Group Tenant Scale - Operating System - Project Management

Group Tenant Scale project management practices and processes.

Overview

Structured and consistent project management practices are important for ensuring that team members and stakeholders understand:

The status of in-progress and planned work.
Why the work we are doing is important and how it delivers value for our customers.
The scope of what we’re working on.

We align to the Infrastructure Platforms guidance for implementation epics for both epics and issues. Most importantly:

Epics/issues have a problem statement that explains why we’re doing the work and how it delivers customer value.
Epics/issues that are in-progress have an assignee.
Epics/issues have a clearly defined exit criteria.
Epics that are in-progress and planned have start and due dates set. Due dates are regularly evaluated and updated as needed. Issues that are in-progress or planned have a milestone assigned.
Epics contain a status section that is updated weekly. We use the epic-issue-summaries project to ping the epic DRI for updates. Updates are rolled up from child epics into a top-level epic.

Epics must have a defined way to measure progress. It’s up to you how you want to measure progress (examples: issues closed, weight finished, % exit criteria completed, etc).
Epics/Issues are measurable. Customer facing features always include success/ ROI metrics. Technical deliverables always include availability or performance metrics. This enables quick and accurate prioritization and trade-off decisions.

Deliverable Epics: A deliverable epic represents work of significant business value that we are committed to completing in a specified timeframe.

We denote these epics with the “Deliverable” label for tracking purposes.
Deliverable epics should be scoped to a quarter or milestone. If a deliverable epic is projected to span multiple quarters, it is an indication that we need to narrow the scope or break it down into smaller milestones.
Deliverable epics align to the Infrastructure Platforms guidance for implementation epics.
We use the epic’s health status field to denote the following broad delivery confidence:
- On Track: 80%+ confidence to complete by due date
- Needs Attention: 50-80% confidence to complete by due date. Additional support may be required to be back on track.
- At Risk: Less than 50% confidence to complete by due date. Urgent action required to meet the due date or timeline needs revision.
We keep a status log of when an epic has had timeline changes or health status updates. This provides us data that will improve our estimation abilities.

GTS Weekly Update Issue: Each quarter, we create an issue for EMs to add weekly updates for their teams. We use these issues as input for our weekly Infrastructure Platforms Grand Review update.