It's simple: better operational visibility means better business decisions. Here’s what visibility means in a business context, and how to improve it.
Operational visibility helps business leaders make better business decisions – and drive sustainable growth and success. But what exactly is it?
Operational visibility is one of those concepts that feels like it should be intuitive. Maybe you can grasp the general idea without much explanation - it feels commonsensical.
But you wouldn’t necessarily want someone to quiz you on it. And if someone asked you to make some progress on improving operational visibility, well - that's when it starts to feel more complicated.
So, that's exactly what we'll be breaking down in this article.
We'll cover what operational visibility is, why increasing visibility into operations improves business decision-making, and, crucially, how to make those gains by boosting operational visibility in your business.
Operational visibility is about getting the clarity you need for confident business decision-making – the ability to see and understand what’s going on in your business.
It’s about having clear sightlines into every department and what they do, backed up by data and stats to help you make confident business decisions.
Operational visibility is made possible through:
Operational visibility translates into operational excellence. And operational excellence is essential in a business landscape that’s stalled on key metrics.
We're in a difficult moment, where many organizations are struggling and finding themselves subject to major restructuring in order to see any kind of progress. Aspiring towards operational excellence - and embracing bold transformation in order to get there - is a central piece of the puzzle that will allows businesses to thrive even in tough times.
Speaking about disappointing productivity growth this millennium, McKinsey highlights that some organizations are bucking the trend.
...A few companies – in both the manufacturing and service sectors – are achieving major gains year after year. Not just in productivity but also in metrics ranging from time-to-market to customer satisfaction and employee engagement. What these organizations have in common is a renewed and expanded understanding of operational excellence."
And they’re achieving this through better management, operational efficiency, holistic processes, effective technical systems, and appropriate use of technology. And that requires real-time visibility into business operations.
Operational visibility gives leaders the clarity they need to improve processes, implement technology effectively, and make confident decisions that better their business, such as:
But visibility isn’t just about having the information – it’s about the ability to act on it. Visualizing and communicating insights is crucial (see below) but so is getting stakeholder buy-in. And everyone in business knows how difficult that can be 🙈
Operational visibility equips you with evidence to build a water-tight business case, helping you implement big ideas that move your business forward. It adds up to serious competitive advantage.
There are two types of operational visibility to know about – macro and micro.
This bird’s eye view of business ops shows you the big picture – how different functions and processes work together to achieve organizational goals. This is primarily the domain of your leadership team, focusing on overarching operational strategy. Macro-visibility can help with big-ticket strategic objectives like measuring operational efficiency and strategic capacity planning.
In a professional services business – such as IT operations or business consulting – here’s how macro-operational visibility play out:
Granular insight lets you deep-dive into the detail – understanding how small actions add up to create a bigger impact.
Micro-visibility is usually managed by individual team leaders, with critical insights filtering up the chain of command when needed. As such, micro-visibility may focus on objectives such as:
Together, these types of operational visibility combine to create a holistic understanding of business operations – from devil-in-the-detail points like recurring resource clashes and skills gaps, to the big-picture insights around the best people and projects to onboard.
Operational visibility isn’t just about leaders looking down on their business. It’s a whole-organization approach that requires cross-team collaboration, the upward flow of information, and de-siloing departmental data.
Here are four key pillars of operational visibility.
Operational visibility starts with business transparency – ensuring that every workflow, process, and step towards creating value is visible and understood.
This lets teams understand the what, why, and how of their operations – so they can identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, or risks early on – and no one is mindlessly completing tasks because ‘that’s the way it’s always been done’. This helps managers identify issues, improve overall efficiency, and innovate.
Of course, it isn’t enough to have transparency into your own team’s work. The organization needs visibility into how all teams operate and how work flows between them. This ensures nothing falls down the gaps between teams, and that dependencies and risks are fully understood.
At the heart of operational visibility is data — reliable, accessible, accurate data that leaders can trust. That means data that is:
When leaders have confidence in the numbers they’re working with, they can forecast, plan, and make decisions with greater certainty. This drives more effective decision-making and better business progress.
