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Your senior managers will especially benefit from transparency. If it is your responsibility
to specifically summarize and report every aspect of every product, it is highly likely that
you will, on occasion, leave out an important item. However, if your boss is used to look-
ing at the project documents himself, there is no chance that you will leave him in the
dark. This will help build trust between you, and will also help discover any impending
problems.
Another problem that is avoided through work product transparency is information
hoarding. Sometimes an insecure person feels that he needs to keep certain aspects of his
day-to-day work secret from the rest of his organization—even his manager. This helps
him feel more important to the organization, since any time anyone needs access to that
information, they must go through him. In some cases, it even (unfairly) provides job
security: if he’s the only person who has maintained that particular work product, it is
much harder to fire him if he’s doing a poor job. That secrecy also makes it difficult to
judge how poor a job he’s doing.
Make Decisions Based on Known Guidelines
If you do things the same way every time, the people who work with you will come to
understand the reasoning behind your decisions. They will feel much more comfortable
with you than if you make decisions in a less predictable manner. One way to help others
understand your perspective, and avoid surprising them, is to publish the standards by
which you manage.
There are several ways that guidelines can help make your decisions more predictable:

• Use published standards documents to help others understand the way certain roles must
be filled. For example, a standard for interacting with a version control system might
require that each programmer verify that the code builds without compilation errors
before it is checked in. Programming standards may include naming conventions for
variables or files. A testing standard might specify that a test plan must be executed by
somebody other than the person who wrote it. Acceptance criteria and release readiness
criteria are useful standards to help the organization make unbiased and objective deci-
sions about when to release the software into test or to the general public. In addition,

inspection checklists are also a kind of standards document.
• Documents should be based on templates when possible. This ensures that all of the
information that is needed in the document is included, and that important omissions
are noted by the person writing the document. For example, a template might require
that a vision and scope document always have a section for future releases. For projects
that are only expected to have a single release, this section will contain “N/A” or a
placeholder. This will prevent the reader from wondering whether the author meant
that there would be a single release, or whether it was an oversight.
• Process documents ensure that each project is done using a repeatable process. That
ensures that the same activities for the current project are done in the same order as
previous projects. This helps each person on the project understand how their work fits

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