Overview
Creating a strategic roadmap is just the beginning of your journey. When you have communicated your roadmap to your stakeholders, in most cases, they will want to see a status update for your initiatives, and preferably in the same format or style as your roadmap.
From our experience, when you are communicating the status of a portfolio of initiatives or projects, most senior stakeholders will not read each project status or highlight report. If you do create an overarching program status report, then they will more than likely want a quick status summary.
The Track step in Jibility will allow you to tag the status of each initiative and provide a description of the status that can be easily published as a document.
Setting the current time period along the time horizon
Jibility provides a visual cue for you to indicate the current time period along the time horizon to set the context for the initiative status (see image below). This visual cue is a slider that you can set to the beginning, on a column within a stage or at the end of the roadmap.
Note, to learn how to set the time horizon, please refer to this article.
Initiatives status
In Jibility, an initiative can be tagged as one of the following statuses:
Note, by default, all initiatives are initially marked as Not Assessed.
In the example roadmap above, the current time period is set to the first column of the Foundation stage. On this basis, we can conclude that the Digital Programme Established initiative was completed ahead of time and the IT Rebranding initiative is already off-track even though it is not due.
Tagging initiative status
To tag an initiative with a status, you can:
drag and drop a status over an initiative; or
double-click an initiative status (on the left panel) to enter painter mode to apply the same status to multiple initiatives (then double click again or hit ESC key to exit painter mode).
Providing an initiative status comment
Select an initiative on the Track roadmap and open the properties panel. In the properties panel, you can enter a commentary for the initiative based on its status. The commentary style and format is up to you as this is a free text field.
Tips: The initiative progress status comments should describe what was achieved/not achieved and what the risks and issues are that are preventing the initiative from achieving the objectives on schedule, budget or scope.
Changing the roadmap in the Roadmap step
In the Track step, you will see a copy of your roadmap, where each initiative is marked with an initiative status.
If you change the roadmap in the Roadmap step, then it is automatically reflected in the Track roadmap as well. This is what happens if you change the roadmap:
If you delete an initiative - the initiative is also deleted from the Track roadmap and the initiative status is also deleted.
If you move an initiative - the initiative is also moved in the Track roadmap and the initiative status is retained (unchanged).
If you add an initiative - a new initiative is also added to the Track roadmap and its default status is "Not Assessed".
Published documents
There are two published documents that show the initiative status: Initiative Status document and Prioritized Initiative 2x2.
1) Initiative Status document
To publish a roadmap showing initiative status and progress commentary, you can open the Initiative Status document. An example is shown below.
2) Prioritized Initiatives 2x2
The "Show Initiative Status" checkbox in the properties panel of the Prioritized Initiative 2x2 can switch from a standard initiative view to show the status of each initiative instead (see the example below).
