Help wanted: program management team

April 8, 2021 / Ben Cotton / 26 Comments

I’d love to spend time in different Fedora teams helping them with program management work, but there’s only so much of me to go around. Instead, I’m putting together a program management team. At a high level, the role of the program management team will be two-fold. The main job is to embed in other teams and provide support to them. A secondary role will be to back up some of my duties (like wrangling Changes) when I am out of the office. If you’re interested, fill out the When Is Good survey by 15 April, or read on for more information.

About the team

You can read more about the team on Fedora Docs, but some of the duties I see team members providing include:

Coordination with other Fedora teams (e.g. Websites, design)
Consulting on team process development and improvement
Tracking development plans against the Fedora schedule
Issue triage and management
Shepherding Change proposals and similar requests

Since this is a new team, we still have a lot to figure out. As we go, we’ll figure out what works and adjust to match.

About you

You don’t need to be an expert to join the team. I’d like everyone to have some experience with either contributing to Fedora or project/program management. If you’re lacking in one, we can help fill in the gaps. You should be well-organized (or at least able to fake it) and have 3-5 hours a week available to work with one or more teams in Fedora.

How to join

Fill out the When Is Good survey by 15 April to indicate your availability for a kickoff meeting. This will be a video meeting so that we can have a high-bandwidth conversation. I’m looking for four or five people to start, but if I get more interest, we’ll figure out how to scale. If you’re not sure if this is something you want to do, come to the meeting anyway. You can always decide to not participate.

How to get help from this team

If you’re on another Fedora team and would like to get support from the program management team, great! We don’t have a mechanism for requesting help yet, but that will be coming soon.

Categories: Operations

Tags: Fedora Program Manager, help wanted, Program Management Team

About the Author

Ben Cotton

Comments

zbyszek says:

Is the initial meeting for people who want to be on the management team, or also for people who want to be managed, i.e. would like to have somebody from the management team embedded in their group?
bcotton says:

It’s for people who want to be on the team.
dtometzki says:

Hello bcotton,

it would be great to support the team.
Looking forward to working together.

Best regards
Damian
ramyaparimi says:

Excited to be part of the team!
bcotton says:
@glb @dtometzki @q5sys @penguinista @sumantrom @ramyaparimi @FerventBabbage @siddharthvipul @kylerconway @grahamwhiteuk @pawelzelawski @jhoanir

Well I got a much larger response than I expected. Instead of 3-4 volunteers, 15 people submitted their availability. As you can imagine, this makes scheduling a meeting very difficult. For any particular time slot, about half of the volunteers couldn’t make it. Since I intended the meeting to be an open discussion, splitting it across multiple meetings doesn’t seem very helpful. So we’ll start here and work asynchronously how it goes.

First, I’ve sent emails to everyone asking a few questions about your interests, skills, and experience. I sent this to everyone who used their Fedora account when submitting availability (and everyone whose Fedora account I could figure out from the name they used). If you did not receive this email, please let me know.

So here are the open questions we should solve. For things that I have a weak opinion on, I’m keeping it to myself initially. When I have a strong opinion, I’ll pre-share it. However, that doesn’t mean it’s set in stone.

Communication

Meetings

I hold weekly FPgM office hours. Do we want to use those or have a separate team meeting? (Any training meetings will be done separately)

Synchronous

Do we need our own chat channel? If we want one, it will be on IRC/Matrix (or maybe just Matrix and we’ll move it to the Fedora homeserver once that is in place.)

Asynchronous

Should we use a mailing list or a Discussion category?

Tools and process
- How do we track work? Taiga? Pagure repo?
  - I have a Taiga board he uses to his work, but it also contains work that can’t be assigned to this team, so it may not be good to reuse this. I anticipate most of the work being more task-like in the sense that they have done and not-done states, which suggests a Pagure repo is the right approach.
- How should other teams as for help?
  - If we go with a Pagure repo, I think the way people ask for help is to open an issue on that repo. We can create a template that prompts them for relevant information. When a team member is assigned, we assign them on the ticket. The downside is that it means teams will remain open for a long time (because we want to see who is assigned where). Alternately, someone taking the assignment closes the ticket and we maintain a doc that lists who is assigned where. That information shouldn’t change frequently, so that’s not a significant burden.
- How do people get assigned to a request?
  - I don’t want it to necessarily be “the first person who claims a help request gets it” because that’s not fair to people who aren’t online when the request comes in. I think the right approach might be for me to match the team’s needs with the skills and interests of PgM team members. This way, we’re maximizing the goodness of fit. On the other hand, I don’t want to create bad feelings if someone doesn’t get matched with a request for a while (I’m not sure there will be enough work to go around), so if anyone had better ideas, I’d love to hear them.
- What else do we need to figure out early that I’m forgetting?
grahamwhiteuk says:
Some thoughts from me…

Communication

Meetings

I’d perhaps suggest a separate meeting for the team for now so that we can get to know each other in an environment where we’re all as new as each other (assuming there are other non Red Hatters in the mix here).

