Minutes and slides from last week's quarterly review of the Foundation's Release Engineering and QA team are now available at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF_Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterl... .

On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 6:49 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:

Hi folks,

to increase accountability and create more opportunities for course corrections and resourcing adjustments as necessary, Sue's asked me and Howie Fung to set up a quarterly project evaluation process, starting with our highest priority initiatives. These are, according to Sue's narrowing focus recommendations which were approved by the Board [1]:

• Visual Editor
• Mobile (mobile contributions + Wikipedia Zero)
• Editor Engagement (also known as the E2 and E3 teams)
• Funds Dissemination Committe and expanded grant-making capacity

I'm proposing the following initial schedule:

January:

• Editor Engagement Experiments

February:

• Visual Editor
• Mobile (Contribs + Zero)

March:

• Editor Engagement Features (Echo, Flow projects)
• Funds Dissemination Committee

We’ll try doing this on the same day or adjacent to the monthly metrics meetings [2], since the team(s) will give a presentation on their recent progress, which will help set some context that would otherwise need to be covered in the quarterly review itself. This will also create open opportunities for feedback and questions.

My goal is to do this in a manner where even though the quarterly review meetings themselves are internal, the outcomes are captured as meeting minutes and shared publicly, which is why I'm starting this discussion on a public list as well. I've created a wiki page here which we can use to discuss the concept further:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_re...

The internal review will, at minimum, include:

Sue Gardner myself Howie Fung Team members and relevant director(s) Designated minute-taker

So for example, for Visual Editor, the review team would be the Visual Editor / Parsoid teams, Sue, me, Howie, Terry, and a minute-taker.

I imagine the structure of the review roughly as follows, with a duration of about 2 1/2 hours divided into 25-30 minute blocks:

• Brief team intro and recap of team's activities through the quarter,

compared with goals

• Drill into goals and targets: Did we achieve what we said we would?
• Review of challenges, blockers and successes
• Discussion of proposed changes (e.g. resourcing, targets) and other

action items

• Buffer time, debriefing

Once again, the primary purpose of these reviews is to create improved structures for internal accountability, escalation points in cases where serious changes are necessary, and transparency to the world.

In addition to these priority initiatives, my recommendation would be to conduct quarterly reviews for any activity that requires more than a set amount of resources (people/dollars). These additional reviews may however be conducted in a more lightweight manner and internally to the departments. We’re slowly getting into that habit in engineering.

As we pilot this process, the format of the high priority reviews can help inform and support reviews across the organization.

Feedback and questions are appreciated.

All best, Erik

[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vote:Narrowing_Focus [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

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