You can’t manage or make good decisions if you don’t have access to good information. Visibility to information enables you to make local decisions that are consistent with bigger objectives.
Visibility means having access to:
- The work being done. This includes:
- Whether the items are waiting or being worked on
- The size of the items
- Dependencies between items
- The relative importance of the work compared to other items being worked on
- The agreements people have made how they do their work (this is not set in stone but represents the best known way at the time that people are doing)
- The queues holding items to work on
- Any blockages to the work
Visibility helps people see:
- What they are working on
- Work that is coming their way
- Work that is going downstream
- Dependencies between items
- The amount of work in process
- Where work is waiting
Creating Line of Sight to Business Value
Creating line of sight to business value means that everyone understands the business value of what they are working on. This requires maintaining a clear map, an audit trail, back to business value all along the decomposition process from MBIs to features to stories.
Additional Factors that Influence Visibility
- The value density of the items being worked on
- Batch size of work
- Effectiveness/efficiency of the value streams
- Visibility of work and workflow
- How workload relates to capacity
- A minimal number of interruptions from outside the value stream
- The rate at which we get feedback
- Quality of the product
- The value creation structure of the organization