As work items flow through the value states a certain level of consistency will be beneficial for the next state to ensure predictable and reliable outcomes, whether it's actual value, including quality and continuity (e.g. documentation), and/or lessons learned.

There are three distinct states (Start, Ready, Done) where work is waiting on later states to be completed or just completed. These staging states have no work in progress limit, but a policy that work has an expiration date after which it's automatically discontinued and archived. Contrary to the active states (Reviewing, Analysing, Implementing), there is no capacity allocation.

• Start criteria
  • English
  • Not official government regulation; go to Analysis for that
  • Not already in a value state, i.e. a duplicate
  • Not already in Discontinued, unless with clear explanation how conditions have changed since it was discontinued and why it is expected to work this time, i.e. do you understand the lessons learned and still see a new opportunity to try again
• Ready criteria
  • Traditional Definition of Ready stuff
• Done criteria
  • Traditional Acceptance criteria stuff
  • Traditional Definition of Done stuff

Ensure that the criteria are integrated end-to-end in the process and not just some document that can be ignored or an administrative afterthought.