This is what it means to be transparent

One of the pillars in Scrum is transparency. But what does it mean and what should we do to be transparent. 

Transparency is about showing the work we do, to ourselves, to our peers and to our stakeholders. By being transparent, people around us can see what we do and help improve our performance. They can help inspect and perhaps notice things that we are unaware of. We might be too deep in our work, because of our expertise, to take a step back and oversee our work. People from the sidelines can share their vision and help us to see what we do and where we are going. They can be our extra pair of eyes and spot improvement opportunities. 

Besides improving they can also see what we do and therefor don't have bother us or the team with status reports; because they can see for themselves what we do and how we work.

Show work
We are transparent in what we do when we show the work we do. All the work we do. There are no hidden jobs, everything is on our work overview. When we use a tool to select work and plan the work, we can show the planning. We can create plans for the long term, but we surely want to create plans for the short term from one week up to four weeks. We also want to show our progress towards the goals we have defined for ourselves, this way we can inspect if we are still doing the right things to achieve those goals. As an example a team can use Jira and let everybody view the Kanban board used as sprint log. Everybody in the organisation can see what is happening workwise in the team and see the progress they make. It allows stakeholders to ask questions in order to improve the solution being build.

Show failures
We only learn from our mistakes. So sharing mistakes is useful. There is never one solution to a problem and in collecting mistakes or failures at least we know what the wrong solution was. In collecting those and making those available we can learn and teach others about problems we had and educate them on not doing the same. A knowledge base of post mortems is a very useful tool for the team and other teams in learning and solving problems fast. A fail party or the sharing of biggest screw ups is a nice variant of the board; those are not only insightful but also big fun.

Impediments
Keeping a list of impediments that are clearly visible empowers stakeholders and managers to do work for the team. They can help fix things when they are considered dependencies, whether it be technical dependencies, organisational dependencies, the lacking of knowledge or blockers in any other form. When those impediments are clear and available for inspection, they can work in our advantage so that others can help our team improve.

Inspection, adaption
We are transparent in order to inspect the work we do and how we do it. With transparency we open ourselves up to feedback from the outside. This might be scary at first, but most people in and around our team are there to make great stuff and want our team to succeed. When we inspect what and how we do things, we learn and are able to adapt. Adaption is a super power. Those who can adapt best, will survive. 

So in order to perform at out peaks, we want to be able to adapt. This we can only be done through learning by inspection. And we can only inspect if we are transparent in our work.

I'm curious what you do to be transparent and how well your team adapts. If you want to share, please leave a comment below.