Manage Blockers and Dependencies

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Seeing the entire organization's Blocker list can be overwhelming (unfortunately). To cut through the noise, "Blocked" encourages you to filter by YOUR TEAM. 

A common cause of long lead-time blockers is that teams forget or don't know in the first place they are blocked or blocking. "Blocked" aims to eliminate that ambiguity.

The WE ARE BLOCKED list shows an ordered list by urgency and age of the blockers impacting your team. If you can help each other get flowing you will improve both lead-time and work in progress - total WIN.

The BLOCKED BY US list shows an ordered list by urgency and age of the blockers for other teams that YOUR TEAM is expected to solve. If you disagree with the assigned urgency or have questions just edit that Blocker. Then - resolve them! 

Which Blocker should be resolved first? It can get hard to tell when many teams view urgency and strategy differently. "Blocked" aims to reduce that ambiguity by helping focus on the simple idea - something more urgent should be blocked by something less urgent.

"Blocked" orders open items from top to bottom first by "Urgency scale" (assigned in each Blocker using a scale 1 to 100 with label markers at regular intervals in English - e.g. Security, Production, Top 3 feature). The color of the circular icon represents three different zones. Orange, yellow, then grey. The number inside the circular icon is "age" - either elapsed days or hours since open. When two blockers have the same urgency, the oldest one is shown above the newer ones.

While "Blocked" won't solve the "organization urgency" communication problems overnight, it will highlight when there is a current conflict. By helping visualize the order that Blockers should be resolved, the conflicting views can help refine policy. The goal is better flow, and aligning on urgency will help teams make better local decisions about where their time is best spent.