Topic on Talk:Team Practices Group/Tracking core and strategic work

Team Practices generally helps other groups be more productive. Our daily work might help other teams meet their core goals, or to do strategic work. Our quarterly goals tend to involve projects outside the scope of our engagement with teams, such as (going meta here) helping teams get to the point where they can track, report on, and forecast based on, work categorizations like "core" and "strategic".

I haven't thought of an example of our non-engagement work that itself would be considered "core". Does anyone have ideas? Is it OK that certain teams might not do any core work (because it would all be strategic), or perhaps in some other case, might do only core work, and no strategic work?

I've been thinking about the definition of "core" for some of our teams as well. If you define "core" as "keeping the lights on", that's a very narrow definition that I think doesn't do justice to the complexities of our work for many teams. For instance, arguably, none of Community Engagement's work would count as core, because we don't help keep the lights on in the strictest sense of the word. But we do very crucial work to keep our projects safe and vibrant, improving communities' health and motivation. So where do we draw the lines for teams like CE? What is our core? Is it only trust and safety, for instance? For the Education team, what counts as core?