Document goals, principles and plan

[it33]

Opening a ticket to discuss the documenting of goals, principles and plans in the context of programs.

Program is something significant we set out to do with a goal, principles and plan, e.g. creating a hackfest program, setting up community guidelines, PeopleOps policy, etc.

In order to invest in community programs we need to be able to compare them across the organization and understand their alignment to organization-wide priorities and specific external outcomes.

Here is a template we use to do so:

Goal

Goal statement connects the activity in a program to specific outcomes it intends to achieve and to organization-wide priority. Goals should tell everyone in the organizations why and how we're investing in achieving a shared outcome.

Example:

Mattermost community programs goal:

Increase Mattermost popularity by increasing relevant product improvements and community advocacy through a clear, effective process for welcoming contributors and providing opportunities, training and support to enable them to make a difference in the future of the project.

1. A goal begins with an organizational-wide priority. By default, use "Increase Mattermost popularity", which is short for increasing the usage of Mattermost for self-hosted team communication.

2. Next, we state the specific external outcomes, which is a result of our efforts external to what we directly control that clearly benefits the organizational-wide priority. In this example, "increasing relevant product improvements and community advocacy".

3. Next, we state the specific internal outcome, which is what is to be completed in the program to achieve the specific external outcome. In this example: "a clear, effective process for welcoming contributors and providing opportunities, training and support to enable them to make a difference in the future of the project."

Programs may start with different goals and as they overlap and merge, programs become aligned.

Principles

Principles are constraints intended to focus a program without dictating a specific plan. For a given goal statement there may be many different plans to consider and principles are general statements that narrow plan options in service of the goal, without being reductive.

Example of good principle (general constraint, many possibilities):

• Move quickly. Prioritize projects that can be completed in about a week or two.

Example of statement that is not a principle (too specific, belongs in plan):

• Write a first draft of the contributor's guide in 3 days.

Principles are sequenced most to least important, and the definition of principles and their sequence should lead to consistent design decisions in the plan.

Plan

A plan outlines the steps required to complete specific internal outcome. In this example, to complete "a clear, effective process for welcoming contributors and providing opportunities, training and support to enable them to make a difference in the future of the project." we need a series of projects:

• Draft of the personas for contributors and types of activities that can be offered
• Introduction to contribution process
• Process for providing contributor opportunities from "first contribution projects" to small projects, large projects and campaigns (small & large projects part of something very large, such as implementing APIv4 or translating Mattermost to a new language).
• Program for training contributors, which include documentation, videos, PR coaches and other materials

Each of these smaller projects is prioritized based on the mana required to complete them and their impact on specific external outcomes.

Other examples:

Mattermost API goal:

Increase Mattermost popularity by enabling users and customers solve more problems using Mattermost through a) more integrations (both open source and commercial) and b) more powerful options for creating custom integrations through a more comprehensive, better documented, more stable API.