Visualising Work - "The Play's the Thing, the Picture is Not"

One of the fundamental principles in Agile is the importance of "Visualising Work". It gives us some vital practices but also brings a surprising risk.

When we talk about visualising work we mean finding ways to make our past, present and future effort tangible, something we can point to and use as a tool for discussion. By collating planned work into a well curated backlog shown in priority order we make it much easier for stakeholders to discuss the relative merits of each piece of work. A well maintained Kanban board helps a team see at a glance what work they currently have in flight to help them recognise where they may need to ask for support or pivot.

But let’s recognise that these practices aren't restricted to Agile. Say it quietly, but the notorious Gantt chart, that staple of long term projects, is a different tool that tries to help visualise our work. This neatly introduces the risk that visualising work brings along.

It's not that you get stakeholders asking more questions, that's a good thing because it helps you better understand their needs. It's not that it takes time to maintain the visualisations because you gain more time back through reducing confusion and misdirected energy. No, the risk that too many teams fall foul of is "Forgetting that the visualisation is a tool rather than an end in itself".

A common symptom of this risk is a team spending prolonged periods of time discussing what column a ticket should sit in even though they all already understand the work it represents. Similarly a team being pushed to cut corners or rush work just to make the burn-down chart look pretty or stay within the boxes of the Gantt chart that was laid down at the beginning of the project months before, based on best guesses and never updated to reflect reality.

As leaders we should absolutely be encouraging our teams to visualise their work but always with the reminder of "we visualise to enable shared understanding". If it gets to the point that the effort being expended to maintain the picture of the work is significantly detracting from the work itself then it's time for reflection and improvement.

Without visualisation it can be difficult to make sense of our work and understand where our effort is best spent to add value. If we visualise our work without focussing on the goal of enabling understanding then we reinforce that difficulty by adding wasted effort to the lack of clarity. 

But if we stay true to the goal of enabling understanding then visualisation can significantly improve how we target our efforts to add value. Our visualisation will also reinforce the key Agile principles of Openness, Transparency and Honesty.