Sep 30, 2010 Why are we so afraid of transparency?
Each year at Appfire, we help hundreds of enterprise customers deploy some of the best collaborative development tools on the planet like Atlassian's JIRA, GreenHopper and Confluence. In the process, we also teach them the value of "being transparent".
The Answer is Clear
In my opinion, "being transparent" is the cornerstone that enables a team to truly leverage these amazing tools to their maximum potential.
But what do I really mean by transparency?
The answer is that you must empower these tools to accurately represent and reflect the work being produced by the teams who leverage them.
If you deploy the tools and then immediately build walls between them, or between the various teams who use them, then you'll never fully obtain the value of the tools as they were intended. Further, this type of opacity significantly increases the chances of project discontinuity and often leads to outright project failure.
Tangling over Transparency
So why do so many teams have such a hard time with transparency?
Having been exposed to many large scale projects, I've heard more than my fare share of excuses for why people didn't want to open their projects up within the tools. Here are some of my recent favorites:
"...it doesn't matter. No one outside my team would understand what we're building anyway."
"...our project doesn't have time for additional changes. If they actually find something wrong, we won't have any time to fix it."
"...because it breeds bad habits. If they're reading this stuff all day, they aren't working on their own tasks."
"...I don't want management snooping around, getting into our business."
And my personal favorite:
"...if anyone wants to know, they can call or send and email."
Seriously folks. It's time to move beyond these self-imposed limitations.
Transcending Opacity
My response to these statements is simple:
It's 2010. Technology has advanced. Processes and methodologies have advanced. Tooling has advanced. People need to advance.
All of these valuable features were not designed so people could snoop on you. They were designed to advance the flow of information within teams and across organizations of all sizes. They exist to keep everyone informed and on the same page. They're intended to help you set more accurate expectations. They help you visualize where you've been, so you can see where you're going. They help highlight important weak points in a project, or a module, or in a task, so you can quickly adjust. They help keep you accountable.
But above all, they help you to make more informed decisions, ...which makes your projects more successful!
Is your organization being transparent enough?
Reader Comments (1)
Nice post.
Its very true that openness is a great tool. I often see that you get problems with openness on projects that were not open from the start or have lost it somewhere. There is some dark secret thats being hidden from someone, usual a client, that can't escape because maybe we can fix it before they find out. That fear increases the longer the project runs and has places to hide knowledge.
Once you have achieved openness and transparency on projects, its a great feeling because when problems strike, you can explain them and have understanding.