Some teams are obsessed with documenting everything. They create tickets for tracking time, logging meetings, or even planning how to plan. They think they’re being transparent. In reality, they’re just adding layers of clerical work that don’t actually help deliver value.
A team I worked with once created tickets for writing documentation, updating Confluence pages, and even responding to emails. They weren’t being micromanaged. They just thought everything needed a ticket. Eventually, half their Sprint Backlog existed just to show how busy they were.
A few years ago, I worked with a Scrum Team that was struggling with this exact question—how much documentation was the right amount? They weren’t just responsible for delivering work from the Product Backlog; they also handled production support tickets. To find the right balance, they experimented. For one Sprint, they documented everything. Of course, they quickly found it was too much—transparency turned into a burden, and the value of tracking every small task diminished. The next Sprint, they adjusted their approach: they only documented work that took more than an hour. That simple rule gave them enough visibility without drowning them in unnecessary tracking. In the long term, they went with the latter option, and they decided to only document production support tickets if they took an hour or more.
Here’s the thing: Work that doesn't deliver value isn’t worth tracking. Transparency in Scrum isn’t about proving you’re busy. It’s about ensuring the most valuable work gets done. Instead of drowning in tickets, focus on the work that matters—solving customer problems and delivering outcomes.
If you need to communicate something, do it. If you need to plan something, plan it. But don’t create tickets just to show you’re working. That’s not transparency—it’s just noise.
Every team has to find the right balance between creating helpful transparency and crossing over into proving how busy they are.