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Obeya room planner
An obeya, Japanese for big room, is a room or a shared digital board where a cross-functional team keeps its goals, KPIs, project status, problems and actions on the walls, and meets there on a fixed rhythm to review them standing at the visuals. Both parts matter: a room full of charts that nobody reviews together is not an obeya. Page 1 of this planner sets up the room: what goes on each of five walls (purpose and targets, KPIs, milestones and projects, problems being solved, actions and escalations) with an owner and an update time for each, a squared sketch of the layout, the daily, weekly and monthly cadence, a weekly review agenda with example time boxes that add up to 30 minutes, the roles, the room rules and a wall check. Page 2 is the weekly review sheet: KPIs against target with an example green and red rule and weeks red in a row, problems with their A3 stage, actions, milestones and escalations, with a worked example. The Excel version holds the plan with a check that the agenda fits the meeting, a KPI wall for 12 KPIs over 13 weeks that turns each week green or red and counts the weeks red in a row, an action log with overdue flags and a milestone list with status and slip.
Free to use: print it, copy it and edit it for your team. Enter your name and work email once to download.
When to use it
When to use an obeya room planner
- When a program, launch or plant strategy has its goals, projects and KPIs in separate files and nobody reviews them together.
- When setting up a new obeya, to agree the walls, owners and meeting rhythm with the sponsor before the first review.
- When an existing obeya has turned into a wall of old charts, to cut it back to what drives decisions now.
- Every week, as the review sheet the team works through standing at the walls.
How to fill it in
- 1
Agree the purpose with the sponsor
Write what the room is for and the few goals and targets it tracks. Everything that goes on the walls should connect to them.
- 2
Plan the walls
Decide what goes on each wall and the order the review walks them, from purpose to actions. Sketch the room from above on page 1: walls, door, screens and where the team stands.
- 3
Give every wall an owner
One name per wall and a day and time it is updated by. In a digital obeya this matters even more, because no wall reminds anyone to update it in passing.
- 4
Set the cadence and the agenda
Fix the day, time and length of each meeting. The weekly agenda has six blocks that add up to 30 minutes in the example; set your own times and keep to them.
- 5
Run the weekly review on page 2
Fill in the KPIs before the meeting. In it, talk about the reds, the late milestones, the open A3s and the overdue actions, and write down what needs a decision from above.
- 6
Prune the walls
Once a month, take down what no longer drives a decision and check the room rules are kept. The Excel version shows which KPIs have been red for weeks.
What's on the planner
Obeya room rules and the wall check before each review
Eight rules to post on the door of the room, and five checks the facilitator makes before every review starts. Both are on page 1 of the planner and on the plan sheet of the Excel version.
Room rules
Post them on the door
- 1Each wall owner updates their wall before the review starts
- 2Stand at the walls and point at the visual you are talking about
- 3Talk about the reds and the late items; greens need no discussion
- 4Name the problem, not the person: every red gets a cause and a countermeasure
- 5Solve problems after the review, with the people who own them
- 6Every action leaves the room with one owner and a due date
- 7Start and end on time; the facilitator holds the time boxes
- 8Take down any visual that no longer drives a decision
Wall check before each review
Facilitator, before the start
- 9Purpose and targets are posted, current and signed by the sponsor
- 10Every KPI chart shows its target line and this week's point
- 11Every milestone shows its planned date and today's forecast
- 12Every open A3 shows its stage and its next step
- 13Overdue actions are marked, with the owner's new date
A filled-in example
Illustrative, not a benchmarkAn example: a plant obeya's weekly review on Thursday Oct 1, 2026, week 6 of the quarter (illustrative; the green and red rule and the limit of 3 weeks red are example values).
- Six KPIs on wall 2. OEE on the press line missed its 75% target in weeks 3 to 6 (73.8, 72.9, 73.5 and 72.4%): 4 weeks red in a row, past the limit of 3, so it gets an A3.
- First pass yield in assembly fell to 97.9% against 98% (1 week red) and customer complaints were 2 and 3 against at most 1 (2 weeks red): both owners bring a countermeasure. On-time delivery was 95.0% in week 4, equal to the target, which counts as met.
- Near misses reported (9 against at least 8) and on-time delivery (96.4%) are green. Overtime was not reported this week, so it shows no data and its run of red weeks stays at 0.
- Actions: 8 logged, 3 done (2 by the due date), 2 open, 2 overdue by 7 and 6 days, and 1 with no due date. Milestones: 1 done, 1 done 3 days late, 1 late, 1 at risk with a 14-day slip on the second die cart, and 2 on track.
In week 6, 2 of the 5 KPIs reported are green (40%). The review spends its 8 KPI minutes on the three reds, opens the OEE A3, and asks the owners of the two overdue actions for new dates before anything new is added.
Common mistakes
Covering every wall
An obeya shows the few visuals that drive this team's decisions, not every chart the plant has. The more charts there are, the harder the reds are to see.
A room without a rhythm
Walls that nobody reviews together on a fixed day are a display, not an obeya. Put the meetings on the calendar before the walls go up.
Walls nobody owns
A wall without a named owner goes stale within a few reviews, and then the team stops trusting the whole room.
Two sets of numbers
A separate deck for leadership drifts away from the walls. Run the monthly or quarterly review in the obeya, on the same visuals the team uses every week.
Download the template
Free to use: print it, copy it and edit it for your team. Enter your name and work email once to download.
Run this template in LeanSuite
In LeanSuite, Lean Studio is a whiteboard with 30 ready-made lean boards and 15 live data widgets, such as a scorecard of KPIs against their targets and embedded Power BI or Looker reports, so the huddle, the kaizen event and the strategy review run from one screen.
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