Flying Blind or Flying Blinded?

Transparency is a central principle of agile working. However, the pursuit of transparency can physically manifest itself in many forms and they're not always necessarily good or useful. In practice I often see the two extremes of the spectrum, a total lack of transparency through to possible sensory overload from overly excessive, illy considered and poorly implemented visual management and other techniques.

The former is a case of flying blind without the ability to see how things stand, the current state of play, where we've been and where we might be heading. In an attempt to counter this teams often find themselves in the opposite space of flying blinded where there's just too much information and detail to absorb. The outcome though is similar, a lack of ability to see and understand where we are and what's going on around us.

Flying Blind

This scenario is pretty straightforward to spot. Take a walk into the team area, take a look around and there's probably not much to see. No visual indicators of what work is in progress or board to indicate the status of the work. Furthermore, there might not even be an electronic or tool based visualisation you can take a look at. The team are simply drifting along, although some of them may profess to have everything stored in their head.

"We don't need any boards or anything else, we know what's going on" they might say.

At the very least most members of this team probably have a unique interpretation of what's going on and of where things are heading.

Furthermore, in a wider context, the organisation also has little idea of what's going on. There's no view of work in the backlog, priorities, estimates, progress to date or anything else.

"You'll get it when you get it" is often the extent of any progress reporting in place. Sure, that may technically indeed be true although it's not particularly useful. In return I've seen organisations react to this by demanding all sorts of measures and artifacts, most of it as equally ill considered as providing no information at all; detailed backlogs, detailed story breakdowns, low level estimates for everything, burn-up, burn-downs, throughputs, task counts, actual vs forecast and just about anything else that can be fudged together.

If not able to effectively push back on this the team and organisation that's flying blind can quickly find themselves transitioning to flying blinded.

Flying Blinded

A team and organisation that's flying blinded still has little idea of what's going on. For the uninitiated this seems somewhat more difficult to spot, although seemingly obvious for the more experienced, or just half-thinking, practitioner.

Blind adherence and cargo-cult thinking are prime drivers in this area. "We're agile so we need our reporting represented on burn-down/up charts" or something similar will often be heard, even if it isn't clear what the charts are showing. I've seen all sorts of horror shows in action. Charts with more lines on it than a motorway atlas, a mixture of measuring units and indecipherable keys. As an aside, this is more often than not a case of using some electronic tool that automatically produces the chart and an example of putting rubbish data in and getting rubbish data out. The point stands though that such an artifact still tends to be published or provided to the organisation because that's what "agile reporting" looks like.

Another manifestation of flying blinded can be seen with a team task/scrum/kanban/anything-else board that tells you nothing much more than the number of different coloured index cards the team possesses. The point here is that the board is there primarily as an agile artifact, the team has one because "that's what agile teams do". If there's no real consideration behind what the board is displaying and how it is being used it will likely evolve into something that displays a bit of everything but  doesn't really show anything. Anybody looking at such a board is likely to be blinded by detail and colour.

I have three simple principles and three rules for providing effective transparency:

- Principle 1 - You should be able to see what's been before.
- Principle 2 - You should be able to see what's currently under way.
- Principle 3 - You should be able to see what's possibly coming up next.

- Rule A - There should be a single source of truth for the above and everybody should know where to find it.
- Rule B - Anybody can quickly look at the information and figure out what they need to know without anybody else having to explain it to them.
- Rule C - The information should be value/business focused.

Transparency means that everyone involved needs a common understanding of what's going on in order to support decision making around optimising value and controlling risk. It's impossible for this to exist both in a state of total blindness and in a state of being blinded by over-powering and extraneous information.

It's time to push back against the "mavericks" who would wish to visualise and radiate nothing and time to sack off the cargo cult tendencies and requests of others. It's time to reclaim the middle ground and provide true transparency by the provision of information that is appropriate, easy to find, useful and value-adding. Sometimes less really is more!