Delivery:System proposals to build transparency and better communication patterns for the team
Context
Delivery:System is a relatively new team, and while we are progressing more and more, we realized that we have some areas of improvement, in particular around better ways to stay connected with project work and to share better what we are working on so that the team feels more connected and aware how the work is progressing in different streams of work.
Problem
Due to PTOs, Release Management, and new projects where new technologies needed a learning period, we found ourselves losing track of project work other people in the team are working on. While documenting better is key, but this would not solve the problem of the lack of awareness of other project streams.
Proposal(s)
In addition to keeping good Epics/Issues/MRs hygiene (proper labeling, assignees, epic linking, and stating the why and not only the what). In order to keep ourselves more connected and involved in the progress of the various streams of work (release management, OKR work, other projects)
- Use of Progress Thread in Issues (and Epics if needed): this was discussed in several 1:1s, and I directly asked some of you to start implementing this practice when the visibility of the working items wasn't very high. Some of you already started using it, while some of you were already very verbose in issue comments and already achieving what a Progress Thread wants to achieve (so there shouldn't be much change). Now I am proposing to make this our standard practice from now on.
- Introducing Decision Log into Epics: this came up in a 1:1 last week, and we already decided to implement it in our current OKR Epic. I am also proposing to make this a habit and adopt this practice in the epics we are working on. Several times we had discussions around decisions to take to move our work forward, those decisions can be summarized in comments, but this makes the whole thread difficult to follow. Having a centralized place where to list of the decision we are taking, with who was involved in the discussion and decision will make the whole decision thread centralized and easy to follow.
- Status update in #delivery-lounge: on a similar approach used by Scalability in #scalability-lounge, I propose adopting a similar approach. We should share work items status/progresses/doubts/anything else, but also non-work related stuff (as you got an amazing Ube flavored ice cream today). This should help to keep the entire team looped in on the progress of each other and share some life facts to feel a bit more connected.
@gitlab-org/delivery/systems - curious to hear your thoughts about the proposals above and if you have other ideas.