Organize Product Flow and Lead time to improve Monthly Release Commitment/ Delivery metrics
Experiment Description
Problem to Solve: The last 3 monthly release average delivery against commitment was 36% for Release. The goal for Product is 100% shipment of release commitments.
As a result the devopsrelease management team has identified some potential root causes and a hypothesis to improve commitment to delivery metrics.
The root causes suspected to be impacting appear to allowing proper lead time to complete the discovery phase prior to committing to feature scope for a release. The past 6 months the Release product area has had a steep ramp with minimal time to dedicate to self organization, refine scope fo features, and completing UX research for new capabilities prior to a release. This in turn has resulted in a snowballing effect that missing a high volume of deliverables the past 3 releases and the 36% delivery rate.
Which metrics do you think this will affect?
Hypothesis By establishing a collaborative Discovery to Delivery cadence similar to Dual Track Agile and the UX collaboration model in partnership with the PMs, Engineering Manager, and UX Manager, the team will improve overall % of commit to delivery success in the Feature lifecycle with higher confidence to deliver value.
What is your predicted outcome on this metric?
It is our goal to see marked improvement between now and %12.3 in the delivery percentage with a target to hit 70% by that Milestone. The long term goal is to get to the desired state of 100% for product.
Other improvements predicted but not measured in this experiment will be:
- Improved scorecards for experience baselines
- Increase user community satisfaction by delivering more informed features
- Increase in Release product team members job satisfaction
What resources will this experiment require?
It is the intent for the team to build this into our already established Product Development Timeline](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/workflow/#product-development-timeline) with a simple more organized approach to address lead time, risks, and unknowns. The team will leverage a UX Researcher
or Tech Writer
based on complexity and as needed which is already an established part of the delivery process.
Supporting Visualization
The team is using the following visualization to mature the approach and align their cadence for Releases.
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1pzPdpjz5ODLnb0egETYu5_Xy_KfVkkHyFwbroq8q4MU/edit