Modular Milestone-driven Development

Purpose

 * 1) Track work more consistently
 * 2) * Use Milestones to define Wikimedia Foundation's scope of work (the “X Board”).
 * 3) * Try to tie high-level goals all the way through to small tasks (may not pass cost/benefit test)
 * 4) * Sync everything. Keep our high-level and  low-level goals in sync (but not so much, or in a way, that we do more  paperwork than other work)
 * 5) Change how we plan so that changing scope is inseparable with changing priorities and changing staffing.
 * 6) * Continuity of planning; stop re-inventing, maintain institutional memory over years, especially when that memory is mostly outside the Foundation.
 * 7) * Quarterly goals, weekly or bi-weekly sprint planning or Kanban checkin, should start with last period's goals and show deltas
 * 8) Become more realistic and evidence-based in planning and evaluation.
 * 9) * Note that these can be in conflict; it may not be realistic to collect enough evidence to be confident in a decision.
 * 10) * Separate Outcome Dashboard from Output Dashboard.
 * 11) ** Use Output dashboard to evaluate what a team has completed.
 * 12) ** Use Outcome Dashboard in prioritizing which outcomes to try and change and which projects to staff up to do so.
 * 13) * Collecting data about whether something worked is itself work. If we do something in Q1, we may not know if it worked until Q3 or even never.
 * 14) * output vs outcome. when evaluating the  results of work, checking that the team completed the output they  intended to complete is a different thing than checking that the output  caused the desired outcome.
 * 15) * noise of change is really signal.
 * 16) ** Traditional gantt charts, and even quarterly goal setting, can induce the tendency to see changes from the plan as problems to be minimized. However, the reasons for these changes are generally the reasons why the plan is bad or incomplete or impossible, so we should be treating these changes as signal to incorporate into the plan.  And we should have a process that encourages rather than discourages this.  (which is what?)
 * 17) * evidence-based narrative. The stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing and how it is working should be grounded in evidence where possible, and bounded by caveats (and plans for tests) where not.

Basic mechanism in SPDPP

 * 1) make goals.
 * 2) do work breakdown
 * 3) do work and track work
 * 4) evaluate against plan  repeats at at least three different levels

Cycles where this applies

 * 1) outcomes to outputs
 * 2) outputs (quarterly goals) to milestones
 * 3) milestones to tasks

Data Model
One possible way to understand and consolidate the different, related terms used for work tracking at the Foundation:

Original Presentation
Coming soon: Slides 44 to 61 from SPDPP Proposal

Unsorted slides
Changes compared to status quo:
 * Milestone evaluation.pngerly review focuses only on Outputs, not Outcomes. Separate process looks at Outcomes and decides what priorities and plans to alter.