Team Practices Group/FY2016Q3 Work Tracking

Purpose and Goals

Document TPG's work for FY2016Q3
1. During the quarter, for internal team planning and tracking
2. After the quarter, for quarterly planning, annual planning, strategic planning, and individual performance records.
Pilot SPDPP and evidence-based-planning techniques of work tracking with Mediawiki and Phabricator.

Proposal

Initial Proposal

Do detailed, categorized-by-goal Phabricator work breakdown for all projects, and have at least a high-level bullet point covering everything TPGers do in Q3. I.e., not a bullet point for each five-minute hallway chat, but have high-level categories so that, in theory, everything we do that takes more than a few minutes has at least a high-level bucket it falls into. See bottom for example/proposal buckets.

Make a Phabricator Task + Milestone for each Quarterly Goal
Make a Phabricator Task + Milestone for each Standing Goal
1. Note that the current "Standing Goals" are not goals. Either call them "Standing Activities" or reword them into goals.
2. Review all Q2 Standing Activities and roll them over or close them
3. Make Phabricator Task + Milestone for each really big Standing Goal Q3 activity
  1. Really big = ?. 100+ hours? 50+ hours (10% of 1 person for the quarter)
Prioritize all of our high-level goals (Quarterly Goals + Standing Goals/Activities)
Do T-shirt estimation on our tasks for Q3
1. Goal is to create enough big placeholder Epics that TPG's Q3 Scope of Work grows less than 100% during Q3..
Each week:
1. In Triage, make sure all TPG work is categorized
2. Each big project (Strategy, Core Fraction, etc) has a weekly planning meeting. Agenda includes:
  1. Check last week's planned tasks and, if they are not done, break them down smaller.
  2. Review the goal and, if it's not done and doesn't currently have Next Step tasks, make more tasks.
3. In Team Review,
  1. do similar review quickly for smaller projects.
    1. (Or maybe move this to a separate half-hour of Weekly or Bi-weekly or monthly planning?)
  2. Review the "actually closed this week" report and consider adjusting team priorities.

EITHER: Standing Goals (rough draft)	OR: Standing Activities
Develop Best Practices	Providing dedicated resourcing for a team's Scrum Master role.
Do Best Practices for Teams	Providing ad-hoc team/individual process coaching. Running Team Health Checks.
Help teams do Best Practices	Providing dedicated resourcing for a team's Agile Coach role. Providing mentorship and support for non-TPGers in the Scrum Master role.
Manage TPG (coordinate, self-evaluate, maintain)	Managing TPGers. Scaling Team Practices Group. Running CSATs.
	Other work that advances TPG goals but doesn't have a tidy goal.

Second Proposal

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/168iQxeKjDAuY0oNJGtbOpRk9oHSlowccniVwDorve98/edit#slide=id.p

Questions

1) Is the structure of https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T123780 and related Epics and Milestones correct?

A: Fixed one incorrect "Blocks" dependency; it should now be correct.

2) What do we need to do to get the list of Q3 stuff in Phab?

get all items into Phab
agree on level of detail for items to be Milestones
remove other things

3) Where do we track work for tracking work?

A concrete example: We did some brainstorming in "T122256: Create Milestone Roadmap showing what would have to be true to do fully evidence-based FY17 planning in Jan-April 2016" before fully outlining the related Quarterly Goals. Where does this task belong within TPG's FY2016Q3 work breakdown?

a) Within the high-level goal that it ultimately defined (T122838: [EPIC] Engineering teams can communicate their capacity for core vs new work)

b) Within a high-level goal specific to figuring out our high-level goals (T122257: EPIC: Document and enumerate TPG Q3 planned work)

c) other

d) something else?

3a) If the answer is not B, where does the work in B belong?

Choices are the rows in Team Practices Group#FY2016Q3 .28Jan - Mar 2016.29 Essential Functions

4) What out of the Q3 Essential Functions worklist should be a Phabricator task?

The only reason apparent to make a line item from the table a Phab task is if it will have non-embedded work that should be tracked in Phab (because it needs followup, it gets handed around, etc etc). Is there another reason? If we want the canonical list of TPG work in Q3, it's the wiki page, right, not a Phab query?

5) What exactly gets tagged with TPG FY2016Q3?

A) only the milestones

B) all Phab tasks TPG is doing (other than embedded work) this quarter.

If B, how do we query for just the TPGFY2016Q3 milestones? Do we need to?

6) Can we delete the list at Team_Practices_Group#Essential_Functions?

a) yes, it's obsolete now that we've written out the full Q3 list.

b) yes, except that it contains Team Health Checks, which aren't on our Q3 goals anywhere, and if we cut this, how/when will we remember to finish re-planning THCs?

c) other?

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Meeting Notes

Meeting Notes/2016-01-06 TPG Q3 Planning

Meeting Notes/2016-01-14 TPG Tracking

Meeting Notes/2016-01-22 TPG Tracking