Developers and DevOps teams must manage many moving parts to deliver an exceptional product on time. Developers have adopted effective tooling such as Jira and Asana to manage and facilitate structured collaboration. But when teams need to solve problems that require creative thinking and don’t have a predetermined outcome — such as determining the goals for the next sprint, understanding the user flow, or brainstorming ideas for a new product — standard conferencing and messaging tools don’t provide enough support.
Visual collaboration is a new category of tools that facilitates and enhances fluid, roll-up-your-sleeves collaboration between team members, whether they are physically together or connecting virtually. During the course of a discussion, it’s simple for team members to visually represent and connect systems, practices, and next steps. Through diagramming and whiteboarding, participants produce a record that’s easily accessible to everyone, and as the conversation continues, changing these diagrams is just as easy. Even more powerful, in some tools, AI can pitch in to create diagrams or help sort, filter, summarize, and refine ideas.
Since visual collaboration tools are an emerging category, however, it may not be immediately obvious how development teams could take advantage of them. Here are four examples:
- Ranking and visualizing aggregate responses: Visual collaboration tools can identify conflicts that are hard to ferret out in other mediums. Let’s say the team is determining which features to develop in the next sprint for a new product. Two of the participants said that building shopping cart capability should be the aim of the next sprint, while the rest of the team ranks it near the bottom, an insight that can spark an important discussion.
- Starting from scratch: Starting from a blank page can be very hard. AI-powered visual collaboration tools can create a diagram from a simple prompt, such as “Create a user flow diagram that has the following characteristics.” From there, the team can easily adjust, expand, and edit the diagram until the team creates a user flow that works for the project.
- Clarifying complex processes: Sometimes, the problem isn’t staring at a blank page but rather having far too much information to process. In this case, intelligent systems can connect to other data sources and visually represent the content, giving the team a much more intuitive grasp of processes.
- Visualizing infrastructures: Let’s say the team is about to start working on a mobile app, and they need a diagram of the data flows and what’s nested within AWS. Intelligent systems can analyze the cloud infrastructure and produce a diagram automatically. But this capability is not limited to IT infrastructures. You could just as easily import an org chart and view it by scrum teams to highlight all the senior engineers or people who possess specific skill sets.
Lucid provides advanced and intuitive visual collaboration tools to nearly every Fortune 500 company, enabling them to increase productivity, become more efficient, and collaborate more effectively in hybrid teams and with other departments. In fact, an ROI study conducted by Forrester showed a 410% ROI over three years and more than three-quarters of a million dollars of savings in operating expenses.
For more information on how Lucid can help your teams collaborate more effectively, visit lucid.co.
