Meeting Notes/2016-01-11 Core Fraction

In attendance

TPG minus Grace, plus Wes

Agenda

Meeting refresher
Goal refresher
1. "TPG Goal 1 - STRENGTHEN: Engineering teams can communicate their capacity for core vs new work (multi-quarter)"
Notes Wes gathered from recent discussions with stakeholders
1. Why are we splitting core and strategic work?
  1. Understand our costs, grow and maintain our impact. bring more clarity to our budgeting process. plan and effectively allocate our revenue, mitigate unforeseen risks
  2. Nothing currently regarding IRS, charitable scoring, grants, etc.
  3. "Core" has multiple meanings, and reducing effort on "core" (because it gets conflated with "maintenance") may trouble some people
  4. There are some existing concerns that these numbers might cause devs to get shifted to different teams mid-quarter
  5. Are we trying to minimize "core" in favor of "strategic"? (A: optimize, not minimize)
  6. Can we add the concept of value in addition to cost, so that teams that do 100% maintenance aren't only "cost centers"?
    1. That's probably what "impact" is intended to cover
2. Definitions of Core and Strategic are still in progress by C team. Current target may be Feb 3. Core work should be more consistent year to year so teams can plan it earlier in the cycle; Strategic work planning then gets finalized later in the cycle.
3. Should we offer a summary of this discussion, and link to these notes, in the current email threads? No, wait another week, nothing concrete yet.
Locking down the requirements for work
1. Requirements for this effort as of 11 Jan 2016
  1. Teams can collect per-team core/strategic fraction data with inconsistent definitions for per-team purposes
  2. WMF can report aggregate, consistent core/strategy fraction data for external reporting purposes (3-4 use cases, e.g., IRS, grants, charity ratings - from fundraising)
  3. Teams can report core/strategic fraction data as part of WMF capacity planning (annual, quarterly, strategic)
2. did not discuss.