​​Always Learning

Transparency​​


Transparency: implies openness, communication, and accountability. Operating in a way that makes it easy for others to observe the actions being performed.

Is that you and your organization? Does your culture allow for transparency? 

Here is a quick way to determine that answer.
Do your Scrum teams know, and I mean truly know, what your management and executive teams are working towards? 

The beauty of being Agile and using Scrum is transparency. True visibility into the daily effort, iteration goals, and progress towards release. The simple artifacts and ceremonies in Scrum show what a team is doing every day, each Sprint and how the product is progressing towards release. All things in an Agile team, as it pertains to progress, is out in the open. Everything is visible and readily available for anyone that wants to know. 

As an organization, are you as open and accountable as you expect your teams to be?

If you want your teams to see that you can walk the walk, use the same methods that you require of them. Ensure your efforts are easily observed, communicated and accountability is inherent.
  • Show your work on a big visible information radiator. It can be something as simple as a big sheet of paper with the product roadmap or as fancy as a big screen monitor with a slide show of everything that's happening. It makes a huge difference to your teams knowing that you as a manager, executive or CxO are willing to walk and talk at the same level of transparency as they are. 
  • Work in Sprints. Iterative development isn't just for software. Create a backlog and plan what the management team or Board will be working on during each iteration.
  • Hold the same ceremonies as your teams. Daily Scrum, Planning, Review, Retrospective. You will be amazed at the benefits these bring. 
  • Use the same artifacts. Sprint Burndown, Sprint backlog, Product Backlog, Release Burndown. A release can be whatever you choose. I have seen the Sales team use market research as their released product. Each Sprint the Sales team commits to hashing out a portion the research.
  • Perform that demo just like those Scrum teams. At the end of each Sprint the Sales team can show that portion of the product they are creating. They get feedback from stakeholders and can carry that into their next Sprint.
  • The audience for these demonstrations should include each business unit. Don't forget about the developers. They're going to have to invent your stuff out of thin air so they have a stake in this too.
  • Always conduct a retrospective. Go over what went well, what didn't quite go as expected, and what could be improved next time. Choose a Kaizen! (An incremental improvement for which the entire team can commit.)

All teams gain true benefit by working in an Agile way. These are the actions you require your development teams to perform. If your Management and Executive teams perform work in this fashion they too will gain the same benefits as any development team. 

​Your Management and Executive teams will realize benefits working in a Scrum like fashion. Higher throughput and more efficient communications are only the beginning. The most significant benefit is that it will show the development teams how committed the organization is to being transparent. When they see the rest of the business doing it their way, the level of engagement within those teams will increase, productivity will increase, velocity will increase, time to market will be faster.


Being transparent isn't difficult. The difficulty is in laying aside the skepticism that it won't make a difference.   


Agile Yoda