High-level work organization

Clarity allows for the organization of all work into a hierarchical structure of focus areas using three distinct structural components called Goals, Objectives and Visions.

Goal

A Goal is a high-level collection of related tasks within a single Backlog. Goals group tasks according to business milestones. A Goal may contain tasks from several Stages because Stage is an independent scheduling classification.

Goals are indicative and have no explicit impact on how tasks are organized in a Backlog - goals serve as a way to correlate related tasks.

Goals also serve to compartmentalize tasks into logical business milestones and can serve as an indicator for prioritization within a backlog and stages. Using goals to compartmentalize the work is optional but recommended, provided such compartmentalization is possible at all.

If you have a Scrum background, Goals also serve as delivery milestones, since delivery milestones are detached from delivery cycles. See delivery cycles for more details.

Objective

An Objective is a high-level unit of organization, a collection of goals. Objectives are optional and handle business cases where business objectives span several teams, several backlogs and include several Goals.

Vision

A Vision is the highest unit of organization in Clarity. Visions are used to group together Objectives and are usually organization-wide efforts. While goals and objectives are finite, visions are not.

Clarity does not prescribe a lifecycle, review cadence, retirement process, or success indicators for Visions. Each organization defines these according to its own governance needs.

Implementing goals, objectives and visions

Assuming all the above units of organization are used, we should define them in the following order - Vision, Objective, Goal. Who defines these units is subject to the internal semantics of the organization. It could be the case that Visions are defined by executive management with participation of department heads, Objectives are defined by department heads together with Team leaders and Goals to achieve said Objectives are defined by Team leaders with participation of Team members. Clarity defines no preference here since the goal-setting process is usually very specific for each organization.

Unit Owners

Both Objectives and Visions should have a designated Unit Owner - a person responsible for each given unit of organization. Owners are managers; they are responsible for the unit of organization assigned to them - for example, an Objective Owner would follow the progression and implementation of an Objective, when necessary working to remove impediments, gathering and defining the business definition of an Objective and facilitating communication between all stakeholders related to implementing the Objective.

Individual Owners can be assigned one or more units of organization.

Clarity defines the ownership role but does not prescribe separate routines or governance procedures for Unit Owners. Organizations decide how Unit Owners participate in planning, review, communication, and retirement of their units.