🎛 State & Status
You need both to tell a complete story of "where are we?" during a project.
Howdy Tribe, it’s Aadil.
First off, Happy Mother’s Day.
I believe that everyday belongs to Mothers but once in awhile, its good to make them feel really special. Watching my wife go through her motherhood journey makes me appreciate my own mother even more. So to all the badass mothers out there, keep doing you, you are all amazing ❤️🙇🏽♂️🔥.
On to the topic at hand.
🎛 State & Status
Project plans and communications often only tend to focus on 4 attributes when articulating progress:
Not Started (Grey)
On Track (Green)
At Risk (Yellow)
Blocked (Red)
Complete (Blue)
This is standard Project Management. This 1D view into project progress serves its purpose. However, when you are working on a multi-dimensional, cross-functional, dependency ridden project like say a platform, you need to extend that gaze to 2D.
In my project plans, at the feature or epic level, I track work using two categories:
State - in what phase of the development life cycle the feature, or epic is.
Status - what is the current trajectory of the work.
State allows stakeholders, in particular the decision makers, to ascertain at quick glance exactly what stage of the development lifecycle is the task on. It helps ground the Status especially when the task is called out as a risk.
There are a few attributes within the State category:
In Backlog - work has not been planned in any upcoming release(s) or sprint(s).
In Discovery - work is under evaluation/solutioning/scoping for an upcoming release(s) or sprint(s).
In Design - work is ongoing to develop a solution, UI design, or other high-level artifacts to help engineering teams know what to build.
In Development - teams are coding.
In Testing - enough of the work is complete to allow testing to begin.
In Staging - specific to backend work, general testing/validation is complete and code is sitting in pre-production for final validation or preparation.
In Production - work is done.
I first used this approach when drafting the project plan for an iCloud Encryption feature for which I was the Engineering Project Manager DRI for. There are few advantages to this approach:
Clarity - Too many items still In Discovery State along with Status set to Blocked is a better, more actionable warning indicator than say Status set to Blocked.
Accountability - Gives engineering teams a better chance to articulate their progress than just “On Track”.
Communication - Makes status reports and other project comms easier to parse. Let’s be frank, nobody reads weekly status reports if you make it to verbose. This gives you a better comms design.
Next time you build a work breakdown or draft out a project plan, use both State and Status and tell me if it makes a difference in how your stakeholders perceive or understand the complete story of where you are in the project.
Advise: Every companies technology organization will have their own lexicon for what falls under State and Status. So, use your own or if it doesn’t exit then develop that lexicon but ensure the definition of each attribute is agreed upon as the universal truth across all your teams.
That’s it for now. Until next time. 🤙🏽🙏🏼
- Aadil
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