TEAM_COORDINATION_TOOLKIT.md

IPFS Team Coordination Toolkit

Table of Contents

• Description
  • Types of Roadmap & Org Planning
  • Project Roadmap (Vision/Why, Roadmap/How, Requirements/What)
  • Working Group Roadmap
  • Product Roadmap
  • Focus Area Roadmap
• IPFS Org Planning & Yearly Priorities
• Progress Monitoring, Reporting and Alignment Metrics (KPIs)
  • OKR
  • KPIs
• Support Research
  • User Research
  • Ecosystem Studies
  • Usecase Studies
• Painting the Picture - How Information flows and priorities are set
• Other instruments
  • Project Requirements Document (PRD)
  • Design Document
  • Launch Plan

Description

The IPFS Project is a huge effort executed by multiple teams from multiple organizations with both intermittent and continuous individual contributors in collaboration across multiple geographies, languages and timezones. To effectively coordinate and propagate information that can empower contributors to their most significant work, a set of tools were experimented with and improved to fit the IPFS Project needs.

This document captures the Coordination Toolkit developed within the IPFS organization and that is currently used for Communication and Planning.

Types of Roadmaps

Project Roadmap

Large scope (i.e. the whole IPFS Project), contains the Vision (the why), how we get there (the How) and what is the acceptance criteria to recognize the project as being successful (the What). Since the scope is large, this roadmap tends to be coarse and high-level - with major changes happening only on a yearly basis, if needed.

For a more detailed picture of a certain timestep (like the next year or 6 months), a more granular “2019 priorities document” is created in parallel with yearly OKRs.

Working Group Roadmap

A Working Group can focus on a product (e.g. IPFS Cluster), a Focus Area (e.g. Decentralised Data Stewardship), or even a whole category with multiple endeavours (e.g. IPFS Web Browsers and IPFS GUI). The Roadmap should describe what’s in the time horizon and how the multiple endeavors are prioritized and which milestones the Working Group plans to achieve.

For the Working Groups that only focus on one Product, then the Working Group Roadmap and the Product Roadmap are effectively the same. Similarly, for Working Groups dedicated to a specific Focus Area. However, working-group-milestones (like adding new contributors, improving Working Group tools, etc), would only live on a Working Group Roadmap.

Product Roadmap

Contains the information about features and capabilities for a specific product (ex “Companion”) that users are particularly interested in and gives clear expectations of what is coming on what time horizon.

Not every product requires a Product Roadmap. It depends on its activity, size, and potential duplication with a Working Group Roadmap.

Focus Area Roadmap

Contains the information about features and capabilities that users with a particular use case are especially interested in (for example “Mobile”, “Offline”, or “Large Datasets”).

We don’t have many of these yet, but as we spin up working groups related to a specific user need these will emerge to track capabilities unlocked by many products or other working groups toward that specific user need.

IPFS Project planning & setting of yearly priorities

Every year, the IPFS Project Roadmap is revised and the yearly priorities are set based on where we are in the overall roadmap and what we need to accomplish this year. This enables the Working Groups to understand what are the most important milestones for the IPFS org this year and devise their own Roadmaps to match what they need to accomplish to enable those milestones for the IPFS Project.

It is a bidirectional conversation that gives autonomy to Working Groups to plan as they see fit, but that at the same time creates a shared understanding of the main targets for the Org.

Progress Monitoring, Reporting and Alignment Metrics (KPIs)

• OKRs - Objectives and Key Results are a common interface in which every Team projects their Quarterly Priorities and Progress.
• KPIs - Key Performance Indicators are a way to check in with reality. A metric and alignment tool to ensure that we as a org are moving towards the right direction of our end goals.

Support Research

Designing each Roadmap needs to take in the Mission of the project and a considerable amount of Research that supports its Vision.

This is an area in which we as an org are leveling up with some initiatives on the way, namely: User Research and User Registry.

We are working towards creating the support structure to perform better User Research, Ecosystem and Use Case Studies.

Painting the Picture. How do priorities and information gets propagated in a Visual Way.

WIP Beautiful graphic coming soon™

Other instruments

Project Requirements Document (PRD)

WIP

Design Document

WIP

Launch Plan

WIP