Developers and DevOps teams must manage many moving parts to deliver an exceptional product on time. Developers have adopted powerful tools like 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 goals for the next sprint, understanding user flow, or generating ideas for a new product), standard messaging and conferencing tools don't work. . Does not provide enough support.
Visual collaboration is a new category of tools that facilitates and improves fluid and fast collaboration between team members, whether they are physically together or connected virtually. During the course of a discussion, it is easy for team members to visually represent and connect systems, practices, and next steps. Through diagrams and whiteboards, participants produce a record that everyone can easily access, and as the conversation continues, changing these diagrams is just as easy. Even more powerful is the fact that in some tools AI can collaborate to create diagrams or help sort, filter, summarize and refine ideas.
However, since visual collaboration tools are an emerging category, it may not be immediately obvious how development teams could take advantage of them. Here are four examples:
- Sorting and displaying aggregated responses: Visual collaboration tools can identify conflicts that are difficult to discover in other media. Let's say the team is determining what features to develop in the next sprint for a new product. Two of the participants said that building shopping cart capability should be the goal of the next sprint, while the rest of the team placed it near the end, an idea that could spark important discussion.
- Starting from scratch: Starting from a blank page can be very difficult. 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 ccomplex processes: Sometimes the problem is not staring at a blank page but having 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 understanding of the processes.
- Visualizein g infrastructureyes: Let's say the team is about to start working on a mobile app and needs a diagram of the data flows and what's nested in AWS. Intelligent systems can analyze the cloud infrastructure and produce a diagram automatically. But this capability is not limited to IT infrastructures. You can also easily import an org chart and view it by scrum teams to highlight all senior engineers or people who possess specific skill sets.
Lucid provides advanced, intuitive visual collaboration tools to nearly every Fortune 500 company, enabling them to increase productivity, be more efficient, and collaborate more effectively across hybrid teams and with other departments. In fact, a Return on investment study conducted by Forrester showed a 410% return on investment in three years and more than three-quarters of a million dollars in operating expense savings.
To learn more about how Lucid can help your teams collaborate more effectively, visit lucid.co.