2021-02-09 Meeting Notes

Short-term task force, hope to get done in a month, to develop a project roadmap for FOLIO, dealing with development needs and addressing develpment outside the purview of the Capacity Planning team.

Questions from TF:

What would your group look for in a roadmap?

KN- to know how tech debt will be addressed; to know when certain features will be developed

Ian- who is the responsible person for a certain thing?  Say someone is making a module that is an outside special project, how do we know what is being worked on so that someone else doesn't start a duplicate effort

• Some existing info:
• FOLIO Module/JIRA project-Team-PO-Dev Lead responsibility matrix
• Directory of Product Owners by Area of Focus
• FOLIO Vision, Strategic Objectives and Initiatives

Jacquie: who will maintain the roadmap document over time?  AMB- especially as things age and need to be updated

Tod- what are the boundaries of the roadmap process and are we straying outside of them? (if things outside of roadmap come up, we want to still hear them and take them back.)

Jesse- is there a willingness to be roadmap driven?  For ex, implemented libraries wants new things that aren't in the current roadmap.

Jacquie - what about a place to record the things we know we can't work on now, don't want to lose track of them - thinking about the Epics/Stories that are not on the map, so organize the page by Epic, details of situation associated beneath.  This type of information might help individual institutions to plan areas of local development.  And helps the communication of those development areas to the wider FOLIO community.

AMB- Epic is too big, feature level makes more sense for this need

Kelly- Strategic Planning document has a lot of things that aren't being requested by libraries now, they're about expanding appeal to the wider library community.  Where does the balance come in?  Are institutions willing to give up short-term goals for the greater vision

Ian- as a host is beholden to their customer needs

TF question: what about the feature ranking process?  Should there be a limit on R1s per institution?

Patty- ranking does not give consensus. Ex- deletes are high priority for some, irrelevant for others

AMB - same with MARC Holdings, of critical importance to a few

Jacquie: I am thinking more and more that if an institution has no intention of using a feature, that their ranking isn't included in the math, so that those R5s don't outweigh the few that really do need it.  Is there a way to figure out if an institution has had a chance to review the features that are important to it.

Christie- some are saying that R5 should mean we don't think community resources to this but she doesn't think it's the right approach

Ian- Trying to reach a consensus on limited pool of resources, institutions need to pool their resources to get those unique features developed

AMB- We're seeing some of that - this is important to me, so we'll apply (or pay for) some resources - e.g. OCLC single record import, and some of the stuff that Cornell is working on

Tod- Individual inst rankings are trying to capture one slice of data, institutional-level priorities.

we need to to keep this, it's useful. How do we pull together or give input into project-level  priorities?

Update from Capacity Planning Team to PC on the process: 

TF- why do people feel their priorities aren't being heard?  Who is missing from the process? and why?

Christie- anything that isn't in JIRA doesn't exist, sometimes we're just waiting on someone to write things up so the same things keep coming up

Ian- data migration group feels that it's not being heard, have JIRAs but still not being worked on, seems to not be a priority because it's used only once per institution

Tom- we have to realistically work with the resources we have. 

Brooks- We need a mechanism to formally indicate strategic development needs for the project. Provide some mechanism to “escalate” features for the community to prioritize outside the existing ranking system.

Tod- balancing immediate needs against strategic investments

Ran out of time, will take up more TF questions next week.