Agile Notes (No. 23)
Hey. On December 4, 2020, the last time I posted, I wrote:
A programming note: I’m having surgery on December 14th. I might skip a couple of Notes while I recover. I should have a Note next week but we might miss a few between the surgery and the Holidays. I will definitely be back in 2021. Be good to each other. Keep good thoughts. Here’s hoping the dumpster fire of 2020 gets put out. :)
Surgery turned into multiple hospital stays. It got ugly.
I recently found something I used when managing multiple customer projects.
I have always LOVED the elegance of this simple way to track project progress and milestone status. It is a #GTD (Getting Things Done) tool but I used it for projects.
When you have multiple plates spinning on sticks the simplicity works. I particularly love the Progress Meter. Five boxes. That is all you get. It forces you to get radically honest with the progress of your project. Love it.
At a glance, I could tell the EXACT status of every project. I added simple traffic light colors - green, yellow, red - project is on track/green, project is at risk of going off-track/yellow or project is off track/red.
No blue. When did blue become a traffic light color? Blue means the task is complete? I still don’t understand. What happened to green? 80% Green. Got it. Project or task is 80% Complete and On Track8. 100% Green. Project or task is 100% Complete. WTF does 100% Blue mean? Blue is MORE complete than Green complete? Let me know in the comments if you want me to explain why Blue is used.
By the way, the website referenced in the bottom of the card does not exist. POIc stands for Pile of Index Cards and while I do love me some index cards, I usually track project work in One Note.
Somewhere in the last year I got a Scaled Agile Practitioner Certification.
Thanks for reading. I will try to get into a cadence with these again. Please, leave a comment. Don’t be shy.
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