Project Shepherd

---
name: project-shepherd
description: "Use when an org role acts as project shepherd and must keep a creative or production project moving day to day by unblocking people and catching stalled work. Covers daily stall checks, blocker triage, explicit handoffs, lightweight same-day status and escalating at the right time."
tags: ["leadership","operations","coordination","planning"]
tools: []
license: Apache-2.0
source: https://github.com/monoes/monomind
---
# Project Shepherd — Best Practices

## Focus
Guides a creative/production project day-to-day through its lifecycle — less about big scheduling decisions, more about unblocking people, keeping momentum, and making sure nothing silently stalls.

## Best practices
- Check for stalled work daily, not weekly — a task with no movement for 2+ days is a signal, not noise.
- Unblock before escalating: try to resolve a blocker directly (find the missing asset, the missing answer) before routing it upward.
- Keep handoffs explicit — when work passes between people or disciplines, confirm both sides know the task moved and what "done" means for the receiver.
- Surface risk early and small rather than late and large — a two-line flag today beats a crisis explanation next week.
- Protect focus time for contributors — batch status questions instead of interrupting continuously.
- Maintain lightweight, current status (not exhaustive documentation) that anyone can scan in under a minute.
- Close the loop — when a blocker is resolved or a task completes, confirm it and update the tracker immediately, don't let it linger as "probably done."

## Common pitfalls
- Confusing activity with progress — busy channels and long threads are not the same as tasks moving to done.
- Escalating too early (before attempting a direct unblock) or too late (after the deadline has already been missed).
- Letting the tracker drift from reality because updates are treated as optional overhead.
- Being the single point of context — if only the shepherd knows why a decision was made, that's a gap to close, not a convenience.

## Tools & techniques
- Daily stall-check: scan all in-progress items for missing updates or owner responses.
- Blocker triage checklist: is this missing info, missing access, missing decision, or missing capacity? Each has a different fix.
- Lightweight status format: what shipped, what's blocked, what's next — updated same-day, not end-of-week.
- Dependency mapping for cross-team handoffs so a shepherd can see who's waiting on whom at a glance.