Synchronous

Perhaps a chat channel would be good, I’ll need to get myself back into IRC again as I’ve moved more or less entirely to Slack these days.

Asynchronous

I’d vote for a mailing list.

Tools and Processes
- Work Tracking: I quite like KanBan boards for work tracking, not that I’m familiar with Taiga
- How should other teams ask for help: Does Taiga integrate well with Pagure? I ask because I’m mostly familiar with ZenHub (kanban board) that integrates really nicely with GitHub.
- How do people get assigned to a request: we need to consider who’s the best fit and who has time available. One of the difficulties here will be correctly sizing the request in the first place i.e. how much time is required and for which skill(s).
dtometzki says:
Hello bcotton,

some suggestions from my site:

Communication

Meetings

I think we can start with the already existing meeting. And if it turns out later, we can still plan a separates meeting.

Synchronous

I think it would be good to have a seperate IRC channel. Other teams infrastructure, Kernel and so on use IRC too.

Asynchronous

mailing list or Discussion category. I’am open for both.

Tools and Processes
- How do we track work? Taiga? Pagure repo?
  I think pagure is already integrated in the Fedora project and is used by many users. Everyone knows the tool and knows how to use it. I think it has already integration to github, IRC and gitlab.
  I don’t know how far other tools like Taiga are already integrated in the Fedora Project.
- How should other teams as for help?
  I think the way people ask for help is to open an issue on that repo with a defined structure is good.
- How do people get assigned to a request?
  It is disfficult to answer. I currently have no sense of how much request we are talking about:
  - We have a Responsibility matrix with the responsibilities. And we can use the matrix to assign requests
  - We plan a daily / weekly short meeting <30min to assign the requests.
  - Or we have a oncall duty (1 week / 1 month or so) as we have in the infra team.
- What else do we need to figure out early that I’m forgetting?
  I think we need a schedule until when we have built the team. Dates where all should / must participate we should communicate early.
best regards
dtometzki
bcotton says:

grahamwhiteuk:

Does Taiga integrate well with Pagure?

No. But they both have Kanban boards and issue trackers, so we’d probably use one or the other and not both.
bcotton says:

dtometzki:

I currently have no sense of how much request we are talking about:

Nor do I. We’ll find out together.

dtometzki:

I think we need a schedule until when we have built the team. Dates where all should / must participate we should communicate early.

Good point. Let’s plan on having consensus by Wednesday 28 April. I’ll summarize a draft and we’ll give people until Monday 3 May to object. At which point, the team is started and we’ll get to work.
glb says:
Meetings

bcotton:

I hold weekly FPgM office hours. Do we want to use those or have a separate team meeting? (Any training meetings will be done separately)

The 20:00 to 21:00 slot sounds fine. I’m notoriously bad at making morning meetings.

Synchronous

bcotton:

Do we need our own chat channel? If we want one, it will be on IRC/Matrix (or maybe just Matrix and we’ll move it to the Fedora homeserver once that is in place.)

Chat is fine. But my ZNC bouncer is currently down. I haven’t bothered trying to get it set up again because I keep hearing that there is a (fedora account sso authenticated) Matrix server that will be up and running very soon.

Asynchronous

bcotton:

Should we use a mailing list or a Discussion category?

I guess a Discussion category sounds a bit more reliable than email. Emails have been known to get lost from time to time (especially in my inbox).

Tools and process
bcotton:
How do we track work? Taiga? Pagure repo?
I have virtually no experience with Pagure and only a little with Taiga. I’m not really knowledgeable enough about the systems to make a call.
bcotton:
How should other teams as[k] for help?
See my response to the previous question.
bcotton:
How do people get assigned to a request?
Assigning tasks sounds fine to me. Do not worry about making me “feel bad” because you have not assigned enough work for me. On the contrary, my skills and familiarity with this whole system are so low that I would very much appreciate a very soft/light start.
bcotton:
What else do we need to figure out early that I’m forgetting?
¯\_(ã)_/¯

Edited to fix shruggy … don’t want to upset the FPL … I’ve seen his murder attic.

Continue the discussion at discussion.fedoraproject.org

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