2023-05-09 Product Council P&R Working Group Meeting with Implementers

Owned by Jesse Koennecke
Last updated: May 10, 2023
4 min read

Date

Attendees

Goals

Discussion items

P&R at Implementers

  • What is a roadmap even? "A roadmap is a strategic plan that defines a goal or desired outcome and includes the major steps or milestones needed to reach it. It also serves as a communication tool, a high-level document that helps articulate strategic thinking—the why—behind both the goal and the plan for getting there" (from the Roadmap Process)
  • Current context for the intersection of the roadmap and prioritization: The roadmap is work that is planned to be developed with some degree of certainty, while prioritization is a process for the community to express preferences for different features to be developed. The roadmap combined with the prioritization should make clear what priorities are under active development and what ones need more resources or present new opportunities.
  • Current roadmap and prioritization working group: FOLIO Prioritization and Roadmap Working Group
  • Roadmap on the Wiki: previous FOLIO Roadmap and the previous Roadmap Process.
  • An example of a "roadmap" for an app: High Level Roadmap for Bulk Edit App
  • Super Casual Roadmap Discussion (FOLIO Roadmap & Prioritization Group)
    • How would you want to use a FOLIO roadmap to support your implementation and workflow decisions?

Impact Go Live decisions based on expected functionality.

First stop – what can FOLIO do?  Then roadmap for what is expected.

Compare gap analysis to Roadmap – who to contact for more information, what can “we” work on?


Jenn: Who is audience for Roadmap at institution?  Project Manager for big picture view, SME for “my stuff”, administrator for strategic planning?

  • Project Manager (Darci) – General trajectory – i.e. work on Bulk Edit happening X timeframe.
    • Search Jira for more specific target plans
    • Ask in SIG if not clear from Jira.
  • Varied (Julie):
    • Librarians – to help inform if they can live with X.
    • PM – looking into extra community stuff beyond what SMEs may see. Guiding others to Roadmap.

Jenn: How parseable is Jira for folks?  Roadmap as a path to suck them into the more detail.

  • Tara – Doesn’t find Jira easy to navigate. More than one strategy to figure out if/when something coming: jira, wiki, etc… Roadmap could be good for starting point.
    • Helpful if roadmap could provide some info about certainty.
  • Kristin – Roadmap vs. Agile development at odds – what is a good balance?
    • Jenn: Conversations with POs – limitation on the roadmap. POs have deadlines for defining what will be in a given release.  Roadmap concete accuracy is about 2 releases.  Maybe roadmap updates per version? 
      • Come of uncertainty: good for next release, somewhat good for following, much wider later on.
      • Roadmap focus on next 2 releases – covers 6+ months from implementer perspective. Is this useful? 
    • Tara: What is on the “radar” for FOLIO?
      • Jenn: If not in the next two releases, it is not really “of interest” yet.
      • If not in those releases, good to learn more.
      • Kristin: Prioritization and Roadmap – surface priorities, even if not scheduled? Can this help people figure out mor eof the future – do they need to find alternative?
      • Tom T – A priority backlog of sorts that would feed into the roadmap?
        • Jenn: Prioritization influences development, but does not determine.
      • Ian: Roadmap is a vision – if this is a PC roadmap – this is the PCs vision. Dev teams working on shorter timeframe and working for their customers.  Microservices architecture lays out work on this Jira, now this, now this. 
        • Jenn: Roadmap coming out of POs work for next cycles. Reflection of what dev community is focusing on.  Prioritization – focus on the community vision –
      • Kirstin: Different roadmaps by different dev communities – good if we can integrate these.


    • How would you want to engage in prioritization exercises? And how would you want to understand how your institution's priorities compare with others?
      • How can we articulate priorities and bring these back to community for gap analysis, combined effort.
        • Tara: very interested – finding people with the same problems as you.
        • Tom: Frequent – priorities change.  Focus on general themes: data import, etc…
        • Too little detail, is difficult to align with what is important for a broader theme.  Too much is impossible to prioritize
        • Tara – detailed priorities at SIGs? 
        • Julie – Roadmap not a “tick all the boxes” but a way to get to information you need. Not a one stop shop for everyone. 
          • This is a big reason we will be talking with POs – dashboards for a SIG or functional area.
        • Tom: sees Jiras go from UXPROD to other module descriptions,  can there be a “here’s an idea” version?
        • Stephanie: I think we need a session: Taming Jira! – do we have any recordings already?  Harry did some of this for PC a while ago.  Dashboards, etc…
          • Release dashboards
          • PO dashboards
          • EPICs
          • Roadmap items
        • Ian: I think we're also relying very hard on JIRA because it's the only communication path between SMEs and Devs
          • Tom: There is a lot of duplicate tickets, and conflicting tickets.


Visualization:  Themes -indication of “something from this theme is happening in next two cycles.



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Action items

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