Wikimedia Engineering/Goals Proposal

This is a proposal for how the quarterly goals planing and review processes could be improved.

Objectives

 * 1) Increase internal and external communication during the planning process
 * 2) Separate operational planning and assessment (“How can we reach our goals?”) from strategic assessment (“What should our goals be?”)

Communication changes

 * 1) Separation of objective, output and outcome
 * 2) Descriptions of contributions required by dependent teams
 * 3) List of metrics relevant to the outcome
 * 4) Must have exactly one focus goal
 * 5) Additional goals may be strengthen or experiment goals

Review changes:

 * 1) Completing an output is achieving a goal, thus our performance is measured on whether we finished the work we set out to do
 * 2) Reaching an outcome informs the next goals to be set, thus our planning is informed by measuring the effects of the work we’ve done
 * 3) Dependant teams must agree to contributions to other teams, thus we avoid the chaos of resource scarcity and contention
 * 4) Dependent teams must list contributions as goals, thus we expose and track the quality of service delivered between teams

Writing goals
Goals should be written in a way that clearly separates objectives, outputs and outcomes. A library of templates should be used to help get people started, but the following definitions should be used as a guide for writing goals. Mapping to current terminology.
 * Objectives should track throughout a product’s life-cycle, and thus be high-level such as “increase participation” or “reduce load time” and correlate strongly with metrics.
 * Outputs should describe the actual work being done by the team, and will track strongly with the phase of the life-cycle the product is entering.
 * Outcomes should describe what we hope we will have or have changed as a result of achieving the described output, ideally in a measurable way.
 * Currently "goal" is used to describe an objective, an output or both an objective and an output. It is proposed that "goal" refer to a specific output which relates to objective and seeks to produce and outcome.
 * Currently "key result" is used to describe an output, an outcome or both an objective and an output. It is proposed that this term be replaced with more specific terms.
 * Currently "metric" is used to describe a method of measuring an outcome. It is proposed that "metric" continue to be used in this way.