Bird's-eye view

We split all work in Clarity into small chunks of work called Tasks. All tasks belong to a Backlog - a logical collection of work for a single Team. A Team comprises a Team leader - a person responsible for management of the Backlog and Team members - people implementing tasks.

Each task has optional business Priority ensuring implementation order - there are two predefined ways to prioritize tasks in Clarity - using a high-level prioritization technique called Rank and a low-level prioritization model called CaPRICE. All tasks are also explicitly prioritized using Stages.

Each task has a Status and Stage. Status shows the current lifecycle stage of a task - whether it is in progress, waiting to be worked on, or similar. Stage shows the current planning, preparedness, and scheduling priority of a task. The Stage is selected from underlying business priority and indicates whether the task should be worked on now and whether it is ready. Stage communicates the priority decision but is not itself the source of business priority.

We organize work using iterative Delivery cycles. A Delivery cycle is both a dated planning interval and the set of tasks planned for that interval. The relative cycles Now and Next are represented by task Stages with the same names: Now is the current planned cycle, and Next is the following planned cycle.

We can organize tasks using Goals - goals are specific to a single Backlog and Team and group tasks under the same logical business goal.

We can organize Goals using Objectives. An Objective is a high-level business milestone that groups many Goals. We can share Objectives between multiple Teams and Backlogs.

We can organize multiple related Objectives together using Visions. A Vision is a group of Objectives to fulfill a general business vision and direction. Visions are organization-wide.

Using Goals, Objectives and Visions is optional but recommended.

Clarity facilitates continuous improvement at all levels of the organization. We do this using Retrospectives and Reviews.