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We think these are the things we should
Start Doing
(P1) Project Kickoff Communication
Involving product managers more from the start. Not just engineers.
Official start - why we are doing this, a little bit of intro, how important it was. Ensure there is right motivation to help team plan better. Have more context to introduce feeling of owning it rather than doing a duty.
Pre-establish a communication process
A dynamic Jira board reflecting current status.
Slack status update once a week where everyone types up their updates. Looks into Stand up Alice
Provide status on when work will start.
Acknowledge work that is ongoing.
Having a clear way to communicate with all interested parties
An owner for ensuring that all providers of communication actually communicate would reduce work.
eg. One time an update was not given in a timely manner.
When the update was given, it was not sufficiently informative.
Who does the follow up to get more info?
Ensuring there are clearly defined review criteria, and contingency/rollback/roll forward plan
Break review and implementation into two tickets on project tracking grid - this was done for Elasticsearch, but for Mongo it was missing for Edge and Prod.
Ensuring there is documentation that is up to date (Discovery IDA was missing from previous exercise). CS_Comments configuration was in a different repo and we needed help tracking that down.
Official start - why we are doing this, a little bit of intro, how important it was. Ensure there is right motivation to help team plan better. Have more context to introduce feeling of owning it rather than doing a duty.
Involving product managers more from the start. Not just engineers.
Configure some automated alerting of when syncing completes
More fluid daily standup
Quarterly status update by SRE on technology that needs to be updated in the coming quarter.
Note: we already have a document identifying technologies and they end of life: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11DheEtMDGrbA9hsUvZ2SEd4Cc8CaC4mAfoV8SVaLBGI/edit#gid=195838733
Identify channels to convey this information to edX engineering
A dynamic Jira board reflecting current status.
Slack status update once a week where everyone types up their updates. Looks into Stand up Alice
Provide status on when work will start.
Acknowledge work that is ongoing.
Having a clear way to communicate with all interested parties
An owner for ensuring that all providers of communication actually communicate would reduce work.
eg. One time an update was not given in a timely manner.
When the update was given, it was not sufficiently informative.
Who does the follow up to get more info?“How to manage a centrally-lead cross-team project”
Build out meta project documentation to help non project managers lead a large upgrade project.
Stop Doing
Communicating really late in the process.(Make sure people are informed of upcoming projects well ahead of time.)
Relying so heavily on a single project manager to coordinate everything.
Continue Doing
Project tracking grid/table was a good visual representation
Question : Can we create a more dynamic status board?
Creating team specific tickets to accomplish the work.
Natalia to continue annoying teams
Project specific Slack channel
Learning as we go.
Being a constructive pain in the butt when progress is needed.