Project Roadmap Guidelines
Goals of the Roadmap
The Brassica collective will have a Project Roadmap which attempts to describe the main outcomes that the collective is working towards, and the order they are being tackled in. It has the following goals:
- To ensure that the collective is in agreement on desired project outcomes.
- To allow individual participants and crews to see how their work moves us forward towards agreed goals.
- To communicate the current status of the project to the public.
It is NOT the goal of the roadmap to be a complete project management solution, although we may create linkages between roadmaps and project management tools.
While the roadmap is intended to help us focus our work on our collectively decided goals, it is not intended to make us work faster or harder. The roadmap does not have deadlines.
Reading the Roadmap
The top level of the roadmap has two types of steps:
- Milestones: These are top level steps, that are a unified goal of the entire collective, and a moment of shared celebration when achieved.
- Streams: These steps represent a part of the work within a particular area, performed in-parallel with other streams. Typically all the work in all the streams needs to be complete to reach a milestone. Streams remind us that different kinds of work are all valuable in getting to important goals.
It’s possible to click on these and go to a page “inside” them, showing the work needed to complete that milestone or stream. This work is generally a third kind of step:
- Outcome: These are the result of work along the way. Outcomes typically do not occur on the top level, and are usually found within streams or other outcomes. An outcome may be tagged with a crew or crews.
Using the Roadmap
As a Project
The roadmap focuses us on the goals ahead. After each top level milestone, we should celebrate our success together. Then, we should ensure that the next milestone, and the streams of work that get us there, represent where we still want to be heading.
The collective has a working crew with a particular focus on strategy, Development & Strategy Crew. This crew has a delegated responsibility to ensure that we consider project strategy, and the Roadmap is a major tool for reflecting that on behalf of all project participants. Like all crews, DAS is a crew that all participants are encouraged to opt-in to intermittently. Participating in the DAS crew is a key way to contribute to developing the strategic direction of the project.
As a Crew
Crews may take on responsibility for achieving roadmap outcomes. To reflect this, an outcome can be tagged as relating to one (or occasionally more than one) crew. These crews then take on these outcomes as goals for crew work, and may break them up into further work as needed either in the Roadmap (if communicating status to the public or other participants seems beneficial) and/or in the project management software.
As an Individual Participant
As an individual participant, it should be possible to connect contributions that you make to the project to particular roadmap steps, and thus see how it is part of driving the project as a whole forward. There is one caveat that the project also values work that is ongoing stewardship, from participating well in discussions to washing the dishes, which may not be best thought of as “achieving milestones” in a roadmap, and is better thought of as the necessary ongoing work of living and working together.
Changing the Roadmap
Although this is a set of guidelines, not a decision making agreement, the following principles are our working plan for determining how to use our decision making processes to change the roadmap.
- The top level of the roadmap is decided collectively. We use a full collective decision (currently a Major Decision, made by consensus) to make any material change to the top level of the roadmap, including adding, removing, changing or re-ordering milestones or streams. Marking milestones as complete is not a major decision, but is still very much the business of the entire collective and is done by informal shared agreement and celebration.
- DAS crew stewards the top level roadmap on behalf of the collective. DAS Crew provides a space for people to think about project strategy, so suggestions for top level roadmap changes are typically discussed within DAS crew before being taken to all participants.
- Crews may take on responsibility for outcomes. Crews can take on responsibility for outcomes by shared agreement of the crew in question and DAS crew. Generally speaking, outcomes which map closely to a crew’s agreed goals and mandate will always be offered to that crew. Crews do not have to take on responsibility for an outcome if they aren’t ready to do so yet, or don’t agree that it represents their goals. Being responsible for an outcome doesn’t give a crew any new delegated authority, if that is needed as well it needs to be brought to participants as per our process for delegating minor decisions. If crews have goals that aren’t well represented in the roadmap they can suggest new outcomes via DAS crew.
- Crews choose how to manage their outcomes. Crews may only change the name and description of their outcomes in collaboration with DAS crew (and any other crews also tagged on it). However, they may add, edit or remove any additional supplementary material to the outcome, including breaking it up into smaller outcomes at any time, and changing those at will.
- Keep participants informed of material changes to outcomes. Participants should be informed when outcomes are created, completed or re-ordered. This should at least be included in crew reports each interval, but for completion of major outcomes (second level at least) it’s a nice idea to inform participants straight away.
- Keep collaborators informed of top level progress. Collaborators will want to know about completion of milestones at a minimum.
Context
These guidelines (Version 0.3) are intended to describe how we intend to use and change the Project Roadmap, and provide additional context for our collective agreement about the top-level milestones in our Roadmap.