An organizational philosophy of transparency, when correctly implemented, can make an impact. Recently a friend shared with me a neat little solution they've developed to track their Agile projects - they call it the Agile Project Management Dashboard. The system they've put in place is ingeniously simple yet very powerful. Each developer, analyst or tester involved with a particular project is asked to enter the status of their tasks to a shared spreadsheet located on a network drive. Later on a Share Point process picks up the updated files and generates a neat project dashboard bundling important information such as:
Color coded project health status
Iteration and release estimates and current percent done
Percentage deviations from original estimates
Completed and remaining stories
Acknowledging that one of the key concepts of agile methods is transparency, my friend set a system where the root cause of every problem is exposed early and decision makers get a sense of the life cycle of each project an any given instant. In highly collaborative and transparent teams like this, it is important to take the time to educate top management about the implications of constant visibility. In the case of the dashboard, it is paramount to convey the right message to upper management: namely, that this dashboard is an internal status tracking tool and nothing more.
Many organizations fall into the trap of attaching accountability to simple tracking tools such as this one, and hence risk reducing the level of collaboration and individual responsibility. Some places go even further to tie employee performance reviews based on some metrics generated from transparent tools such as this. In an open dialog environment such as an Agile project, top management should be well aware that increased transparency should not come at the expense of holding individual team members accountable of things they may have little control over.
Honesty seems to go a long way of establishing credibility and contributing to the transparency of any team. This was emphasized by my friend and also once expressed by management guru Jack Welch. Welch asserts that "leaders establish trust with candor, transparency and credit. When leaders do not do this, they foster an environment of suspicion. No one really knows what is happening. As a result, the network of people within the organization begin to work at cross purposes from one another. It is important that critical candor be constructive. That it is not just to put someone in their place, but provide them a way to move to a different place. When you have that kind of communication stream going on, the sharing of credit becomes much more motivational. Honesty begets motivation to improve and perform at your best. The leader though must model this genuinely for it to be effective."
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