Portfolio capacity planning
- Planning high-level initiatives at a very coarse abstraction level for planning in quarters and even years.
- We would use this at GitLab to replace spreadsheets. We are in a stage of rapid growth. So we need the ability to plan several quarters in advance.
- This features set would focus on capacity in particular. So a typical flow:
- Senior executives at company have a few strategic initiatives.
- They use some very high-level estimates of effort to quantify the work required.
- They have some way to quantify how much capacity they have and planned capacity (future hiring and estimated attrition).
- These numbers are pulled together in GitLab and GitLab spits out visualizations of when initiatives would be completed.
- People go back and refine estimates and move things around.
- Rinse and repeat.
Out of scope: These are things not in scope, not because they don't belong in GitLab, but because we want to carve out some exclusive scope. In fact, all the following should be in GitLab, but for the sake of discussion of what to work on next, I want to be clear.
- Financial planning: Dollars and cents are not involved in this scope. Budgeting is not involved. So that would be handled with a different tool for now.
- Risk management: Assign and monitor risks on initiatives. Surface delays in planned initiatives. Surface risks due to other sources and display them in GitLab. This is not in scope.
- ROI analysis: Quantify and assign returns to initiatives. Look at investment required, which could be capacity (people effort) or dollars invested. And have GitLab display ROIs for you. And then you can take that into account when planning initiatives. This is not in scope.
Interested Prospect
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