A lot of teams have a backlog of some sort and some form of Kanban board — whether it is Jira, Trello, Monday, Asana, MS Project, or a bunch of post-its on a wall. These are all ways of making the work visible. But they aren’t enough.

There are two key aspects to making the work visible; what is the work and how is the work progressing.

So, when I talk with teams about making the work visible, I am talking about both aspects. Do they have a roadmap? How are they forecasting and planning? Does the work board accurately reflect what is happening right now? Does the team have a dashboard showing their flow metrics? Do they recognize and record queues and wait states? Does the team have a dashboard showing their quality metrics? What kind of access do internal stakeholders have to pre-release software?

I once had a boss who told me, “Stakeholders just want to have the sausage, they don’t want to see how the sausage is made.” Let me tell you something folks — we’re not making sausage. If your process is one that is best represented by a metaphor of blood and guts, you’re probably not hiding it because they don’t want to see it, you’re hiding it because you don’t want it to be seen.

Make the work visible. If not to your stakeholders, at least to the team. Make it front and center, make it important, use it to inform your narrative, your learning, and your continuous improvement.