Project Management/2011 Q4/Updates/Project Funnel - Short-Term Proposal
Purpose
Based on the outcome of the project management survey, we need to develop a short term solution to gain visibility across the organization on our projects. As of 2011-11-10, nearly 51% of the 150 respondents have said that quarterly goals are at risk due to their group being over utilized. This is a comment problem voiced by employees due to so many projects requiring assistance from multiple other groups. The purpose of this proposal is to create a short-term solution to help all employees to work together as a single team to better understand how to move all of Mozilla forward.
Probing Questions
How we can bring more visibility to projects to help all of us to better understand what is being requested of each team? If you put in a bug for a team to complete by a specific date, and they say they do not have the bandwidth, what do you do? How can we compare the relative importance of all requests and decide on what moves forward if we don't have a view of everything being asked? If prioritization is really about making choices, how we can make informed decisions without knowing all of the available options?
Proposal
Note: A planning period will often be a quarter, but it doesn't always have to be.
- Develop a simple Google Doc form to capture all major projects at Mozilla.
- Only make the form available during a predefined and communicated period near the end of the current planning period.
- Ask all product owners, project/program managers, and leaders from the entire organization to submit their projects by a specific date.
- Sort and organize the results of the form submissions in a Google Doc spreadsheet.
- Remove duplicate projects and clean up submitted data.
- Communicate to the organization the summaries and metrics of the submitted data.
- Perform a project prioritization process on the submitted projects.
- Review and adjust the list of projects that should be priority for the next quarter.
- Gather feedback from all Mozilla groups if all priority projects are technically possible within the defined period of time.
- Adjust priorities based on what is possible given all of the internal constraints and feedback.
- Approve priority list and communicate the goals and priorities to the entire organization.
- Focus the upcoming period of time, usually a quarter, on executing on priorities.
- Projects not completed or started for a given period of time should be added to a backlog for the next planning period.
Intake Form
The following is an example form that could be used to intake projects from the entire company.