No more project status 😱

Project statuses have been removed from Macro projects.

What?! 😱

Yes, but it actually all makes sense.

Ok, tell me more

Project statuses (on track/at risk/not on track) are great in theory, but they have a few (big) problems:

• they quickly go out of date
• they have no supporting evidence, so it’s hard for stakeholders to trust that the status is accurate

So what’s the solution? Update statuses, which luckily we already have in Macro. i.e. Every time you post a project update, you also give the current status of the project. This neatly solves the two problems above:

• you can see how recent the status is by when the last update was posted
• you have confidence in the status because the update gives supporting info

Trendy updates

This also plays into another strength of this approach, showing the status trend, rather than single status.

Macro defaults to showing you the reported project status over the last 5 weeks. This means you can easily see a) how active a project is and b) how consistent the status is. Contrast these two projects for example:

Candidate experience has an update every week, and looks on track. Great! In contrast, it’s easy to see that Marketing is struggling - they haven’t posted any recent updates, and their last updates were not on track.

What are the UX changes?

You have to set the project status when writing a project update. And most of the time (when using a template) the status is set automatically. 🙂

That’s all for now, as ever, let me know if you have any thoughts or feedback.

Best, Tyro.