Planning

The Planning tab is the project’s working surface. It is a board of the maturity model’s objectives in five lanes: Backlog, Ready for Work, In Progress, Validated and Blocked. Each card is one objective at one level, with its category, the number of open actions and the assignee.

Drag cards between lanes to plan. Moving a card to Validated or Blocked asks for an explanation by default: the lock on the divider between In Progress and Validated turns that requirement off.

The objective dialog

Click a card, or a cell in the Roadmap tab, to open the objective.

The left side is the reference: the objective, its description, Examples of good evidence and Recommended tools. The right side is the work:

• Activity is the evidence log. Write a note in the composer at the bottom, with Markdown and @-mentions of people, projects, objectives, actions and files. Notes are the evidence: what the team learned, from what source. Turn on All levels to see notes across every level of this category.
• Actions holds the concrete steps that gather evidence for this objective. See Actions and My work.
• Plan with Max is a Max conversation scoped to this objective.
• Suggest targets asks Max for validation criteria: a target outcome and an implementation plan per suggestion. When the team can show them in evidence notes, the objective is ready to validate.

The header holds the assignee and the status. Changing the status while writing a note saves both together with Save & change status.

Sources and citations

An evidence note can cite the files it draws on. Notes Max writes always do: each carries a Sources line with the file, and a page or slide locator that opens the file at that place. Notes you write pick up sources when you @-mention a file.

Tip

Write evidence, not activity. “Interviewed 12 target users; 9 named onboarding as the top pain” validates an objective. “Held interviews” does not.

Validating

Validate an objective when the evidence shows the level has been reached. Validated objectives raise the maturity score; the ones below them must be validated too for the full effect. See how the score is computed.

Filter Planning and Roadmap by Category, Level and Assigned to from the filter panel in the project header. On Roadmap, Export saves the matrix as an image for slides.