People:removing roadblocks to productivity/project lack of standardization
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Contents
Lack of Standardization
Project manager: Sheila Mooney
How to get involved
Talk to Sheila. Initially a small working group will assemble regularly to discuss and collaborate on problems and solutions. After some experimentation we will find a way to expand the group of contributors.
What we heard
- Unclear/conflicting priorities
- Some teams simply do not know how to prioritize work effectively.
- Incoming project requests coming from teams with competing agendas and priorities; my stuff is most important.
- Priorities change on a whim without regard to the cost.
- Too many commitments
- Unrealistic expectations around a teams' capacity.
- Everything must be done, no acknowledgement of tradeoffs or choices.
- Teams don't feel empowered to say no or push back.
- Planning and communications
- Silo'd approach to projects or working around a team since we think it slows us down.
- Looping teams in too late with expectations that they will get something done immediately if we determine it's a dependency.
- No simple and unified way to see a teams' priority list. Everybody using a different tool.
- Conversations/information happening in private not accessible to others.
Shorter term actions
- A simple backlog/priority list
- A small working group representing different areas of the organization will look a couple of different tools to communicate a team's work queue, backlog or goals.
- Some analysis to determine what problems we can tackle by simply communicating this information.
- Identify the conversations this can help initiate.
- Look at how this works for very different groups/info; ie: IT, Desktop, Platform.
- Visualization clustered around company goals.
Longer term changes / shifts
- Better alignment on priorities and what people should be working on; eliminate pet agendas.
- Acknowledgement that we have limited resources and have to make choices.
- Clear ways for teams to show capacity and productive discussions on tradeoffs and choices.
- Standard way to view and talk about team backlogs. Clear understanding across all groups what people are working on and why.
Responses in this category
- Lack of a proper, unified project management system used by all Mozilla teams. This results in poor inter-team coordination, and a poor universal understanding of the relative importance of tasks/projects. 81 votes
- Teams that don't like to use Bugzilla or IRC. 55 votes
- Lack of consistent, repeatable process. 9 votes
- Lack of a team responsible or defined process for driving/prioritizing cross-team collaboration required to launch initiatives. (sometimes called a PMO in traditional organizations). 8 votes
- Lack of total systems view, leaving downstream "work stations" blindsided by new projects. 6 votes
- Trying to test things and get involved with projects that have no specs or established process. Most things are `TBD` and then just get coded, then ultimately rewritten. 4 votes
- The appearance of different priorities in different parts/regions of Mozilla. We are and should be One Mozilla. 4 votes