VisualEditor/2015 Team Process Review

Team Process Review

Progress

April 6–17

• Onboarding and Orientation for Joel and Neil

April 20–24

• Interview with 3 members of the VE team (as it existed pre-reorg) for micro-retrospectives.
• multiple ad-hoc interviews with James and Trevor to start understanding the VE process (and WMF processes)
• asking various people about how Tasks work for VE
• start a list of VE stakeholders Stakeholders
• build a list of standard questions for interviews

April 27–May 1

• Interview 7 more members of VE team
• Interview 6 more stakeholders
• Extend list of stakeholders/interview candidates (total of 35 names)

May 4–May 8

• Interview more people
• Complete 1st draft of report

May 11 - May 29

• Most of the team is traveling
• Some editing of the report

Plans

Milestone 2: First draft of report DONE 11 May 2015

• Complete interviews with all team members
• Complete interviews with majority of stakeholders and at least one representative from each group of stakeholders
• Report has complete outline
• Report includes 75% of notes and ideas from interviews and discussion in some form, either text or notes or diagrams.

Milestone 3: Report distributed to interviewees for feedback. DONE 8 May 2015

• Report uses only constructive and positive language
• Report sent to all interviewees and anyone else who contributed to the review

Milestone 4: Highest priority challenges identified. DONE 2 Jun 2015

• Based on input from team leads, stakeholders, and process reviewers

Milestone 5: Recommendations shared. DONE 10 June 2015

• document contains specific recommendations
• recommendations are prioritized to match challenges
• Relevant stakeholders do not object to changes (and at least some approve of them)

Milestone 6: Process change initiated DONE 12 June 2015

• List of challenges broken into appropriate sizes and prioritized
• Menu of options for each challenge developed (several options defined, in enough detail to discuss, with pros and cons and with indications where one change may address several challenges)
• Team, team leadership, other stakeholders agree to changes

Milestone 7: Report shared publicly. DONE 6 June 2015.

• All sources of information have had a chance to read it and correct/rebut anything authors misunderstood or misrepresented.
• Document reflects the Foundations communication goals.
• Report converted from Google Doc to Wiki page.
• Report announced on (?) mailing lists, blogs?

Milestone 9: Report archived for reference

• Report can serve as guide for process change in other teams
• Report updated with results of process change

Output

• Process Review Report
• Phabricator Master Task
• VisualEditor/Design of Backlog

Reference material

• "State of the team" report
  • top strengths
  • top concerns
  • from team
  • from external stakeholders
• Process diagram showing how VE team works now
  • Implicit State Machine diagram for Editing Phab Tasks
  • process flow for VE team within WMF
• Process Menu with feedback from team
• Suggested progress changes
• Previous WMF Process Review (theoretical model for all of WMF, not specific to VE team)

Working materials

Interview notes (etherpad)

Goals

1. Joel and Neil learning the team's processes
2. Joel collecting information prerequisite to suggesting any changes as TPG detailee to VE
3. Documenting how VE team works because it may be a model for other Editing teams and other teams in WMF
4. Provide VE team retrospection on progress up to point of re-org and VE release
5. Meet requests from execs for better forecasting and visibility

Timing

Information Collection: April

Make changes: May?