.e. radiates information. This information can be status information – alerts, monitoring graphs, build status including unit test results, automated tests, SLA status, or other information on upcoming events, experiments the team is working on, team mood, birthdays, or other team events.
Many teams have a large TV screen on a wall connected to a laptop or Raspberry Pi that displays the status of the build pipeline, the status of the services in production, and alerts. The information displayed is a dashboard from a tool such as Grafana or DataDog.
For other information radiators, a large piece of paper with hand-drawn notes is perfect, especially for the team to see upcoming events, upcoming vacations, team experiments, plus kudos awarded to team members. This can be the easiest place to start if you want to try it out before investing in large screens.
Another common information radiator in Agile is a Kanban Board or ‘Scrum Board’, which can be either a virtual board if the team used a tool such as Jira, Asana, ClickUp or Monday.
Another term used for Information Radiators in XP is Big Visible Chart (BVC). Ron Jeffries has a great article on BVCs.
What is the purpose of an information radiator?
Information radiators promote visibility and transparency. By having the information in a prominent place for the team, they can have important information available at all times. At the same time, it is available for all people who visit the team’s area, including management and customers. This also promotes transparency, showing that there is ‘nothing to hide’ by only sharing the current status of important metrics in PowerPoint updates, or on intranet pages visible only to the team.
Information Radiator Examples
Team Achievements of the Week
Teams should celebrate the wins and learn from the failures. A good way to ensure the team celebrates is to highlight the wins and achievements at the end of the week. A small meeting, or as part of the daily scrum or standup is ideal for this exercise. Each team member can write down a win they had, share it with the team, and place it on the board or wall.
Dashboards
Dashboards are essential tools for most teams. For development teams, the dashboard can show the status of the build pipeline, plus other important information. For DevOps teams, there might be two or more boards to show not only the build pipeline, but the status information of the services in production. Dashboards also benefit other teams in the organisation, as they can show the status of leads in the sales pipeline, the status of campaigns, patient status information, and so on.
Team Experiments
After a team retrospective, it is a good idea to take an experiment and put it on an information radiator on the wall so the team can see it and refer to it as they conduct their experiment.
Kanban Board
A Kanban board is the perfect example of an information radiator. A Kanban board has a column for each major step in the team’s workflow, and also includes the Work-in-progress limit, or WIP limit. It serves as a reminder that focus produces flow and productivity, whilst starting and not completing many tasks impedes flow and impacts productivity.
Who is the intended audience of an information radiator?
There are several groups of people that benefit from the information on an information radiator. These are the development team, the product owner or product manager, designers, stakeholders, and customers. If they all understand the benefits of openness and transparency, information radiators are a powerful communication tool.
The development team benefit because important information is available in front of them, all the time. If the team is running DevOps, then having a dashboard showing the health of production, build pipes, etc. ensures they can identify and correct issues earlier. Having a Kanban Board on the wall provides a focal point for their standups or daily scrum, plus if anyone is curious what the team is working on, what blockers they have, how much work is in their backlog, and so on, then that information is right there on the wall.
It might take some coaching of some individuals to understand the purpose of sharing the information transparently so that by sharing information and challenges the team is not impacted by stakeholders who freak out by red indicators on a dashboard (it happens!!) – used wisely it can help to develop trust because of this openness. The challenges the team is facing are visible for all to see, and stakeholders can ask questions, and possibly even help if they understand the challenge and remove blockers and impediments to the team’s progress.
What is an information refrigerator?
For an information radiator, the information you are after should be transparently visible in the organisation, easily found and understandable. However there are certain types of information that are best stored or displayed in a medium that is harder to find, is secured, or requires interpretation – this information is stored in an information refrigerator.
Is the Scrum Board an Information Radiator?
The Scrum board is a good example of an information radiator. The Scrum board comes from the Kanban board, and is a good way for the team to make their work visible to themselves and to stakeholders around them.
What does an Agile Information Radiator ensure?
An information radiator ensures that the information is visible and available to the team. It promotes transparency and conversation about the status of the team’s work. This helps the team discuss and prioritise their work.
