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Best Practices for Monitoring Progress

Learn how to effectively monitor progress in Shortcut

  1. Iteration Progress
  2. Epics Progress
  3. Team Progress & Support

Step 2 - Epics Progress

Learn best practices for how to monitor the progress of your team's Iterations.

Overview

The second level of monitoring progress is for those larger projects or features that are organized as Epics. Monitoring progress towards these larger goals zooms out from just what is happening at the Iteration level and lets you see when large deliverables will be completed. The goals here are that you are able to stay on top of the Epics your team is working on so you can organize, assign, and provide support as well as synthesize and share the information about Epics to share with leadership.

Epics Page

The Epics page is a great place to see the different features your team or teams are working on and ensure you’re driving towards completing those larger goals. First, filter by States and whatever your started state is such as In Progress.

Next, filter by Team and select the Team or Teams you want to view Epics so you can see the Epics that are currently being worked on for your Team. This view makes it easy to see the Epics your team is working on and should be top of mind. 

To dig deeper click into an Epic and Group by State so you can see the upcoming, current and completed Stories. For everything upcoming or in progress you can scroll over to see if they are assigned to the current Iteration. This view lets you see what work is left to complete the Epic and whether all the work is assigned to an Iteration. If all Stories are completed and assigned to the current Iteration you know the Epic is likely to be completed by the end of the Iteration. 

Another helpful view is to sort by Iteration. This quickly shows you if any new Stories have been added that haven’t yet been assigned to an Iteration. Then you can determine if the Story should be added to the current Iteration or will be worked on next time and this gives you the opportunity to stay on top of what still needs to be completed in this large project.

Epics Space

Next on the Stories page, we can create Spaces that will make it quick and easy to view Stories related to the Epics you are monitoring progress on. 

To create an “In Progress Epics” Space add the filter, Team (for whatever Team  In Progress Epic and then Started Iterations, then hover and Inverse, so that this will show all the Stories in the in-progress Epics that aren’t yet assigned to the current Iteration. Then a nice view is Table View and then group the page by Epic. Now we have a great view of what Stories still need to be added to an Iteration for each Epic. 

You can also expand and collapse each Epic for a nice summary view of each. Then you can go through and expand each one out, looking at the details of each Story. From here you can schedule a Story to be worked on or gain an understanding of why it hasn’t been scheduled yet. Overall, a great view for monitoring progress on Epics.