New Initiative Workflow

This document documents a proposed workflow to get new initiatives onto the CLE backlog.

The Process

The process to submit a new initiative to the CLE team to be potentially worked on is outlined below:

  • Propose a new initiative by opening a ticket at https://pagure.io/cpe/initiatives-proposal/new_issue - the proposal should give the “what” and “why” of the work requestedd.

  • The product owner will review your ticket, comment and potentially schedule some time with the requestor(s) to go over the proposal to refine the details. We are looking to establish why this initiative is important to do,what benefits it will bring to the community, the technical details as the requestor sees them and their estimated ‘need by’ date.

  • Once we have established these requirements, the product owner reviews the request with the technical leads of the team to scope the effort the initiative will require from the team to complete. These details include skill sets needed, hardware, storage, automation, dependant services that could be impacted by changes made & how long they think this would take to complete.

  • This information is then reshared with the requestor to verify and sign off on and then reviewed by the CLE review team to be accepted or rejected to our backlog.

  • If rejected, the requestor is notified by the product owner.

  • If accepted, the proposal is added to our backlog queue and will be refined until it is sufficiently scoped to be included in the list of initiatives to be proposed at the quarterly planning.

  • Projects that are moved from the backlog queue to the consideration queue and are not chosen for that quarter may still be progressed in the next quarter(s), or depending on project sizes and timelines, may be picked up by the team on free cycles if they choose to work on this.

  • The team leads, team management team and all the stakeholders review all the proposals for the quarterly planning session during which they prioritize a number of initiatives for the coming quarter.

  • The management team forms the different project teams who will be working on the different initiatives during the quarter.

  • As the quarter progresses, the product owner will reach out to the requestor(s) to sync with them on the progress of the initiatives.

The initiative flow
Figure 1: Initiatives flow

Proposing a New Initiative

To propose a new initiative, open a new ticket at https://pagure.io/cpe/initiatives-proposal/new_issue and fill in the template provided.

That template is basically the what and why of your request and some other information such as:

  • What do you want the team to work on?

  • Why do you think it is worth doing?

  • Potential dependencies for this initiative (dependencies on people, skillset, other work/initiatives, etc…​).

  • Potential deadlines that could impact the initiative.

  • Your definition of success

    • The minimum required for this initiative to be considered a success and the nice-to-have or really-nice-to-have you would like to see/have.

  • Area and community concerned/impacted

First Decision Point: Is This Initiative for the CLE Team?

Based on the information provided in the ticket, the CLE team will consider whether the initiative is in scope of the Mission Statement, and if there is a clear benefit for the communities the CLE team is involved in. If your initiative does not fit in the scope of our mission statement, it does not mean your challenge is not worth pursuing - but that the CLE team has limited resources and needs to be careful on how they are spent. There may be occasions where an initiative outside of our scope is accepted. Should this happen, it will be at our team and management’s discretion.

The CLE team meets regularly to go over the proposed initiatives. At this point, it will be decided if your initiative is accepted, or not, and if necessary, appoint someone to work with you on refining this proposal.

Final Notes

This new workflow is a change from how the CLE team has worked until now. The core idea is to maximize the output of the team to the community. We are not able to accept everything and anything, and we want to make sure that what we do accept is properly limited in scope and time. Hopefully this will allow us to work on more initiatives and bring more beneficial changes to our communities.

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