Team Practices Group/Tracking core and strategic work

Overview
WMF management has 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.

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
Current work and resources required to maintain essential services.

Examples

 * Operations - Data center support tasks to maintain uptime
 * Legal - Subpoena tasks
 * Product - Tasks to maintain latest version of elastic search
 * Fundraising - PCI Compliance tasks

Strategic
New work and resources or goals aligned to a strategy.

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

Other
Work that is neither core nor strategic.

Practices

 * TBD


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