Email - From Quarterly planning to on-demand prioritization

--- title: Email - From Quarterly planning to on-demand prioritization tags: email, CPE, initiative --- # From Quarterly Planning to On-demand Prioritization ## Current state The CPE team currently operates under a quarterly planning model. Meaning at the end of every quarter, the CPE management meets with its stakeholder and decide what will be the focus of the team for the next quarter. Team composition are then adjusted based on the project selected to be run that quarter and the interest each team member expresses. This has been working well for over a year now, which makes this an interesting time to have a critical look at it. Looking at the past year a few things jump out: - the CPE team has basically at maximum capacity for 4 sub-teams/initiatives - the CentOS Stream initiative will not finish in 2021 - the Infra & Releng team is a never ending team Taking this into account, we can see that we have at maximum capacity for 2 other initiatives From this capacity, one team has been dedicated to the replacement of our AAA solution for most of 2020. Leaving room to actually plan for only 1 initiative maximum per quarter. In addition to this, the quarterly planning model means that every initiative can be challenged after three months, and work started may be delayed or even never finished because other priorities took over. This leads to uncertainty and frustration on the CPE team as work done is never finished and feels like wasted effort. Finally, of the initiatives we have done as well as those on our backlog, there is a very low amount of initiatives that would fit exactly in a quarter. Some may be shorter, most of them will be longer. In those condition, meeting every 3 months to decide on the work of one sub-team that may in fact be in the middle of their previous initiative, while it works as we've seen until now, may also not be the best fit for our team. ## Proposal This proposal is about moving from an "Quarterly planning" model to an "On-Demand Prioritization" model. The idea is simple: - **The team finishes whatever initiative it starts.** So rather than prioritizing initiatives on a time-based schedule, we prioritize them when needed, i.e: when a sub-team reaches the end of their initiatives. We feel like it is important to give regular updates to our stakeholder (internally and externally), therefore we recommend that a quarterly progress report be sent to all of them. However, the actual meeting and prioritization would only happen when needed. Advantages: - Potentially less meetings for our stakeholders - The team stops starting and starts finishing - More stability - no time-based instability - when someone starts a project, they are sure that they will see it until the end (unless they do not want to or are really needed for something else) - More flexibility in when we call for a prioritization meeting - we could imagine a situation where one team finishes their work a month before another team. The first team could then help the second finish and the Prioritization meeting would then happen for both team at once - This also gives us the flexibility to give the team a small break between two initiatives as we organize the next prioritization meeting. Time which can be used for personal development, acquiring new skills, R&D... Disadvantages: - The start of a new quarter is only a good time to make changes to team composition allowing to rotate people in and out of team and thus allowing for some knowledge-sharing. - Two points to this: - How much have the teams changed last year? - This could still be achieved by: - 1x1 discussion between associate and their manager - when a new initiatives starts, we can ask people who would like to join the new initiative and who would like to join one of the other teams - Every quarter each stakeholder has the possibility to submit and get prioritized a new initiative that needs to become a top-priority, even over on-going work. - We could address this by having the stakeholder reach out to our project owner and management, who can then discuss with them about the status of the on-going initiatives and the timeline of the new, top-priority, one. If deemed critical enough, an "emergency Prioritization meeting" can be gathered and the team and its stakeholder can decide if that new top-priority initiative needs to take over one of the on-going initiative and if so, which. - The quarter rhythm also gives a target to the team which can be motivating as a goal to reach - This is, however, very much person-dependent and some people will react very badly to time-pressure while other will excel in it