When VR first started getting into the reach of mainstream consumers, I was excited. I remember my first experience, riding down an elevator. I looked down at my hands, and when I wiggled my fingers in the real world, the VR fingers wiggled, too. It all matched up, and I felt my brain say “Yup, those are my hands.” It was a complete suspension of disbelief.
A lot of VR is currently centered around fun and games. I’ve been so immersed that my reflex system engaged and launched me into a very non-virtual, very real, very hard wall during a mishap with a virtual fighter plane. Everything but my pride was fine in that incident, but this got me to thinking… Can we utilize virtual reality to enhance our communication and digital articulation within the Agile coaching space?
I’ve got a few things that I’m researching and spending some think-time on right now, but the first of them is how we as coaches describe process problems to leaders.
I think a lot of diagrams try to describe multi-dimensional problems in two dimensions
In a two-dimensional diagram like Visio, Gliffy, etc, it would be hard to get a holistic overall picture that was meaningful. Often what I’ve seen is a process map for each of the horizontal slices of the process, or worse, a diagram that’s so large trying to fit everything in that it almost can’t be opened by your laptop. While creating Lean process diagrams for several teams inside of an insurance company – a lot of the difficulty and resistance from individuals to assembling those diagrams came down to frustration at the lack of information a diagram had. “It’s not a two-dimensional problem.” I would tell them. “YES!!! You get it!” They exclaim.
Another thought – the average human brain can retain seven (plus or minus two) things in short term memory. If we have Architecture, QA, Development, UX, and Project Management horizontal slices each with their own, we’ve already taken five of the slots before we’ve even dug into the problem. If you are an Agile coach trying to impart change on leadership that is happily horizontal, you are starting with a problem that’s already almost too big to describe in a way the brain can naturally grasp it. This, of course, assumes that your audience isn’t taking up those precious slots with weekend plans!
Can we use VR to make this easier?
So the thought occurred to me – can we use VR to better articulate what is happening when we ask teams for a feature? I spent some time putting my oculus to work and this was the result.
Now, if you’re inner Agile coach is screaming when you see this, that’s a good thing. Can you spot all the process issues?
I used an Oculus store application called Noda that is designed to create mindmaps, but I used it to create a fictional Flow to production Map, a spin on a Lean Process Map. It shows a fictional team, but follows a lot of patterns that I’ve seen. It captures a lot of hand-offs of a team that shows typical horizontal-slicing that occurs within enterprise teams that have not yet finished their Agile transformation.
The third dimension VR affords lets me do things like including the tools the development team is using but organize the blocks in such a way that when I look at the diagram head-on, those blocks are hidden and I just see the flow. But if I want to see what’s behind the curtain, I just need to duck my head around the block! That’s a lot better than, during a meeting, having to fish for another Visio tab or another slide in a slide deck.
The development process from an angle similar to that a traditional diagramming application would give. 
A write code node with defect returns heading into it. 
Behind the scenes of the development process.
Additionally, how many teams have described a process where they early on have to engage another upstream or downstream team and ask for a unit of work before they can continue their unit of work. with VR, we can take the diagram and map that process at a right angle to the main process we are mapping, showing an entire additional set of work that has to occur for this flow to production. Normally, that would go on another tab, the slide deck, or image. Now we can just turn our heads and see it. In this example, I show a database team being asked by the QA team for test data. When the inevitable question of “Why does it take the data team eight hours to get us a schema?” We can go through how the data team handles the request for that schema.
I think this does a lot better job of showing what happens when an organization makes a change and says “go”. The developers don’t just start coding – there’s architects, QA leads, and all sorts of activity that kicks off. Showing how far-reaching the change process gets and how quickly is powerful.
This is what makes me think that as virtual reality gets more and more accessible it can be used as a tool that can be used in everyday business to articulate difficult multi-dimensional problems.
But VR isn’t in the office – yet
It’s true, if I asked a client to purchase VR headsets for everyone in their engineering team, I would be laughed right out to the parking lot. I don’t think VR technology is enough of a commodity just yet for this to go get everyone into VR right now. But I think with the reality that virtual teams are here to stay, and a lot of new company being started without an office at all, that this technology is going to become more important and useful.
I think it’s reasonable to give the presenter or coach a headset, and to have it in their toolbox as a way to show complex problems that would be well served by having a third dimension and full immersion to present with – especially with the latest set of VR headsets like the Oculus Quest being fully stand-alone with no expensive gaming computer required behind it.
Even so, I recently demonstrated this map using Zoom to share the virtual space to a fellow agile coach, who had no issues seeing the 3D space. ” So it’s not a question anymore of “Do we have the technology.”. It’s now “How do we make it consumable for our audience.”
I think there is a lot of potential here – what are some of your thoughts? I’ de be interested to try this in the wild – any takers?
Check out the full image slide-show:
A standard process map node with value add and non-value add times. 
A VR flow to production diagram, looking from the start down to the finish. 
A look at the development process 
Overview of the process. Imagine this flattened in a 2D diagram. 
The data team has it’s own process to fulfill test data requests. 
A write code node with defect returns heading into it. 
A defect node in the developer flow. 
Behind the scenes of the development process. 
External teams engaging near deployment to production 
Looking from the end of the process.