Overview

I would hazard to say that most of the time, regardless of professional title, or role within your company, you will more than likely be working on more than one design project simultaneously.

This matters because each design project come with its own challenges, languages, approaches, patterns, and means of communication within the project team.

Today, I want to share with you a simple, robust way that you can share project status across multiple teams, in a clear, democratized fashion.

What are switchboards?

A switchboard (sometimes referred to as a statusboard) is a series of the current projects you have, color-coded, with an associated status.

Let me give you an example:

Project A | Status: In-progress | Color: Green
Any additional information about the project where it currently is.

Using this same format, you can list multiple projects at a time, and allow your team to update/access it at their leisure.

But why not just do this in Jira?

Because Jira hides this type of functionality and I’m not okay with that.

How to use project switchboards

First, create a switchboard. This can be done virtually anywhere, just make sure that everyone has access to the document.

The goal here is to include the following information per project:

• Title of the project (can be working title)
• Where the project is at in the process (project status)
• A brief description of precisely what has just been done, what is being worked on, and/or what needs to be done to move the project forward.

Let’s take a look at an example:

Now, add a few of these together, and you’ve got yourself a project switchboard!

Look at how nice that is!

“Hey, where are we at on Project X?!”

“It’s in progress, we’re still waiting on client to get us the approved revisions for prototype 2c.”

Done.