Talk:Team Practices Group/FY2016Q3 Work Tracking

Here are some partially written notes that are a longer, more formal and verbose version of the short proposal. If the short proposal is successful, these may be helpful in documenting it as an SOP.

Long-winded Proposal

All TPG work is traceable to Phabricator tasks

Definition

Some work gets full Phabricator breakout and some work is just vaguely implied by high-level bullet points, but everything TPGers do traces back, at least in theory, to Phabricator tasks. The level of detail of Phabricator tasks is commensurate with the value of tracking of the work, so that we do not have excessive tracking overhead.

• Work that requires followup, reminding, status reporting to other stakeholders, or passing between different people should generally be tracked as distinct Phabricator tasks. E.g., write a report; organize and facilitate a conference.
• Work that is continuous or process-oriented should generally not be tracked in Phabricator. E.g., write up the notes from a recurring meeting.

Implementation

• All TPG Quarterly Goals and Standing Work is represented, at some level of detail, by
  • We can use "Other" for things that aren't worth breaking out in any detail, but Other should be capped. Open question: at 10%? 20%? 50%? How do we know when we reach x% if we aren't tracking it in any detail?
• "TPG Quarterly Goal" work should be fully managed via Phabricator tasks, e.g., from high-level milestones down to per-person tasks.
• Continuous work and process work should generally not be tracked in any more detail than
• Work that amounts to less than 10% of any one TPGer's effort in the quarter (i.e., less than 50 hours total) is not specifically documented in any way.
• Work for embedded teams is tracked in Phabricator tasks associated with the embedded team, not TPG; or is not specifically documented if it's not worth tracking.

The proportion of work TPGers put into different goals is tracked/estimated.

• 1. Probably 50% or more of all TPG work is either not trackable in tasks, or allocated to embedded teams. Open Question: What do we want to do about this?
     1. Nothing - reports will be way off.
     2. Do one-time gross estimation of how much this is in % of our time.
     3. something more complicated