Hi @team !
A while back, you might recall this thread about improving the way we measure contributions and by this point, every team member has completed their ticket to tag contributions. We now have the stats and they’re not what we expected. We had expected that we’d have blown way past our commitments to contribution.
However, the data paints a different picture. While the team as a whole exceeded the contributed hours commitment last year, on an individual level, most CCs did not hit their target. The reasons were myriad:
- Many of our CCs in Falcon, and the majority of the work they’re doing can’t be considered CC work since it’s funded by Axim. That means any CC work from Falcon team members must necessarily be from non-billable efforts, which haven’t been prioritized or have otherwise been constrained.
- Some of the team members we have are on assignments that mostly don’t touch Open edX directly at all (say, administrative or ops work)
- Some of our most recent projects which could have been considered contributions weren’t set up to be-- such as the XBlocks for WGU, or the Pathways work for HMS.
Number 3 we’re currently in the process of resolving– we intend to upstream these projects. Both projects were stared when the product proposal process was not fully formed, its implications were not understood, and we hadn’t integrated it into our processes, so future incidents may be avoided in our current processes.
However, the other items require more thinking. For some team members and scenarios, it’s hard to imagine a solution other than ‘Direct non-billable contribution budgets’. That is likely the case for Falcon. It might be the case for team members like Gabriel.
But even for Serenity team members, it is likely we could find more ways to align work as conributions.
And, of course we want to maximize our contributions for non-CCs as well where possible– while the CCs have a particular obligation, as much of our work should be contributed as we can make so. That may mean getting more clever with how we handle certain tasks. Can our automations be upstreamed more? Can our mentoring work have more of a public documentation element? What else can we think of?
This thread is to discuss how we might achieve these goals. What things could we place into a contribution-oriented stance which we don’t currently? Are there any solutions for team members like those on Falcon to get CC hours which don’t purely have to come from new non-billable allocations? What could help us capture more effort we’re currently doing as contributions? Is there anything we could do to improve epic management to find more contribution opportunities?
What else can you think of?