Workflow#

Levels of work within 2i2c#

There are roughly three levels of work at play in 2i2c’s team[1]:

Level 3: Strategy. 2i2c’s overall strategic goals and the initiatives that make progress towards them. Defined as items in the initiatives board.

Level 2: Coordination. The sequence of actions that is carried out in order to complete an initiative, and the cross-team coordination needed to accomplish them. Defined as sub-issues within initiatives on the initiatives board.

Level 1: Operations. The work that a team intends to deliver now and next. This is a combination of strategic work that drives an initiative forward, as well as reactive work that is driven by external processes. Defined as items on team delivery boards.

In short, our strategic goals are 2i2c’s overall measure of success. Initiatives are concrete efforts in a strategy to make progress towards those goals. Initiatives require coordination across our team to plan the proper sequence of actions. These plans are then operationalized by being pulled into the delivery processes of each team.

../../_images/boards.excalidraw.svg

An overview of our boards and how they relate to one another. Initiatives (blue) are defined to make progress towards goals (red). Initiatives have sequences of actions to move them forward defined in Initiatives Planning sessions (yellow). Teams pull work from these sequences and complete them in their daily workflow (green).#

Initiatives board#

Initiative-led work is driven by our overall Coordination strategy and goals that define success for 2i2c. These are defined during our quarterly goals planning meetings. Goals should be outcome-based, measurable, and directional in nature. For example, the goals of a high value funding proposal could include checkpoint milestones written into the work plan that we need to target by certain dates.

The Initiatives board is where we define our team’s strategic priorities, and coordinate across sub-teams to ensure that each one has a clear plan of action. An Initiative is an effort that makes progress towards our goals, and usually requires coordination from multiple people or many actions over time.

Note

All initiatives should be driven by a goal, and all non-reactive work should be parented with an initiative via GitHub sub-issues where possible.

Structure of an initiative#

Initiatives should provide enough context for anyone to understand its importance and outcomes or measures for completion. It should provide enough information that our team can prioritize the initiative in our Bi-weekly initiatives meetings. They should also provide a single point of access for visibility into any related epics, tasks, and subtasks.

In Progress initiatives should have a sub-issues list of steps to complete the initiative. These become the issues that we plan in Delivery Boards and iteration planning.

Ensure that every initiative has linked sub-issues so that:

  1. Every task can be traced back to its parent initiative by clicking upward through parent issues.

  2. You can reach each task by clicking downward through issues linked in an initiative’s sub-issues list.

Bi-weekly initiatives meetings#

There is one bi-weekly meeting with the initiatives team for planning and prioritization. We first walk the board and ensure each initiative has clear next steps, assigned people, and that any coordination between teams is clear. We next zoom out and discuss our overall portfolio of initiatives to ensure we’re sequencing them properly and that any upcoming high-priority work is clearly flagged. This should inform priorities for sprint planning and delivery.

Please refine issues before these meetings by updating and reviewing the Initiatives board.

The #initiatives Slack channel#

The #initiatives Slack channel is a space for cross-organization initiatives and strategic conversation.

Initiatives team#

  • @choldgraf : To represent 2i2c’s overall strategy and policies

  • @colliand: To represent our overall Business Development strategy

  • @Gman0909 : To represent our product and services strategy

  • @jmunroe: To represent our community services strategy

  • @yuvipanda : To represent our technical and open source strategy

  • @haroldcampbell : To represent 2i2c’s overall system of work and operations

  • @aprilmj : To represent 2i2c’s People Operations and team support

The above list represents mandatory team members. The initiatives process is however open to all members of 2i2c.

Delivery boards#

Our delivery boards are where we organize the tasks, deliverables and stories that drive our daily actions and our bi-weekly planning cycles. All items on the delivery board should be linked to an In progress initiative, or be related to reactive work.

There are two delivery boards:

Operations board#

The Operations board is a team-wide board focused around delivery. Includes all organizational tasks/actions except for Engineering.

  • Board link

  • #initiatives is the Slack channel for this board.

  • Meetings: Bi-weekly organization-wide sprint planning meetings.

Product and Services board#

The Product and Services board: This is the main board used to coordinate work for the P&S team.

Retrospective boards#

We use EasyRetro to facilitate our retrospectives.

Product and Services retrospective policy#

The Product and Services team holds a retrospective every two weeks.

The #team-updates Slack channel#

The #team-updates Slack channel is for organization-wide announcements and team discussion. It is a place for the whole organization to talk to one another, share status and life updates, etc. There’s not a strict limit to topics for discussion, but if your conversation fits within the scope of another Slack channel it’s better to discuss there.