Julie Kuehl 1:21 pm on September 24, 2018  

Proposal for Changing the Training Team’s Workflow

The WordPress Training Team has had the same workflow for several years. It consists of:

  1. Generate an idea for a topic
  2. Articulate the description and objectives
  3. Draft the lesson plan
  4. Instructional review (a relatively new step in the workflow)
  5. Copyedit
  6. Copyedit
  7. Copyedit (Review for style guide adherence)
  8. Test
  9. Test
  10. Test
  11. Review for publication
  12. Publish

That’s a lot of steps. The reality is this workflow slows the release of lesson plans for months, it is tedious for the team, and it may not be necessary.

So in an effort to be more agile and improve the impact the team can make, it is proposed that the workflow be changed to:

  1. Identify a need for a topic
  2. Articulate the description and objectives
  3. Draft the lesson plan
  4. Instructional review
  5. Copyedit
  6. Review for style guide adherence
  7. Review for publication
  8. Publish

This new workflow would reduce the copyediting and testing steps. Rather than having the team use resources on those tasks, feedback forms would be provided on the published lesson plans for copyediting and testing. To be clear, those forms would include:

  • Copyediting: typos, grammar errors, hard to understand writing, organization comments, generally any feedback not generated from using at an in-person event
  • Testing: feedback after a lesson plan has been used for an in-person event, see: https://make.wordpress.org/training/handbook/about/testing-lesson-plans/instructor-testing-feedback/

This change would allow the Training Team to focus on identifying lesson plan needs, drafting them, and getting them published and available to the community. And letting the community assist in making them better in ways the team itself cannot.

The purpose of this change is to reduce the time from when a need is identified until that lesson plan is available for use by the community. The team is looking to implement this new workflow before WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. US in December 2018.

Please share your thoughts in the comments!