Red yellow green 2

I promised to follow up on Red yellow green, a process I was using to visualise the status of my work. I put each area on a card and put the cards on columns representing succeeding comfortably (green), at risk of failure (yellow) and failing (red). I initially intended to do this followup after a week, but in the end it took a bit longer to get around to. The biggest complicating factor was that I ended up unexpectedly busy and most of the things I was working on ended up in the red.

That said, I feel that I can at least give it a positive review in that sense. I thought it would be a good way to visualise the ahead vs behind feeling and track what changes in those terms when I do a task. Unfortunately, if you end up very behind with something, there's not much it can tell you. You look at your status and it's red. You think about what will change if you work on it and it's still red.

But, in its own way, that has been quite useful. One of the biggest challenges is knowing when to cut your losses and move the goalposts. But if your goal is to move from red -> yellow -> green and it's clear that no feasible amount of work is going to get you out of the red, then the only way you're going to be able to do it is to change the definition. In other words, the time to make a new plan is when the old one no longer contains a path to green. I feel like that insight was made much easier by this visualisation.

The other thing is that, although it's pretty depressing to see a board full of red and realise most of it's going to stay red, I don't think it's any more depressing than the reality. In fact, by distilling that situation into a visual form it makes it much easier to reason about. Okay, so the whole board is red. What am I going to do about it? The board also makes it easier to visualise a solution.

One difficulty I've found is that you have to make an effort to keep the board maintained. As in, you have to remember to move the cards regularly as the status changes. That might not be such an issue if it were computerised, but using a physical representation it's a bit inconvenient. The other thing is that, although I've been drawing arrows to indicate potential changes in status, it's not really possible to represent things along multiple time-scales. So if one thing is going to go yellow->red if I don't deal with it this week, and another thing is going to go yellow->red if I don't deal with it today, it's hard to represent both of those at once.

Still, all up I've found it useful, and it combines nicely with process pipelines, so I think I'm going to keep it going for a while longer. Next followup should be around the end of December.