Frequent questions about Clarity

Can I modify Clarity? Some of it does not fit with my use case.

You absolutely can. In fact, we expect you to do so. No methodology can cover every use case and account for all the diversity in organizations.

You are free to experiment and adjust Clarity to fit your specific use case as needed. Remember to keep your adjustments well documented and evaluate the impact of your changes. What might work on paper, might not work in practice so measure and analyze your changes.

Great working environments and processes to support them are built and devised based on empirical evidence, trial and error, and gratuitous application of objective measurement. Therefore Clarity implementation prescribes setting goals for the implementation and measuring the impact once implemented during pilot. Without this, how can you know?

As far as Clarity is concerned, the framework is supposed to provide a starting point. Where it leads eventually is entirely up to you and your team.

Reach out with your particular use case, I would be happy to hear about it!

Is Clarity based on Scrum?

No. Fundamentally, Clarity and Scrum are two completely different frameworks, with different set of goals and approaches how to achieve said goals. While the two might look similar at a first glance, Clarity is designed to serve as a general work management framework, while Scrum is generally product and software development oriented.

For example, in Scrum, a Sprint (delivery cycle in Clarity) should normally result in deliverable or increment to a product. This is not the case in Clarity - a delivery cycle is a unit of planning and does not forecast a deliverable result explicitly - this is what Goals are used for. There are many such differences, explicit and implied.

Clarity is designed focusing on Teams with significant to total ownership in the work being performed - usually self-managed, cross-functional product, services, delivery and other teams.

It is best to avoid a general comparison between the two. Both Scrum and Clarity are sufficiently different to cover distinct use cases and different organizational goals.

Is Clarity an Agile framework?

The answer to this question highly depends on the definition of Agile, but - yes. Clarity enables an impressive deal of agility in execution and delivery. In software development specifically, Clarity enables the twelve principles of Agile software development. Consider however that Clarity is explicitly not limited to software development industry. As far as Clarity is concerned, the focus of this framework is clarity of process, ability to respond to change, delivery efficiency and facilitation of communication.

Is there task delivery forecasting?

Clarity provides strong forecasting for up to two delivery cycles - Now and Next. Both should contain as much work as could be expected to complete during these two cycles at any given time.

It is possible to forecast delivery timeline based on an average throughput of previous delivery cycles provided that sizing estimation is used and is fairly linear.

Where are the task types?

Clarity is a generic work management framework and does not define task types as often seen in information technology related frameworks and tools.

Besides, task types rarely, if ever, bring any actual value to work organization - it is just one more metadata item the team needs to fill and consider. Task types are sometimes used as a performance metric - how many bugs do we have, how many stories, etc. Categorizing tasks like this serves only to provide some analytical insight, nothing more.

What you want to consider - does it ever make sense to prioritize using task types? Is a Bug more valuable than a Feature because it is a Bug? Would it not make more sense to prioritize by intrinsic value of a task to the stakeholders instead?

In Clarity, this problem is solved by both Rank and CaPRICE. You prioritize tasks relative to their absolute impact on stakeholders - users, customers, consumers. Highly valuable task is highly valuable regardless if it is a bug or feature.

Clarity also does not forbid anyone from having more metadata attached to tasks. You can if you need to.

Can I use Kanban boards to illustrate task status within a stage?

You can use Kanban boards to illustrate task status when using Clarity but doing so is not recommended.

Kanban has a significant drawback when used with Clarity - loss of priority perception - a very important base concept of Clarity framework.

In Kanban, each or nearly each status has a different column on Kanban board - and there is no actual way of visualizing priority between tasks once they separate in different columns without resorting to swim-lanes.

This is not an enormous problem if we assume tasks always travel “in front” of other tasks, from commitment to delivery point on Kanban board. In Clarity that is not the case - tasks can travel freely between statuses and even stages at ANY given time.

Having such freedom comes at a price - maintenance of priority between items within the same level of priority, especially when technological aids to do so are not available. Top-down task lists are the preferred method of task presentation in Clarity because regardless of the task status, the absolute priority of a task (or its value if you wish) does not change - and it is not supposed to.

Delivering status information is still a very important part of Clarity methodology. See here for how to visualize task status in Clarity.

There are technological workarounds for this problem, for example, maintaining backlog as both list and Kanban board where task order in Kanban board depends and is linked to the backlog. This allows using Kanban board for status visualization while priorities and priority visualization is delegated to the Backlog.

Is Clarity suitable for a team of one?

Yes, absolutely. Clarity is about providing structure, and nothing prevents you from using Clarity to organize independent work. You can adjust Clarity to work with a team of one perfectly well.

For personal task management you might want to use Clarity Express instead.

Is Clarity complete?

Clarity is ready to use and implement, but it will never be “complete”. As recent tendencies and novel ways to organize work are discovered, changes to the framework will be made and the framework will improve and develop along the way.

What organization sizes is Clarity best suited for?

Clarity is designed to be very scalable and can be implemented by organizations ranging anywhere from a team of one to hundreds or thousands of teams. There are no scalability limitations on how many teams can there be.

What's with the unusual License?

Clarity is licensed under CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license with general exceptions.

The License permits royalty-free use and implementation of the framework while curtailing abusive commercialization of the framework itself. Using Clarity for its intended purpose - work management is perfectly safe regardless if the purpose is commercial or not. You can also build and sell / rent tools for Clarity and based on Clarity principles. You are free to use Clarity to create teaching materials and you can create courses for it as well, even paid ones.