Capture Blockers and Dependencies
Capture by Humans
Creating a new Blocker or Dependency is as easy as clicking on a "plus" sign in the bottom right of the "Blocked" application screen. When you click on the add button, a simple dialog opens that guides users through the most important information about a blocker.
Description: Describe the blocker. Keep it short, and make the first 100 characters count! The first 100 characters are displayed in the lists. Whilst there isn't a limit to the size, remember once created you can add "Notes" to the blocker and more detail might be better there.
Team Blocked: Who is blocked. If your team isn't listed, contact an Administrator user of the application to get added. If you are filtered by Team in the main application window (which should generally be the case), this field defaults to that team. You can't leave this blank.
Team Blocking: Who can un-block. This will make this Blocker turn up on the "We are Blocking" tab in the main application window for that team, and email them that a Blocker has been created with their name on it! If that team isn't known, leave it blank and it shows up as a red warning in the list of open blockers to get "someone's" attention that this Blocker isn't going anywhere until we at least know what team needs to fix it.
Tags: Tags are central to getting good analytics on the causes and types of Blockers that are costing you the most. They are optional but play a very important role in benefiting from capturing Blockers. If an appropriate tag isn't available, suggest it to an Administrator user of the application to get it added. Remember, there can be more than one tag, be as descriptive as you can so that the analytics can ascertain overlap and root causes.
Urgency: Set the urgency as best you can align to the text descriptions on the scale. This setting controls the sort order of Blockers on a team's Blocker backlog. Is it qualitative: yes, the goal though is to make sure Blockers are relatively sorted with an organizational view of urgency. Administrator users can change the labels.
Link: A URL to another tool to allow linking between systems.
Adding Notes
After an issue is created, the Notes section appears at the bottom of the Blocker details. You can add any number of notes and they are always sorted most recent at the top. Use these notes to add details of progress, status, or ask clarifying questions. The idea is that the team blocked doesn't have to keep bothering you to see "how is it going?" - so add notes and avoid the email conversation!
Resolving and Re-Opening
After a Blocker is created, a button on the top blue bar in this edit dialog shows one of two commands -
RESOLVE: Marks the blocker as resolved and it is moved from the open lists into the resolved list tab in the main application window. The team blocked is emailed.
RE-OPEN: Marks the blocker as open again and moves it back into the open list in the main application window. The team blocking is emailed. It's polite to add a Note saying why you needed to re-open it so the team blocking knows what to do.
Capture by Tools: Coming Soon
The following features are coming soon -
1. Email a blocker into the system
2. Slack a blocker into the system
3. Sync to Jira
Suggest other tools, email us at support@focusedobjective.com
FAQ
Coming soon. We don't have anything to add just yet.