This is a generalized discussion to allow staff to provide input as to the organization and structure of the idea of a large-project-tracking board in order to keep leadership transparently accountable (to staff, to each other).
Within the past several months, a few leadership-level discrepancies have occurred or slipped through the cracks, which may partially be due to that there is no one singular source of truth as to major projects:
- Disciplinary team reviewing the refactoring of the rules page required multiple follow ups over a long period of time
- Multiple MAST-dependencies/cooperation with other teams have been missed or required multiple follow ups
- The review & revision of the staff charter, which should be an admin-led project, is so massive and disparate that there needs to be a broad plan on how to implement and how to make this implementation transparent over a possibly months-long, ongoing project.
This has occurred over multiple cross-team efforts/large projects and therefore displays a need for a broad, central project tracker (and only for large-scale, multi-team efforts) if only so that any captain can see what other teams are dependent on them, and any staff member on a multi-team effort can be aware of what's happening. The tech team has been in the discussion of how to implement such a central viewpoint, and they believe they have a platform that they already use for their major technical projects, which can be expanded to include the general project management of the rest of the wiki overall.
The suggested staff to keep track of this central repository of large projects, specifically and only to ensure the central repository is up-to-date and to contact captains/staff/project leads in question to ensure as such, will be kept small and will not generally be expected to have a say as to how any project is run. The current members proposed are the following:
DrMagnus, who has existent and directly relevant IRL experience in project management;
SoullessSingularity, who runs monthlyish meetings and therefore can perform multi-team/large scale project checkins during the monthlyish 'how-is-everyone';
aismallard, who as co-captain of the tech team and has domain knowledge on the setup and management of the platform tool itself
The current suggestion is that a trial run will occur to keep track of the charter update project, which is expected to take multiple months and several discussions.
Among currently unknown details is whether or not staff want this to be public or staff-only. Tech has informed that it is possible to make certain issues private (eg. security bugs in their other projects) while making the platform as a whole publicly viewable. However, given the importance and usual incompleteness of larger projects (since that's kind of the point of this board) there is also an argument on evaluating the readyness of making projects public as a separate hurdle to whether or not a project can be tracked. Additionally, the proposed platform may not have an intuitive/pretty interface for non-technical staff to look at.
Any rank of staff member is welcome to post to opine and discuss this general idea; nothing has been directly implemented yet. This isn't really a policy so much as it is a proposed initiative direction.
tl;dr:
Problem: Cross-team and large projects fall through the cracks.
Proposed solution: A small number of people keep tabs on large projects(and only large projects), remind people if something's waiting on something else.
Proposed trial: The small number of people keep kicking tires to make sure charter rewrite actually gets done.
Living the dream, or dreaming the life?