Team Practices Group/Tracking core and strategic work

Overview
WMF management asked the Team Practices Group (TPG) to work with audience-facing product teams to start tracking "core" and "strategic" work. As part of annual planning efforts, aligning all of our work to core and strategic labels will help us communicate our work externally, and to improve our internal budget and strategic planning processes. This work has since been integrated with the annual planning, which affects all teams throughout the foundation.

Some teams have been piloting the tracking of other related categories, such as "maintenance" and "interrupt", using Phabricator tools and practices. You can see that work here. TPG will incorporate earlier questions and concerns into this conversation, as well as continuing to work with teams to make categorization as easy and consistent as possible.

Please use the Talk/Discussion page here to help refine these definitions and practices. To help with annual planning, executives have asked that these these definitions be finalized by the end of January 2016. TPG has a quarterly goal that teams are able to track their work in these categories by the end of March 2016.

Core
Activities required to maintain current level of support and services for our projects. Core work should be evaluated annually or quarterly against relative impact to our reader and editor communities and optimized to best leverage donor funds.

Examples

 * Operations - Data center support tasks to maintain uptime
 * Legal - Trademark protection
 * Product - Tasks to maintain latest version of Elasticsearch
 * Fundraising - PCI Compliance tasks
 * CE: On-site safety work.

Strategic
Activities that are experimental and the impact is not yet fully predictable. Strategic work is designed to facilitate forward looking impact on our projects and movement. Strategic work should be evaluated and re-prioritized annually or quarterly for actual impact.

Examples

 * Operations - Expanding new data center locations
 * Legal - Exploring licensing and complications with new partnerships
 * Product - Mobile editing feature development
 * Fundraising - Expanding tests to additional platforms or regions
 * CE: Work on gender-based harassment.

Other
Work that is neither core nor strategic.

Practices

 * TBD


 * Previous Research: Team Practices Group/Measuring Types of Work