Stephanie Ockerman

Throughout my career as a Scrum Master and Professional Scrum Trainer, I have found that transparency is an incredibly helpful—yet much underrated—tool. Scrum Teams and organizations benefit from transparency for almost every challenge, including what they are building and why, how they are building it, and their progress toward goals. Without a sufficient level of transparency, any attempts to inspect and adapt are less effective in achieving desired outcomes. By focusing on increasing the breadth and depth of transparency, a Scrum Master enables effective self-organization, team ownership, and better problem solving. I believe a Scrum Master’s most important tool is transparency.

Transparency is more than just tracking information and making it accessible and visible. Just having a Scrum Board doesn’t make a Scrum Team’s progress transparent. Just having a Product Backlog that is available to stakeholders doesn’t make the plan for maximizing the value of the product transparent. What really counts for transparency is having better conversations, frequently enough and with the right people, that lead to a shared understanding.

One of the tricky challenges for a Scrum Master is to enable and give support without undermining self-organization. Often in the spirit of “helping,” Scrum Masters may point out people’s problems and lead them to the solutions the Scrum Master thinks will work. At best, this achieves a few benefits, but it does not unlock the true power of creativity, collaboration, and bottom-up knowledge creation. At worst, it creates a dependency on the Scrum Master, resentment among team members, and poor solutions.

Whether you are working with a struggling Scrum Team or an experienced Scrum Team encountering new challenges, transparency is the flashlight. Teams don’t need to know the entire path ahead to move forward; they need to illuminate what is in front of them so they can make an informed decision and take the next step in the right direction (certainly knowing that the entire path ahead is full of unknowns anyhow). And if they happen to get it wrong, transparency will help them find that out quickly and course-correct. It’s why we organize work in these short cycles called Sprints.

Scrum Masters can hold a flashlight for the Scrum Team and the organization to inspect where they are and where they want to be—then they adapt to move a few steps forward.

As a Scrum Master, create transparency in the information that helps guide a Scrum Team’s decision-making. What perspectives are missing? Where is there not yet a shared understanding? What is not being said? What is holding the Scrum Team back right now?

Create transparency in learning, progress, and value. What trends does the team see, and what might that mean? What information would help confirm there is a problem or need? What outcomes might indicate a change is successful?

Whether Scrum Teams are struggling with bottlenecks in their process, gaps in skills or knowledge within the team, entering into productive conflict, quality issues, making clear decisions, keeping up with competition or changes in the market, adopting new technology, increasing value delivered, breaking through limiting beliefs, or managing stakeholder expectations—transparency is the key. As a Scrum Master, help them see more clearly; hold that flashlight so they can determine the best way forward.