How We Used a Gallery Walk to Build a Five-Year IT Roadmap
How do you get meaningful input from an entire IT department without getting everyone in the same meeting or hearing only a few of the loudest voices?
A few years ago, I faced that problem with a well-known consumer products company. The leadership team was creating a five-year IT roadmap and wanted input from developers, architects, business analysts, project managers and others across the whole department.
A survey would have been easier. But would people participate? And even if they did, would a survey spark creative thinking or surface the best ideas? Doubtful.
Instead, we ran a department-wide Gallery Walk.
How the Gallery Walk Worked
A Gallery Walk is a way to get asynchronous feedback from a small or large group of people while still encouraging people to react to and build on one another's ideas.
Post the system maps. We posted system diagrams and capability maps on the walls of a conference room. The diagrams included application names and key features, with enough technical detail for architects while still being clear enough for people who didn’t work with architecture diagrams every day.
Brainstorm and post improvement ideas. People worked in groups of four or five. We considered mixing specialties, but ultimately grouped peers together so they could brainstorm from their own use-case perspective. Over the course of the week, each group visited the room, reviewed the systems and applications, and added improvement ideas on sticky notes directly to the relevant diagrams.
Walk the gallery and build on ideas. By the end of the week, the walls were covered with ideas. You could see where people had made comments on other people's ideas or elaborated on those ideas with sticky notes of their own.
Vote on the strongest ideas. Groups were asked to return a final time to vote on the best ideas. We used dot voting: each group was given five stickers and asked to work together to place their stickers on the best improvement ideas.
Prioritize the results. Leadership reviewed the voting results alongside feasibility and organizational priorities. They ranked the ideas on a single list. The result was a single prioritized backlog shaped by input from across the IT department and strategic direction from leadership.
Turn priorities into the roadmap. Leaders worked with the IT department to develop high-level estimates for scope, effort, duration and feasibility. From there, they created a timeline showing what could realistically be delivered over the next five years and in what sequence.
The result was a five-year roadmap shaped not just by leadership priorities, but by ideas and input from across the IT department.
A Note for Agile Teams
This exercise took place before the company transitioned to Agile and before dedicated product teams owned these applications.
With product teams in place, much of this stakeholder outreach would normally happen continuously through Product Owners and their teams rather than in a one-time department-wide exercise.
That doesn’t make the Gallery Walk obsolete. A broader exercise like this can still help surface issues that cut across products, identify organizational impediments, gather feedback on the organization’s product structure or uncover opportunities that don’t fit neatly within an existing product.
Where the Gallery Walk Worked, and Where It Fell Short
It was definitely better than a survey. We heard more voices and had more thought-provoking discussion and got more creative input than we would have with a survey.
However, one limitation was that most of the creative discussions happened within individual groups. An idea from one group could not immediately spark creative discussion across the entire department.
Even with that limitation, the Gallery Walk is still one of my favorite ways to generate ideas from a large group without having to get everyone together at the same time, which can be difficult from a scheduling perspective. Pairing it with dot voting also gave us a practical way to move from a large pool of ideas to a smaller set of priorities.
Try a Gallery Walk With Your Team
Sometimes the best way to plan the future is to put the system on the wall and let the people who use it every day tell you what needs attention.
If you want to practice the Gallery Walk and other facilitation techniques, sign up for Rebel Scrum's Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills class. We'll work hands-on with techniques like 1-2-4-All, Affinity Mapping, Shift and Share, Fishbowl, and White Elephant, and other Liberating Structures.
The course also gives you a chance to earn the Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills certification from Scrum.org. Check it out. It really is a hidden gem.
