The "Daily Preview"

The Daily Preview is where the team will review its current objectives for the week, set the top three priorities for the day, and plan any other tasks that are due or should be worked on opportunistically.

Setup

Schedule a recurring team meeting to do the preview. Typically, the meeting should be scheduled at the beginning of a new work day or at the end of the prior work day.

• Most teams will need approximately 15 minutes to complete the exercise. Larger teams may need a full 30 minutes.

• For geographically distributed teams (ex: Europe + North America), schedule a time that maximizes attendance instead of being concerned with targeting the beginning or ending of a day. Participation is more important than time of day.

• For teams that are extremely distributed, consider adapting these instructions for asynchronous reviews if there is no time of day when a super-majority of team members can be present.

Steps

1. Identify one person to share their screen for everyone else. Display the team’s task list in Jira.

2. Filter on the “@this-week” horizon label. This will limit the task list to your objectives for the current week. If you’re using the recommended board configurations, use the “Daily Preview” quick filter.

3. The top of your board should display your Weekly Big 3 (if you’ve configured the ‘goals’ swim lane). Click on the first Weekly Big 3 item to view its Details View (as either a modal or sidebar).

   1. Select to view the Agile Task Planner panel.

   2. Determine if any progress needs to be made toward this goal today:

      1. If the goal should be completed today, then change the Horizon to “Today”.

      2. If only a chunk of the goal should be completed, then create one or more subprojects to represent the smaller-sized outcomes you plan to achieve today.

      3. If no work is expected to be done on this goal, then leave it as-is until the next preview session.

   3. If there are existing subprojects from prior daily previews, then review them and update as necessary (update workflow status, horizon value, etc.).

4. Repeat Steps 3(a) through 3(d) for the remaining Weekly Big 3 items.

5. Now, repeat the same steps (3(a) through 3(c) for the tasks in your Urgent swim lane. These are tasks with due dates in the next two (2) weeks.

6. Review the remainder of the displayed tasks. Rank the tasks in order of importance. Do this for all columns (workflow states) that represent In Progress or To Do states.

7. Now review each task, working right-to-left, top-to-bottom:

   1. Click on the task to view its Details View (as either a modal or a sidebar)

   2. Select to view the Agile Task Planner panel.

   3. Review the task’s horizon, and update as necessary:

      1. If the task should be completed today, then update the horizon to be “Today”.

      2. If the task is no longer expected to be completed this week, the change the horizon to “This Month”, “This Quarter”, “This Year”, or “Someday/Maybe”.

      3. If a subset of the task will be completed today, then create a new subproject with a horizon of “Today”.

      4. If no work is expected to be done on this task today, but it is still expected to be done this week, then leave the task as-is until the next daily preview.

   4. If there are existing subprojects from prior daily previews, then review them and update as necessary (update workflow status, horizon value, etc.).

8. Review the team’s calendar for the remainder of the week to see if there are any upcoming meetings, milestones, or events to prepare for. If there are, create new tasks in your task list, and assign horizon values and subprojects as necessary.

9. Have a brief brainstorming session to determine if there is any missing work that should be represented on the board for today. Ideally, all of the team’s obligations and expected outcomes should be represented here.

10. Now, it’s time to identify the team’s Daily Big 3. These will be the top 3 items that absolutely must get done for the team to have a successful work day. At least one of the Daily Big 3 should support a Weekly Big 3. The other two may also support a Weekly Big 3, or they may support upcoming deadlines and/or other important things that need to get done this week.

    1. Review your Weekly Big 3. If any item has a subproject that should be a Daily Big 3, then toggle the goal flag on that subproject.

    2. If you haven’t flagged three items yet, then change your filter to the “@Today” label (To Do List quick filter). Review all the tasks identified to be completed today and flag the most valuable or important one(s) as a Daily Big 3 until you have 3 items selected. The selected Daily Big 3 will be displayed in your Goals swim lane.

11. Get to work! Team members can now filter on the “@Today” horizon label (To Do List quick filter) to see exactly what the team would like to accomplish today. The list can be further filtered by Assignee for people that only want to see their tasks.
    
    At a minimum, the team should work hard to accomplish their Daily Big 3. In this way, they will make small, incremental progress on their largest goals, which quickly will add up to a successful quarter/year.