Best practice

There is no right or wrong answer on how to build a Sharktower plan! But here are our best practice tips...

• Keep things spaced out; you have a lot of space so to ensure things are clear we recommend spacing activities out and using clusters to show large chunks of work. In particular, if you are working at a high zoom level, you might want to consider how the plan will appear when you zoom out fully.
• Try not to join activities half way through each other. The purpose of joining at the nodes is to represent the dependencies in a data-driven way. So try to join activities at the start or end of other ones. If you really need to, then think about breaking the activity down into chunks of work.
• Keep activities to between 1 and 4 weeks. If your activities are longer than this, try to break the work down into smaller chunks - this will help you understand progress during the activity. If your activities are less than 1 week, consider creating them as tasks under broader umbrella activities instead.
• Use clusters, outcomes and activities - they all work together to facilitate using the plan as a communication tool, so that stakeholders and team members can understand how all the scope fits together.
• Try not to have "orphan activities". These are activities which don't lead to either another activity or an outcome. Think about why you are carrying out the activity - is it to lead to a particular deliverable or milestone? Or is it to unblock/facilitate another activity in the plan?
• Keep lines straight and parallel where possible. Curved lines are create for dependencies but you don't need to make every line curved.
  
  

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