This should help make our epic descriptions more consistent, and brings in a checklist with best practices from our documentation about how to manage an epic well.
Please use this for any new epics going forward. (And post here if you have any feedback on how to make it better!)
If you are an owner of an existing epic, I’d also encourage you to edit the description of your existing epic to match this template, but I’ll leave that up to you.
Taking from the recent Learning and applying "Project management for non-project managers" tickets, I’ve had a lot of resistance to write down the points asked, since I first needed to convert the ticket guidelines down to a template, understand what was needed in each category and then fill it.
While a checklist is a useful tool, we sometimes can overlook a few items here and there when doing the planning (because of the mental effort to define what exactly should be written).
I don’t think we need all new fields though, because then the epic description would become too cumbersome to fill: Goals + Definition of success, Roles and responsibilities, drawing a fence around the project and Make a communications plan are good points to have in the description.
We can also add all the fields into the template but make them optional. The project management becomes better and easier the over time the more fields an epic manager fills (but it’s also up to them to define the detail level of the epic).
but it’s also up to them to define the detail level of the epic
@giovannicimolin That’s what I had in mind for the checklist: it’s not forcing the epic owner to do everything, but reminding them to ensure they don’t forget about whatever pieces would be useful. If something’s not needed, they can just cross it off and say “not useful for this epic.”
I’m not really clear on what you’re saying otherwise though? Could you perhaps just open it as a PR?
I’m not really clear on what you’re saying otherwise though? Could you perhaps just open it as a PR?
It was hard to nail exactly what to write on each of the sections listed, some are very clearly defined (Roles and responsibilities, Goals + Definition of success), while others are not (drawing a fence around the project).
I have to say that if wasn’t for @adolfo’s (here) and @Fox’s (here) writeups the outcome of my task wouldn’t probably come out as good as it did. Thanks for the help :p
