📝 Category Direction - Team Planning

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This direction page was last reviewed on:

2022-05-15

Team Planning

Team Planning


Stage	Plan
Group	Project Management
Maturity	Viable

Introduction and how you can help

👋 This is the category direction for Team Planning in GitLab, which is part of the Project Management group with the Plan stage. Please reach out to the group's Product Manager, Gabe Weaver (E-mail), if you'd like to provide feedback or ask any questions related to this product category.

This direction is a work in progress and everyone can contribute:

Please comment and contribute to the related issues and epics. Sharing your feedback directly on GitLab.com is the best way to contribute to our strategy and vision.
Please share feedback directly via email, Twitter, or schedule a quick Zoom for us to connect.

Category overview

Team Planning's goal is to provide collaboration and planning capabilities to empower small, autonomous teams to continuously deliver customer and business value with the shortest possible cycle times. Features owned by the Team Planning category include work items (issues), tasks, milestones, iterations, boards, discussions, labels, todos, quick actions, markdown, and notifications.

Strategy and themes

Team Planning's strategy is aligned to Plan's 3 year stage themes.

1 year plan

What's next for us

Add improved type filter to issue lists and boards. Teams can better control which work item types are visible in boards and lists.
Enable work items (Tasks) to be visible on Boards. Teams can manage their tasks (and other work items) from within Boards.
Issues and work items open in a drawer within boards and lists. Reduce the context switching and tab fatique when drilling down into a work item detail view.
Customizable work item statuses. Provide a foundation for building a more robust work item lifecycle management solution, and enable teams to mark work items as done or cancelled.
Complete the migration of issues to work items. Replace the legacy issue detail view with the new and improved real-time work item detail view.
Work item configuration MVC. Enable teams to self-service creating new types of work items and enabling/disabling widgets per work item type.
Add support for custom fields to work items. Provide teams with a more robust solution for associating business-specific meta-data to work items.
Work item lifecycle management. Teams can organize status values into a workflow to model the desired lifecycle for a work item.

What we are currently working on

Work Item Enhancements (Task, Objective, Key Result) – Prevent double counting data on timebox reports so that iterations and milestones can be defaulted to on for Tasks. Improve the discussions and threads experience on tasks to reach relative use case parity with issues.
Work items are natively supported within Groups – Eliminate the need to maintain OKR-only projects under groups, allow teams to consolidate their planning activties at the group level, and enable issues and epics to be migrated to work items.
Use OR filtering within issue lists and boards – Individuals can more granularly filter down lists and boards by selecting whether an issue contains one of multiple values of a given filter parameter.

Our group level issue board provides detailed insight into everything currently in flight.

What we recently completed

Change the dimension of images in markdown (15.7) - Before this release, there were no controls for changing the size of images rendered within Markdown text areas. This often led to unwieldy images with no control over how much space they took up in descriptions and comments. You can now set the width and height of how images are rendered directly in Markdown by appending the {width=x height=y} attributes to the image reference. Sizes can be specified with pixels or percentages.
Convert a markdown checklist item on an issue to a task (15.9) - Teams often use Markdown checklist items to outline tasks or completion criteria for an issue, but tracking more in-depth information related to the checklist item has always been limited and cumbersome. With the release of 15.9, you can seamlessly convert a Markdown checklist item in an issue to a task, enabling teams to have a more robust experience tracking and managing an issue’s dependencies by assigning and estimating tasks separately from issues.
Use quick actions when editing a Tasks description (15.9) - Quick actions are helpful for efficiently updating issues, merge requests, and epics. With this release, you can now use a subset of quick actions when editing a task's description. Future iterations will introduce additional quick actions and the ability to use them in comments in a task. **
View system notes and comment on Tasks (15.10) - Before this release, there was no way to see a detailed change log for a task or have discussions directly with team members. Tasks now show system notes and support collaborating with comments and threads.

What is not planned right now

Integrating machine learning and natural language processing. While this will be important in the future, we need to provide a base level of support for modern agile teams before introducing optimizations.

Best-in-class landscape

BIC (Best In Class) is an indicator of forecated near-term market performance based on a combination of factors, including analyst views, market news, and feedback from the sales and product teams. It is critical that we understand where GitLab appears in the BIC landscape.

Key capabilities

This information is maintained on this internal handbook page

Roadmap

This information is maintained on this internal handbook page

Top [1/2/3] Competitive Solutions

This information is maintained on this internal handbook page

Maturity plan

This category is currently at the Viable maturity level, and our next maturity target is Complete on 2023-12-22.

We are tracking our progress against this target via this epic.

Target audience

GitLab identifies who our DevSecOps application is built for utilizing the following categorization. We list our view of who we will support when in priority order.

🟩 - Targeted with strong support
🟨 - Targeted but incomplete support
⬜️ - Not targeted but might find value

Today

Medium Term (1-2 years)

Jobs To Be Done

We are currently focused on providing best-in-class solutions for the following Jobs To Be Done (JTBD):

Plan and Collaborate On Value Delivery

Job statements	Confidence	Source
When splitting prioritized initiatives or features into requirements, I want to group related slices of value and surface dependencies, so I can maximize alignment on the scope of a business goal and efficiently plan its incremental delivery.	Researched	Issue
When estimating work during refinement, I want to validate that requirements are valuable and discrete, so I can increase the amount of value delivered with the least effort.	Researched	Issue
When planning a release, I want to prioritize and sequence estimated work based on feasibly, capacity, and ROI, so I can incrementally deliver toward business objectives.	Researched	Issue
When organizing priority work, I want to visualize our intended workflow, so I can increase team efficiency, collaboration, and predictability.	Researched	Issue
When collaborating with a team or stakeholders, I want to radiate the current status of work continuously, so I can increase alignment on progress and any impediments that need to be addressed.	Researched	Issue

Align plans with customer needs and business objectives

Job statements	Confidence	Source
When reviewing my product strategy with leadership, I want to demonstrate how my plans will drive overall vision and objectives toward reality, so I can increase buy-in, trust, and allocation of resources toward my efforts.	Researched	Issue
When synthesizing inputs, I want to categorize opportunities based on how efficiently they drive the success of business objectives, so I can increase confidence in items I have prioritized, and feel empowered to say no to less impactful ideas.	Researched	Issue
When visualizing the plan of how my strategy will be implemented, I want to display how prioritized items cascade up toward larger vision and business objectives, so I can increase alignment on the overall impact and importance of even the most granular items within my plan.	Researched	Issue
When soliciting feedback and collaboration on the implementation of my strategy, I want to craft a view of my plan with the intended audience in mind, so I can increase team and stakeholder alignment through effective storytelling at the correct level of abstraction.	Researched	Issue