A Status that Actually Means Something
I think subtasks should be baked into tasks in a way that actually communicates what’s happening without us having to manually change a custom field.
The statuses I (think) simplify and sum up all the standings a task might find itself in are:
- Draft: when blocking out a plan in the timeline and the task has not been allocated to an available resource with available capacity and/or the task has not been confirmed.
- To Do: go time; the resource has the capacity and the task is confirmed.
- In Progress: this would automatically happen if someone has the task blocked into their week and at that moment in time. As soon as the time passes that allocated block, it would revert to ‘To Do’.
- Blocked: anything that has an incomplete precursive task.
- Gone Cold: any tasks that have been languishing for an extended period of time and needs attention.
- Complete: the satisfying tick.
- Cancelled: we all make forecasting and planning mistakes; rather than deleting these tasks, we can learn from our mistakes if they are visible. This would be similar to ‘Complete’, being that they would be faded out.
Stages replace Subtasks
Rather than subtasks, I would like to see stages of a task. Each stage would influence the status rather than being disconnected like the current subtasks; there would a sequence and maybe even a workflow map (see Jira workflow feature). You would be able to block these out using a resource capacity feature.