[teampractices] Make a tag for quarterly goals?

Wed Jul 1 18:08:43 UTC 2015

We're still trying to flesh out a full set of use cases for the whole thing
(work planning?), which is probably impossible since it's a huge topic, but
without explicit use cases we keep falling back to logical data design and
then getting stuck in the maze.  Let's start:

   1. Individual team members want to know what they should work on next
   2. Product managers want to identify potential work in the near future
      1. from team goals
      2. from foundation goals
      3. from call to action or any other expressions of priority
      4. from community requests
      5. from other inputs
      3. Product managers want to estimate, break down, and prioritize
   potential work
   4. Product managers want to know what work they have already planned
   5. pretty much everybody wants to know when particular things (tasks,
   goals) will be done
   6. Bug reporters want to know the status of bugs they have reported
   7. More generally, stakeholders want to know the status (estimate,
   priority, expected completion date) of work they care about
   8. Product managers want to compare their teams' actual output to the
   planned output or goals

Does this include what you want to accomplish with goals?  Can you add to
this list?
Side note: we probably want to keep Epics and Goals distinct.  We're
working on a baseline vocabulary for the whole Foundation.  The direction I
think we want to go (no consensus on this yet) is that Task/Story is a
completable piece of work; Epic is a theoretically completable piece of
work that's more than (very roughly, will vary by team) a few person-weeks;
Goal/Milestone Criterion/Key Result is a target that you compare to a
project's current state to decide what Epics or Stories to create or
implement next.

*Joel Aufrecht*
Team Practices Group
Wikimedia Foundation

On Wed, Jul 1, 2015 at 10:06 AM, Max Binder <mbinder at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Hey Dan,
>
> This has been an ongoing and as yet unresolved point of discussion with
> some teams. There are concerns about goals-as-epics, from a long-term
> process perspective, as well as overwhelming Phab with proprietary tags (a
> problem that Bugzilla apparently suffered). Andre, Joel A, Kevin S,
> Kristen, and I all chatted at some point about this on
> #wikimedia-teampractices. While I can't say we found ultimate resolution,
> we did decide that the simplest thing to do would be to use the Epic
> project Tag, and apply it to goals-as-epics "tasks."
>
> Another thing to consider is Phab's "Goal" category. Joel and the VE team
> are apparently going to experiment with that.
>
> I wish I could better explain where we landed, but I am still wrapping my
> head around it. Maybe one of the others could illuminate the issues more
> clearly than I?
>
> Max
>
> On Wed, Jul 1, 2015 at 9:49 AM, Dan Garry <dgarry at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> I'm creating epics to track the Discovery Department Q1 2015-16 goals
>> <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2015-16_Q1_Goals#Discovery>,
>> and thought it might be useful to track organisation-wide progress towards
>> achieving their quarterly goals by having such epics have tagging them as
>> Q1 2015-16 goals.
>>
>> The epic tag already exists, but I would consider quarterly goals to be a
>> strict subset of epics: all quarterly goals are epics, but not all epics
>> are quarterly goals.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> Dan
>>
>> --
>> Dan Garry
>> Product Manager, Discovery
>> Wikimedia Foundation
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> teampractices mailing list
>> teampractices at lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/teampractices
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> teampractices mailing list
> teampractices at lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/teampractices
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/teampractices/attachments/20150701/5d2ead5d/attachment.html>