Topic on Talk:Team Practices Group/Flow

All project management depends on some form of "progressive elaboration", in which work in the immediate future is well-detailed and less immediate work is understood more vaguely.

1. Is it valuable to have a more specific "Best Practice" cone documented?
2. If so, should there be several different cones for different situations?
3. How much variation should we expect across different teams?
4. Is there any value in using this as a kind of dashboard, and if so, how would we generate the data?

Here is a simplified visual representation of a cone of visibility.

A sample cone might look like:

• (today) Know exactly what tasks we are doing, i.e., all tasks fully detailed and prioritized.
• (this week) All tasks for the week fully detailed and prioritized.
• (2-4 weeks): 90%+ of tasks identified and prioritized
• (1-3 months): these decided. At least 50%+ of tasks known and mostly sorted (is this an objective or a health indicator?)
• (3-6 months) objectives and key results decided
• (6+ months) objectives and key results enumerated
• (1 year) possible objectives enumerated
• (beyond) No visibility other than to do some basic filtering, triaging, and/or re-checking to make sure nothing is critical. (in context of a backlog, means we'd ignore almost all the time. In context of the world of possible changes, it would mean things like watching for legal or technical changes with multi-year lead times.)

I would change the (2-4 weeks) text to "Almost all tasks are identified and prioritized", to reflect that the 90% is a rough aspiration.

At 1-3 months, I would not expect most tasks to be known and mostly sorted. I would say something more like: "Most of the work is captured in tasks or epics, and assigned a rough priority". Again, I would avoid the "50%".