Of course, senior leaders and project managers are busy people. And data literacy may not be their strong suit. So a key tenet of operational visibility is data visualization and interpretation.
That means making data understandable at a glance – while providing in-depth reporting as required.
Data visualization tools – such as dashboards and heatmaps – support confident interpretation and decision-making at all levels, rather than relying on a data analyst to have time to delve into the details for you.
.png)
Whether it’s the COO spotting capacity and utilization trends – or a project lead assessing schedule adherence and budget variance – data visualization makes it easier and faster for people to get information and take action.
Take, for example, the above capacity chart in Runn. It aggregates a number of different data points - from time allocated to different project tasks, to upcoming PTO days project team members are expecting, to projects that are in presales but currently unconfirmed - and clearly shows where there is a project delivery risk owing to a workload that exceeds the project team's capacity.
Looking at this chart, you don't need to be a data wizard to realize that you'll need to add capacity to this team before you confirm any of the 'tentative' work that's currently in the pipeline!
For operational visibility to truly benefit the organization, the right people need the right data at the right time.
Bottom-up – Departmental leads monitor data at their level and escalate insights that need senior input. For example, if a team leader spots worrying utilization figures that suggest a pending capacity crisis, that needs to go up the chain for prompt action.
Top-down – Senior leaders need to share top-line information that impacts day-to-day operations. For example, a shift in market conditions may mean departmental heads now need to prioritize cost efficiency over strict schedule adherence.
Horizontally – Information needs to flow between teams too. For example, in a professional services setting, one team may be experiencing talent shortages while another has idle resources. Bringing those teams together could improve utilization and reduce project delays. This requires the de-siloing of departmental data and effective cross-functional collaboration.
From past to present – Historical data has a lot to tell current leaders. Patterns, trends, and outcomes from past projects or business cycles can help shape future strategies. For example, understanding forecasting accuracy, seasonal changes in demand, or cyclical hiring needs. Historical insights need to be accessible in the same central system as current data.
Looking at the pillars above, it’s clear that gaining visibility into business operations isn’t easy. You need real-time data, a centralized approach, cross-team collaboration, effective communication. It’s a lot.
No wonder some businesses struggle when they try to improve visibility. Do you recognize any of these challenges in your organization?
To address these challenges, you’ll need cultural change, top-down advocacy for better operational visibility, and appropriate technology investments. This leads us to our final point.
Using the right operational visibility tools can significantly increase transparency and decision-making confidence, especially in service- and project-based businesses.
Centralizing your business intelligence creates clear sightlines across your organization, while data analytics and processing platforms provide actionable insights, fast.
Whether you’re a software studio, consulting firm, construction business, marketing agency – or any other organization built on projects and people power – here’s some tech to consider.
Tools that centralize and stream live data from various sources. These eliminate data silos and processing delays, and ensure data consistency and integrity in a single source of truth. They’re essential for maintaining real-time visibility across departments and systems.
AI-powered analytics can predict trends and provide actionable insights without having to wait for analysts to examine your data, helping teams stay ahead of challenges. For example, spotting trends that predict potential employee turnover, to enable proactive interventions.
Technology that turns complex datasets into clear, visually engaging formats like charts, heatmaps, and graphs. These make it quicker and easier for stakeholders to grasp insights and take action based on the data presented.
Tools that automate routine tasks and reduce the manual intervention (and manual error) associated with them. For example, introducing time-tracking software that automatically captures timesheet data and feeds it directly into your invoicing system, rather than requiring duplicative and error-prone data entry. This not only frees up the team for more value-adding tasks but also supports data consistency and integrity.
A centralized platform to capture, analyze, and act on resource management data and increase project visibility. Provides the bird’s eye overview at an organizational level, as well as granular detail such as task progress and individual capacity. Information is available as in-depth reports and intuitive data visualizations.
Runn's resource management platform significantly increases operational visibility for project- and service-based businesses. With Runn you’ll know your business inside out, for better decision-making, thanks to:
