Inherent Visibility:
When the Work Creates Its Own Visibility

Visibility is usually treated as a reporting problem.

Someone needs to understand the status of a matter, so they ask questions, review emails and notes, or call a meeting. Management needs to understand the operation, so information is gathered and assembled into spreadsheets and reports.

In each case, the work happens first, and visibility is created afterwards.
But visibility doesn't have to work that way.

If work is performed within the right operating system, much of the information people need can be created naturally as the work is being done.

A task is assigned, so responsibility is visible. A due date is established, so timing is visible. The task is completed, so progress is visible. Matter information is recorded and available to those who need it.

Doing the work creates the visibility.

That is what we mean by Inherent Visibility.

Three Levels of Visibility

In a Trust & Estate organization, visibility is needed at three levels.

The first is individual work visibility.

At the individual level, people can see what they individually need to do and the information they need to do it.

The second is matter visibility.

The individual elements of the work—tasks, due dates, responsibilities, documents, information, notes and decisions—need to be visible to everyone who needs to understand the matter—independent of who is responsible. Together, they provide a picture of what has happened, what is happening, what remains outstanding and where attention may be required.

The third is management visibility.

Equivalent information can be brought together across matters to provide a view of the operation as a whole, depending on management priorities.

These can look like three different information problems. They aren't.

They are three different views of the underlying work:

Do the work → the work is visible to the individual → the matter is visible to the team → the operation is visible to management.

The Visibility Tax

When visibility is not inherent in the way work is managed, organizations have to create it separately.

At the matter level, that often means asking questions.

Has this been done? Who is handling it? When is it due? Did we receive the document? Has someone followed up?

At the management level, the questions are different.

How many matters have reached this stage? Which matters have an upcoming due date? Where is work falling behind? How is work distributed? Where does management need to pay attention?

Answering those questions requires information from multiple matters to be brought together.

When that information is not inherently available, organizations introduce shared tracking spreadsheets, status meetings, matter lists and reports.

But creating that management visibility requires effort at both ends. The people doing the work have to report what has happened, and someone then has to compile that information into a useful view of the operation.

When things get busy, completing the work is naturally the priority. Updating a spreadsheet or preparing a status report can wait. The information used to create visibility then starts to diverge from the work it is supposed to represent.

This is the visibility tax: the additional effort required to make work visible when visibility is not produced naturally by the way the work is performed.

From Reported Visibility to Inherent Visibility

The difference is not whether information gets recorded. It is why and when it is captured.

With reported visibility, information is captured because somebody else needs to know what is happening.

With Inherent Visibility, it is captured because it is part of managing the work itself.

Consider a due date:

If it exists only in an individual's calendar, someone else who needs to understand the matter may have to ask for it. A manager who wants to compare the equivalent due date across multiple matters may need it transferred into a separate tracking system.

If the due date is part of the matter's underlying workflow, the situation is different.

The individual can see it as part of managing their work. The same due date is available to others who need to understand the matter. And management can view the equivalent due date across multiple matters.

Each level of visibility is created from the same underlying operational information for each matter.

Consistency Makes Aggregation Possible

For this to work, operational information has to be consistent in two ways.

The first is where information is maintained.

If one team records information in a spreadsheet, another puts it in a document, and a third relies on someone's notes or calendar, the information may exist, but it is fragmented.

The second is what the information means.

For information to be meaningfully compared across matters, teams need to use the same basic processes, definitions and data conventions.

"Opened Date" provides a simple example. It is not enough for every team to have a field called "Opened Date." They also need a common understanding of what that date represents, how it should be established, and how it relates to the underlying process.

Without the first type of consistency, the information is fragmented. Without the second, apparently equivalent information may not actually be equivalent.

Inherent Visibility therefore requires both a consistent place for operational information and a consistent operating model behind it.

What Changes When Visibility Is Inherent

People spend less time looking for information.

Individuals can see what they need to do. Someone who needs to understand a matter does not have to chase colleagues for updates or piece together its status from emails, documents and conversations. Management does not have to ask teams to reproduce information in a separate format to understand the operation.

The information is already there because it was created through the work itself and is sitting in an accessible system.

That reduces dependence on individual knowledge and makes it easier to collaborate, hand work over and understand unfamiliar matters.

It also makes visibility more scalable.

More matters create more work and operational information.

They do not need to create more reporting effort.

Building Inherent Visibility into Trust & Estate Operations

This is the principle behind the way EstateWorks approaches Trust & Estate operations.

EstateWorks brings matter information, processes, responsibilities, tasks and due dates together within an operating environment where the organization's operating model can be applied through the work.

At the individual level, people can see what they need to do and the information they need to do it.

At the matter level, the individual elements of the work come together to provide visibility to everyone who needs to understand the matter.

At the management level, equivalent information can be brought together across matters to provide visibility into the operation as a whole.

The information does not have to be recreated at each level. It is created through the work.

That is the difference between reporting what has happened and making what is happening inherently visible.

See how EstateWorks can create Inherent Visibility across your Trust & Estate operation.

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