[Neos] FYI: Summary for the work package "Product Management / Team Management"

[Robert Lemke]

Hi folks,

during the last two months I was able to draw from a small budget which
allowed me to spend more time with organisational tasks for the Neos
project on top of unpaid voluntary work. This a brief summary of what I
could achieve.

Originally I planned to establish a regular day (each week) to work on
coordination which would allow team members to approach me with certain
questions etc. But as it turned out, there were too many urgent tasks in
the way and at that time it was also difficult schedule such a day. The
team does, however, plan to establish a bi-weakly feature / issue
discussion meeting for the near future.

In agreement with the team and Sebastian, I also used some of the hours
for tasks which weren't strictly about coordination: we experienced a
few blocking issues and were confronted with a way too long list of
pending reviews which made me push in a few review and debugging
sessions which, without this budget, I wouldn't have been able to do.

I also went through the (at that time) 327 mostly feature and task
issues for Neos, but couldn't fit in a full review and prioritization of
them until today since priorities also shifted slightly during the Neos
sprint in Karlsruhe. Christian and Aske were a great help as they also
went through the issues and Aske coordinated mosts of the UI related
tasks during the sprint.

The last third of the budget mostly went into coordination and
discussing features, concepts and tasks regarding Neos and then into
planning and communicating an updated team structure [1].

As a conclusion I am (and also think that the team is) quite happy with
what could be produced and pushed with this work package. It wasn't
strictly used according to its definition [2] but instead I focussed on
the tasks which I think had the highest impact.

For the future we definitely need a new budget, not necessarily targeted
to my person but rather a general budget dedicated to the ever-growing
amount of organizational and nobody-wants-to-do tasks (like reviews
...). At the moment we are in a situation where more money will clearly
be able to buy more time from most members of the Neos team.

Cheers,
Robert

[1]
http://typo3.org/news/article/neos-and-flow-an-update-for-the-team-structure/
[2] http://forge.typo3.org/issues/45399

-- 
Robert Lemke
Lead Developer TYPO3 Neos and TYPO3 Flow
Co-Founder TYPO3 Association

Blog: robertlemke.com
Get involved: typo3.org – flow.typo3.org – neos.typo3.org