Comprehensive Guide to Improved Project Visibility

In general, project visibility includes four critical aspects, as follows:

1. Project Goals: Define your project goals and share them with the team. Use these goals as signposts for the rest of your project and reference them often to keep your team on track.
2. Visual Status Reporting: Along with written updates, a visual dashboard or chart helps users understand project status more easily. Create a document or dashboard that the team can reference at a glance, and update it in real time to reflect the status of your project. It often helps to grant team members editing access, so they can adjust and update their own status.
3. Individual Team Members’ Responsibilities: An effective project manager excels at delegating. Know the strengths of your team and its individual members, and communicate clearly about individual responsibilities and the expectations of the team as a whole. Make these assignments visible to everyone on the dashboard.
4. Any Potential Risks: As with any project, risks are always inherent. By clearly outlining the potential risks of a project, you can often avoid them entirely. And by making these potential risks public, you put more eyes on the issues that may arise, which means more chances to notice and correct them before they occur.

A project can be visible without being transparent when you prioritize some team members over others and give them access to more or different information. A transparent project will offer all information to every team member, regardless of their level.

You can think of transparency as the highest level of visibility. When records, conversations, or information is not accessible to everyone, you muddy the transparency of a project.

Increased visibility has many benefits, including improved communication, organization, and understanding between managers and team members. Below are several advantages that project visibility can deliver for your organization:

• Improve Communication: The most obvious and immediate benefit of visibility is improved communication among all project stakeholders. When communication is open and honest from the outset, everyone benefits.
• Build Trust with Stakeholders: Stakeholders appreciate being in the know. Instead of waiting for updates or asking questions, clients and executives should have access to your dashboard in order to answer questions themselves.
• Organization: Creating and maintaining a central dashboard is a great way to encourage strong organizational practices for yourself and your team.
• Foster More Cohesive Teams: Visibility helps build trust by keeping communication above board and eliminating an air of secrecy. A team that feels involved in the entire process of a project is more likely to trust its members to get work done and make decisions that benefit everyone.
• Anticipate Risks: Outline risks at the outset and share that information with the group to catch problems early. Your team is more likely to avoid issues altogether when everyone understands the risks and feels empowered to address them.
• Encourage Feedback: Allow access to updates to encourage early feedback. Team members and stakeholders do not need to wait until they receive a project status report to comment on an aspect of the project if they can see updates throughout its lifecycle.

Team members are responsible for maintaining transparency in their communication and workflow, but they also need a good project manager to lead the charge. Create a communication plan and update it as needed. Encourage the use of visual communication mediums, such as notes in a shared timeline, instead of one-to-one methods such as email or instant messages. Individuals should also track their progress on tasks and mark them as complete. 

Witt adds, “At the same time, good documentation, transparency, and visibility in the process are essential for onboarding new employees, who may feel overwhelmed when they come on board to a project environment, especially if the employee is expected to learn many specialized or niche products all at once. In some cases, it could take years for an employee to become fully up to speed in their job role, whereas proper visibility, transparency, and accountability can bring a new employee up to speed far faster.”

Many common practices can contribute to a lack of project visibility, such as information tiers and general disorganization. We’ve collected some of the most common ones below and offer suggestions for overcoming them in the future:

• One-to-One Communication Methods: Email and IMs hide the information that is shared between two people. When someone asks a question, ensure that other people have that answer, too. Use an open, asynchronous tool such as a central message board or shared chat channel that everyone can access whenever they need to. To learn more, visit our comprehensive guide to asynchronous communication.
• Limited Access to Information: “A lack of visibility and collaboration between groups often leads to teams ‘siloing’ themselves into a specific knowledge set and not sharing information, which can lead to different groups within the company setting different standards and different methods to complete tasks and deliverables,” notes Witt. Make sure that all teams and team members have access to procedures and standards across the board.
• Not Clearly Defining and Stating Goals: People are less invested if they don’t understand the “why.” Let your whole team know the desired results of the project, and let them help you get there.
• Disorganization: Keep all of your status info organized and in one place. By placing notes and updates in different places and formats, you confuse everyone and waste time trying to find the info.

We’ve asked the experts their best tips and tricks for improving project visibility. Read on to learn about the advantages of varied communication, visual progress trackers, and more.

1. Project Management Software: Establish the use of project management software within your organization. Keep everything in one place. “I think my best advice is to use specialized tools to meet the task,” says Witt. “Whatever you're using, you should have a tool that is visible to all users on a project, allows assignments and ownership of work and key milestones, and enables you to set reminders and deadlines to ensure key goals are met on time. It should also be easy to go back and look at past projects to help review and be consistent with projects and deliverables.”
2. Create a Communication Plan: A communication plan will help keep you and your team accountable for what needs to be communicated, to whom, and how often. For more information about communication plans, read “The Comprehensive Guide to Project Communication Plans.”
3. Vary Your Communication Methods:
   
   Kristen Bellomo, Senior Project Manager at Bednark Studio, encourages frequent communication with the team and the client. She uses a combination of emails, phone calls, progress photos, and in-person meetings to ensure that her clients have an eye on every step of the process. 
4. Include Your Client: “Transparency isn't just for internal groups; being open with your customers about the timeframes and costs upfront help set the correct expectations down the road, where it can be much harder to try to recover,” notes Witt.
5. Use Visual Aids: Patti Armanini, Quality Manager at Festo USA, emphasizes the benefits of visual tools like Gantt charts. She uses them to “track each individual’s progress, milestones, made and missed deadlines, and precursors that must be completed before a next step can take place.”
6. Delegate Tasks: “If something is everyone's job, then it's no one's job. Tasks without owners and visibility and just assigned to ‘everyone’ are less likely to get done, the business version of the bystander effect in action,” warns Witt.
7. Keep Communication Public: “All users on a project should have access to the tool where they can share and store project data, and projects should be able to split tasks to individual owners that will then go out to an individual or team contributors and, in the latter, to their respective team leader,” suggests Witt.
8. Maintain Accountability: “‘Accountability’ isn't a scary word,” says Witt. “It's the end goal of transparency and visibility, and it helps ensure projects get done on time.”

Download Project Visibility Plan Template

Microsoft Excel | Google Sheets | Smartsheet

We have filled in this sample template for a team preparing for a trade show presentation, but you can easily customize it to your needs. Use it to indicate who is working on a task and the expected start and completion dates.