History

It all began at Ford Motor Company Light Truck Division in 1989.

Ford’s goal was to shorten the delay time for the development of new vehicles. The initiative was proposed to the employees to come up with improvements on the main processes which were critical to the development. After a year, the process and what actions needed to take place to reach the goals was clear to me. Each month, we had a top management briefing on the progress. Before each briefing, lot of time was spent on making the presentation looked good.

The top management quickly learned how to see through each presentation, but the presenters did not make it easy for the management by changing the layout of the presentation each month in order to make it look good and better than the actual result.

Why hiding it? Make it easy for the top management to understand and to ask the appropriate questions.  This change was received in a positive and successful manner. The experiences from Ford are now reused and transformed into our own Visual Strategy Visto method and product.

During the 1990s, Peter Kimber was heading the development of the base for planning and management on Ford Motor Company and Boeing in USA. By 2000, the Swedish Armed Forces started to use the method and tools. In cooperation with world-leading researchers from the Swedish National Defense College developed the Visual Strategy Visto software based on the quality-assurance philosophy “Quality Function Deployment.”