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.
- Is it valuable to have a more specific "Best Practice" cone documented?
- If so, should there be several different cones for different situations?
- How much variation should we expect across different teams?
- 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.)