On this page

Team members can think they’re doing the right thing by carrying out work on the side either for themselves or other team members without it being known or made visible to the whole team. We created Hidden Work to help teams more accurately plan, prevent overloading team members from a false impression of there being more capacity than there actually is, and reduce the risk of team burn out.

The Hidden Work score highlights the issues that are worked on by team members that are not allocated to the active interval.

Hidden Work provides teams with the complete picture of work that is carried out through the interval, not just the work that is assigned. By understanding your team’s full capacity, your team can plan more accurately, maintain throughput balance and work towards reducing an overload culture due to all issues worked on being made visible.

A lower Hidden Work score is better and is reflective of a more focussed, transparent team culture. It also signals higher degrees of communication and trust where all work carried out throughout the interval can be made visible and its completion is supported by the team.

Hidden Work is the percentage of issues not assigned to an interval that are worked on by team members, compared to all the issues assigned to a given interval. It is presented as a percentage, where for example a Hidden Work score of 7% is better than a Hidden Work score of 70%.

TeamX surfaces the hidden issues and pull requests that are worked on each interval, which team members carried out the work, the activity that was carried out, and when that activity was carried out.

Activities that contribute to and influence Hidden Work include the movement of all issues that are not on the board for the active interval, all assigned issues and the number of assignees. Also included are all Pull Requests with tagged ticket IDs that are not in the current interval.

Activities that are not included are issues that are moved straight from a To-Do status to a Completed status as this usually reflects a clean-up event. Also not included are Pull Requests without ticket IDs as they can’t be accurately identified as belonging to tickets in the active interval or not.

Furthermore your Hidden Work score is influenced by:

When work is identified as being hidden, be sure ask the relevant team members why they were working on these items, and why this work wasn’t assigned to the interval.

Help team members understand the benefits of assigning all work to the interval. By making your complete workload visible, managers can better manage capacity and protect the team from overloading them with additional tasks when they are at capacity. This goes a long way to prevent over-load culture or burn out.