Wikimedia Product/Program Management

This page describes the Program Management Team of the Product department in the Wikimedia Foundation.

Team Mission & Purpose
"We design and run impactful, thoughtful programs that align with our mission and our identity as a techno-social organization." (We want to turn this into an ambitious, “in 10 years we will have empowered the movement through our awesome powers of program management” statement, but aren’t sure how yet.)

How do we facilitate Product Program Delivery Excellence
For Programs & Projects to be successful we aim to bring the following expertise and practices to a Program team so that we are able to deliver on the objectives we set out to achieve. These are some of the processes, disciplines and frameworks we tailor per program so that we have clear, concise and transparent means of planning, tracking progress & execution, facilitating Issue Management and being able to pivot in an Agile way while keeping all stakeholders engaged and informed in key decision making and in providing the right level of direction to steer the program correctly.

Cross Functional Team Collaboration
We support the activities related to sound Program Management through a Program Life Cycle. Looking into the ambit of working with stakeholders to understand the Program objectives, breaking this down into Key Results and working with subject Matter experts to determine our Minimum Viable Product/s along with other key outputs across various teams/function to realise certain outcomes. We look at the high level planning and how this cascades into detail delivery plans. Programs typically encompass multiple projects which need to be managed sequentially or in parallel from a delivery perspective. This requires extreme insight into being able to work with Product Experts to see the big picture and drill down into the actual activities as part of the delivery or execution planning. We also look at scoping and planning across various Product Feature teams and Technology teams to ensure synergy and sequence in what needs to be delivered in line with Strategy.

We are very interested in the identification of critical path items (milestones) which must be carefully coordinated across various teams/disciplines.

Identifying potential Risks, show stoppers, dependencies is what we also thrive in doing. We want to know how we will achieve the Objectives set out per program, who are the role players instrumental in paving the way to get there, what impediments or challenges do we anticipate we will face along the way, how can we pivot in the face of adversity. We are all about doing things Agile but knowing we are also compliant in what we do, we look at the Governance to ensure things are above board across the various team disciplines.

We endeavor to work with our stakeholders to ensure we can work together collaboratively, timely, with urgency and accountability to deliver on our commitments for confirmed Programmes and related sub projects that drive how we achieve our Strategic Objectives in the organization.

Team members

 * Amanda Bittaker
 * Carly Bogen
 * Liam Wyatt
 * Mary Munyoki
 * Astuthi Odit

Team services

 * Processes we recommend to support delivery across Programs, Projects, Features, Releases, Tech & Non Tech delivery
 * Specific & tailored tools & PgM frameworks, checklists, artefacts we use to get things done,
 * Cadence/Rhythm for Reporting, Financial Management & Stakeholder Engagements, communication
 * Industry related Governance, Best Practices considering Agile disciplines and Program Management Disciplines
 * Our key strengths, skills where we add value and help teams achieve great outcomes
 * Inter-dependency Management, Cross Functional collaborations
 * MVP: Minimum Viable Product Release planning
 * Community Engagement- Implementation and Change Management