Community Relations/Planning

This is how the Community Relations team organizes their work.

Goals

Community Relations goals define our short term priorities. They are tracked in Phabricator.

Goals can be single tasks or long-themed tasks with many subtasks. As opposed to regular workflows, they have a beginning and an end.

Goals are assigned to one person, who is responsible of its completion regardless of who else is involved.

Team goals benefit from top priority attention and resourcing. They are tracked through Quarterly Check-ins. Any team member can propose a team goal and each proposal will be discussed by the team.

Individual goals consist of tasks that can be performed mostly or completely by one person. They are expected to be completed within a quarter. Each individual agrees their goals with their manager, scoping and resourcing them accordingly.

Subprojects and their boards

The Community Relations team has an umbrella project in Phabricator which acts as parent for several subprojects. All subprojects have one board to organize their tasks, except Community Relations Support, where tasks are organized in quarterly milestones.

Subproject boards

Tasks in subprojects are expected to move through the board columns:

• The Inbox column is the default location for new tasks landing in the subproject.
• The Needs discussion column hosts tasks that don't have enough information or consensus to be committed
• The To-Do column hosts tasks committed and waiting until someone has time to work on them.
• The Started column hosts ongoing tasks as well as closed tasks that haven't been evaluated yet.
• The Evaluated column hosts only closed tasks that have been reviewed within the team or through a survey to the person who requested support.

Community Relations Specialists quarterly milestones

Community Relations Specialists track the support requests received through so-called milestones for every quarter. We only accept support requests from other teams in their boards. New requests are expected to land in the general Backlog by default.

Adding a task to a quarterly milestone implies that the team has the intention to work on that task during that quarter. This action is usually done by the owners of the tasks or the manager of Community Relations Specialists. All tasks in a quarterly milestone must be assigned to someone.

During the quarter, tasks are expected to move through the board columns:

• The Backlog column hosts the tasks that haven't started yet.
• The Started column hosts ongoing tasks as well as closed tasks that haven't been evaluated yet.
• The Evaluated column hosts only closed tasks that have been evaluated through a survey to the person who requested support.

Any Community Relations Specialists tasks closed during the quarter must be filed under their corresponding milestone, including those closed as Declined, Invalid or Duplicate.

At the end of the quarter, all open tasks must be either pushed to the next milestone or to the general backlog. Once the board has all the tasks closed under the Evaluated column, it can be archived.