Revisit your workflow statuses and transitions
If you’re working on a remote team, you most likely have a task board in place. It doesn’t matter whether you use Jira, Trello, Asana, or another tool. Most project management tools allow you to define a workflow for your team and visualise that workflow as a task board.
For the uninitiated, the workflow could be as simple as below.
| Workflow stage | Description |
|---|---|
| To do | The backlog of work; sorted in descending order of priority. |
| Analysis | Tasks that the product owner is analysing so they’re ready for a developer to pick up. |
| Dev | The list of tasks that developers are currently working on. |
| Test | Tasks that developers have written code for which a QA (quality assurance analyst) is testing. |
| UAT | QA tested functionality that internal users are testing out. |
| Done | Tasks representing functionality that’s in production and/or meets the definition of done. |
Your workflow may look similar or different or even more complex. The number of stages doesn’t matter as much as the principles of setting up the workflow.
Represent every stage of your process on the task board.
Define primary ownership for each stage.
Optionally, spell out the rules to transition between stages.