Meeting Notes/2016-01-14 TPG Tracking

1) Make a Phabricator Task + Milestone for each Quarterly Goal

Already done (see Team Practices Group/Goals/FY2016Q3)

2) Make a Phabricator Task + Milestone for each Standing Goal

1. TPGers to complete T122988, to update the TPG Prototype Work List spreadsheet
2. Joel to mock up a proposal for how exactly to move that into Phabricator
   1. Each line item in the spreadsheet should become what?
      1. a Phab Milestone
      2. a Phab task (maybe EPIC) which is a child of a Milestone
      3. a line of detail in a Phab task
3. TPG reviews Q2 items and close or roll over (maybe via regular team Review meeting)
4. Decide what to call Standing Goals/Standing Activities
   1. Grace and David have a proposal: Permanent Activities (?)
   2. Do we need to differentiate between TPG's permanent goals and the things we are doing each quarter as projects or continuous work toward those goals?

How do we make our list of work we're doing this quarter?

- can we use our existing boards?

- [EPICS] column?

- highest-level only?

- if so, where do we put the other stuff?

Kevin: can you exampleize some slice of our master work list?

Issue with Epics: too much information at the wrong time, not enough at the right time

- see "in scope" tasks and goals per project

- see when to close things

4) Do T-shirt estimation on our tasks for Q3

David: if we're doing any estimation, that needs a bigger conversation and consensus. In particular, Grace has asked to be part of that decision.

5) Decide what changes to recurring meetings are necessary to implement new process

We need to

1. make sure that we are working on our top priorities
2. see if we are working on low-priority work
3. do consistent follow-up on work in progress

We could use per-goal meetings to accomplish #1.

David: no more meetings. Joel: We have several existing meetings where this can happen: 1-1, weekly planning meeting, weekly Tracking and Strategy status meetings

Kristen: The 1-1 agenda should stay free.

What does "everything we do that takes more than a few minutes has at least a high-level bucket it falls into" mean? Does that mean we create a Phab ticket for everything that takes more than a few minutes?

Joel: No. Intent is that we could check ourselves at any point and ask, which TPG goal does the work I'm doing right now fall into, and if it doesn't fall into any TPG goal, should I be doing it? What size work should trigger this self-query?

Kevin: not a few minutes, an hour or more. Kristen: multi-day. 5%, 10% of timespan.

David: what about time on other projects?

For #2, there is a Phlogiston query that will highlight if we are completing low-priority work. Could check it for a minute in Review meeting.

We can use Burnups to see if we are making progress on goals. Burnups are per project.  May not work for some TPG work, not development-oriented.  

Is just looking at burnups per-goal enough structure?

If we just put our goals into Phab tasks, subtasks, do tracking.

David: just look at burnups, see if they look okay, [that they are meaningful and providing value], before looking at other charts.

Burnups would require estimates, not just count.  Is that true? Projects with a large flow of tasks, broken down relatively consistently, don't actually gain much from estimation compared to just story count. But our tasks are very heterogenous so that probably wouldn't help us.

Joel to propose (or start) something about our Phab boards and how the EPICs column would change.