Agile Transparency

Why is transparency essential?

You can’t learn, lead, or change what you can’t see. This truth sounds basic, but I frequently see leaders and organizations harmed because of a lack of visibility.

Here are some symptoms of low levels of transparency

• The overall direction and goals are unclear to most of the team or organization.
• Two teams are working on the same thing without knowing it or communicating.
• Team members don’t understand how their work impacts others’ work.
• Leaders don’t understand what the doers do.
• Leaders aren’t aware of the implications of the decisions they make.
• Teams building products don’t know what the customer thinks about them.
• Teams building products don’t know what the stakeholders think about them.

As you can see from the list, transparency matters because it highly correlates with clarity and understanding.

When teams or leaders can’t see or don’t understand what others are doing, they don’t have empathy. And without empathy, things break down pretty quickly, even becoming adversarial within the team or organization.

How does Scrum make things visible?

Scrum addresses the lack of visibility through four strategies.

1. Prioritization of value.
2. Clarity about current reality.
3. Commitment regarding deliverables.
4. Cadence of visibility

Scrum provides clarity about the current reality

Scrum helps you know where you are through four of its events.

• Sprint planning
• Daily Scrum.
• Sprint retrospective.
• Backlog refinement.

Sprint planning.

The sprint begins with the product owner sharing the vision for the new sprint and the development team creating an initial plan to reach that vision. The four fundamental questions of sprint planning are:

1. What is the goal for this sprint?
2. How does that goal make the product better?
3. What work are we committing to complete during this sprint?
4. How will we use this week to complete the work?

As the team works through these questions, a sprint goal is set, work is moved from the product backlog to the sprint backlog, and the team verbalizes their initial plan for the sprint.

The Scrum team is self-organizing, which means they have significant freedom to identify how they will solve the problem and deliver the solution.

All these actions create visibility and shared understanding within the team and are transparent to other stakeholders outside the group.

The daily scrum.

Sometimes called the daily standup, the daily scrum is a brief 15-minute meeting where the whole team checks in. It’s usually structured around each person answering three simple questions.

1. What did I complete yesterday?
2. What will I focus on completing today?
3. Where am I stuck?

This simple rhythm of daily check-ins makes the team aware of everyone’s current reality.

But this meeting isn’t just a status update, and it’s not for people outside the team. It is a time for the team to take that shared understanding and further clarify what they need to do next to complete the work they prioritized at the beginning of the week.

Sprint retrospective.

When the sprint ends, the team holds a retrospective to evaluate how they are doing as a team. The focus is on the health and functioning of the group.

Here are some questions I like to use:

• What did you like?
• What did you learn?
• What was lacking as a team?
• What do you long for on the team?

The retrospective provides clarity regarding how’s our team doing right now. How often have you been on a team where big or small issues went unaddressed for too long.

Imagine being part of a team that keeps short accounts and honestly works through things together to become the best team they can be.

Backlog refinement.

Backlog refinement is a little more about the future, but it provides clarity about what we currently think about the future ;)

This may sound a little silly, but consider how often two people have different ideas about what will be done next or what it will take to do it?

During backlog refinement, the team reviews product backlog items (PBIs) to ensure there is enough shared understanding that the team can take action when they select the PBI in a future sprint.

The backlog is the one source of truth regarding what’s prioritized.

The needed supporting information and resources are identified and visible within the PBI. The team also uses tools like user stories and acceptance criteria to clarify the goal for the PBI and how they will know if it was successful. They will discuss how much work it will take to complete the PBI and measure it using story points.

What’s planned for the next sprint isn’t static, it can still be changed, but the current plan is clear and visible.

Scrum requires a commitment to deliver

Have you ever missed a deadline only to discover nobody noticed? When others don’t see a commitment, it fails to be much of a commitment.

People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.
_{Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.}

There are three factors that Scrum’s approach to commitments increases visibility.

1. Sprint review.
2. Backlog refinement.
3. Self-organizing teams.

Sprint review.

As the sprint ends, the Scrum team gathers with stakeholders to review what they produced.

The product owner will facilitate feedback and accept or reject the work done according to the user story, acceptance criteria and the definition of done. If changes are needed, the product owner can add them to the backlog for the following sprint.

The Scrum team collectively owns their commitments.

Not only are the team's commitments visible at the beginning of the sprint via the sprint backlog, but they are also evaluated with transparency at the end of the sprint.

Backlog refinement.

During backlog refinement, the team works to clarify each PBI to ensure there is clarity regarding what they are committing to if they select the work in a future sprint. When a PBI has been refined, there should be no ambiguity about what it will mean to complete and deliver it.

Self-organizing teams.

The Scrum team doesn’t have a “leader.” This reality might be one of the hardest for managers to grasp early in the process. The Scrum team is self-organizing, which means they have significant freedom to identify how they will solve the problem and deliver the solution.

When coaching new teams, we work a lot on moving from I or you to we. It’s no longer I need to get this done, or you made a mistake. It becomes we need to find a way to finish, or we need to correct this.

The Scrum team collectively owns their commitments.

Scrum creates a cadence of visibility

Everything is in a constant state of change, which is why transparency isn’t a one-time event. You need to develop a rhythm and cadence to visibility.

The Scrum events help to create that cadence. Let’s take a closer look at the role each play in transparency.

• Sprint planning. The team visible moves work from the product backlog to the sprint backlog. The product owner communicates the sprint goal, and the development team responds by communicating their plan for reaching that goal.
• Daily scrum. Every day each team member makes their status visible to the rest of the team.
• Backlog refinement. Every week the team refines part of the backlog making the requirements and supporting information more visible.
• Sprint review. The work completed during the sprint is visible to any and all stakeholders. What is being accepted by the product owner is also being made visible.
• Retrospective. As the team focuses on how well they work together, they create transparency around how their processes and behaviors impact each other.

As you can see, the events in Scrum each play a role in creating transparency. When they occur in sync, they build a cadence of visibility where you can help but evaluate and improve. More on that in a minute.

3 strategies you can level up transparency and make things more visible

Whether you’re already practicing Scrum or just considering it, here are three actionable steps to level up transparency.

1. Identify the people.
2. Craft the questions.
3. Place them on the calendar.

Identify the people.

As we saw earlier, each role in Scrum contributes to creating and maintaining transparency. Do you have people to play these key roles?

• Product owner.
• Scrum master.
• Development team.

Individuals can play multiple positions if needed for a season, but ideally, you work toward having individuals dedicated to a role. The one exception is being both the scrum master and product owner simultaneously. I would not recommend that.

So whether your context is wanting to deliver content consistently or getting home projects done, identify who will play these critical roles.

Craft the questions.

I’ve provided suggested questions to ask at crucial moments like sprint planning, the daily scrum and the retrospective. You can use them as-is. No need to adapt. But if you want to nuance them a little or add a question, the key is to decide, “these are the questions we’re committing to asking at these times.”

Place it on the calendar.

When will this happen? If you want to see an increase in transparency, you must make time for it.

I recommend starting with 1-week sprints because most people's lives already orient around a weekly cadence. So a weekly schedule would look something like this.

Choose your times, create a calendar event, and invite your team.

Now that you’ve taken steps to increase visibility, it’s time to evaluate what you see. From there, you’ll decide what needs to change.

This process repeats as you and your team grow in focus and effectiveness.

Scrum is a framework for organizing a team around the work of solving problems. Scrum makes the work more visible, so we can better evaluate and adapt.

These three pillars of Scrum are essential to an effective team.

• Transparency
• Inspection
• Adaptation

Continue to explore these pillars of Scrum or check out everyday scrum if your want a deeper dive into how to practice Scrum in your everyday life.