'50-59 Portfolio of creative outputs' becomes 'W0000-9999 Work packages'

With the release of the Small Business System last year we introduced a new pattern. Area 50-59 Portfolio of creative outputs was an expanded area with numbers ranging from 50000 through 59999.

The extended numbering is required because you're expected to have more than 100 'creative outputs', so the usual restrictions don't work. This numbering was always a bit weird, not least because 50-59 as a parent folder name didn't accurately describe its contents.

Expanding the concept

This concept was originally for 'creative outputs', as its name says. For our type of business that's blog posts and video course lessons. For a restaurant it might be the photo shoot for their latest Instagram campaign.

But the more we used it, the more we realised that it was a useful pattern for all work. If you have a broad Johnny.Decimal ID like 21.34 Small Business System, it gets crowded if you try to do work in there.

A diagram showing ID 21.34 SBS with lots of 'work' floating around it. It's very busy.

One solution would be to promote that thing to its own category: 61 Small Business System, say. You could do that, but now we've pulled this specific product out of the list of products into its own place. And we still have the limit of 100 things to consider.

A diagram showing the SBS as a new category '61' containing a bunch of IDs.

This 'place to do work' turned out to be a really nice alternative. With this pattern, you leave the core thing where it is: 21.34 Small Business System never changes. Each piece of work you do gets a new number in this 'work world', and we link it back to 21.34.

The diagram now shows the SBS as 21.34 again, but _connected to it_ – not inside it, crowding it – are a bunch of work packages.

Introducing 'work packages'

At this point I realised I'd brought the established concept of work packages into Johnny.Decimal. And that's a good sign: well-established patterns are probably correct. Let's not invent something new for the sake of it.

So that's what the 'creative pattern' has grown into: each of these jobs is now a work package, and they're no longer limited to creative-like things. They're useful for any work.

For example, you might need to conduct a large audit as part of a compliance exercise. That audit could be a work package, linked to the SBS ID 11.13 Compliance.

Fixing the numbers

A design principle of Johnny.Decimal is that you must always be able to give a stranger – a new starter at your business, say – a number, and they must be able to find it easily. So the parent folder name needs to accurately explain what's in it.

The existing area pattern A0-A9 doesn't work here. Work packages are so different, we've given them a completely new scheme. They start at W0000 and continue to W9999.1 So we call the folder that contains them W0000-9999 Work packages. This sorts them below all of your regularly-numbered Johnny.Decimal areas.

Crucially, work packages may not exist in isolation. They must belong to an ID. We indicate this in the title like: W0011~11.13 Compliance audit. Here, we've linked W0011 to ID 11.13.

This link-to-parent-ID-in-title is required. You can and should cross-reference these entries using links in your JDex, but trust me: you'll forget to do that. If you always link every work package to its parent using this simple notation, you can never lose anything.

This is how our Small Business example now looks.

The work packages connected to the SBS are now numbered, e.g. W0011~21.34.

How do I migrate from 50-59?

If you've been using area 50-59, I recommend switching to this new scheme. Start the numbers where you left off: if your last creative job was 50106, your first work package is W0107.

You could renumber your old entries. We didn't: the nature of these things is that, once done, they're rarely referenced again.

We've also retitled 40-49

While we're at it, we've tweaked the title of the Small Business System's area 40-49. What was your Library of creative inputs, previously mirrored by the now-defunct Portfolio of creative outputs, has been renamed to 40-49 Creative assets. Same thing, simpler name.

See more at the updated Task & Project Management

We just re-recorded the entire second half of the course. You'll find a full explanation of this concept starting at this episode. See the blog post that follows this one for more information.

Footnotes

  1. Just like every other part of the system, you should leave the first 10 for standard zero-like IDs. Start your own WPs at W0011. ↩