Proposal: [Experiment] Adopt Standardised Team-wide Project Management Tools – already utilised by other Make Teams for a Quarter.

This proposal is focused towards improving our project management and goal and progress tracking by using the same transparent tools that other Make Teams already utilise.

Background and Skeleton

Currently we have many spreadsheets, trelloTrello Project management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing. boards, slackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. groups and many other disparate ways of working on our various ongoing projects outside of helpscout.

From my personal experience having returned as a Community DeputyProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. and now as Community Team RepTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts., I believe that the first action – before further planning and goals discussions – is to standardise and fully utilize the power of the tools already available to us. We can benefit by learning from other teams that already consistently use these tools.

…and possibly this demo of a Make Community Team →

Benefits of adopting GithubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/:

GitHub is a powerful and widely-used platform for project management and issue tracking already in full use by @WordPress.

Adopting GitHub for these purposes within the Community Team would bring a number of benefits, including:

  1. Improved collaboration and communication: GitHub provides a central location for team members to access and work on project tasks and issues, as well as a built-in system for commenting, tracking progress, and assigning tasks. This makes it easy for team members to stay informed about the progress of a project and to contribute to it, even when working remotely.
  2. Increased transparency and accountability: With GitHub, team members can easily see the progress of tasks and issues, as well as who is responsible for them. This increased transparency helps to ensure that everyone is on the same page and that tasks and issues are not falling through the cracks.
  3. Better organization and prioritization: GitHub provides a number of tools for organizing and prioritizing tasks and issues, such as labels, milestones, and project boards. These tools make it easy for team members to understand what needs to be done and when, and to focus their efforts on the most important tasks.
  4. Standardisation: By adopting GitHub for project management and issue tracking, the Community Team will standardize our way of working, making it easier for new team members to get up to speed and enabling more effective cross-team collaboration. This standardization also makes it easier for Community Team members to track progress, identify issues and make data-driven decisions.

Overall, adopting GitHub for project management and issue tracking would bring improved collaboration, increased transparency, better organization, and standardization, ultimately leading to a more efficient and effective team.

Next Steps, the Experiment:

I propose we adopt these tooling methods similar to other make teams, and experiment with its usage for a month, having monthly meetings reviewing its success or not, and gathering data for more data-driven decision making

If after the first Quarter the consensus is that this does not suit our team, we will revert back to initial project and tracking practices and explore more.

Update: Other teams using github already were kind enough to share some of the resources they use and workflows which would be extremely beneficial should we move forward with this adoption standard.


Proposal Adoption Feedback Form

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Thanks to @mysweetcate @juliarosia @megabyterose @peiraisotta for their help editing, offering invaluable advice, and their support for this proposal by @leogopal

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