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We are a global team of five, focused on building and managing world-class information technology systems and business processes. To learn more about our individual job functions, visit the Program Management, Business Technology family page.
Barbara Roncato - Manager, IT Program Management
GitLab handle: @broncato
Slack handle: @barbara
Location and Timezone: Portugal, WEST/GMT+1
LinkedIn Profile: /roncatobarbara
Caroline Swanson - Senior IT Program Manager
GitLab handle: @caroline.swanson
Slack handle: @Caroline Swanson
Location and Timezone: USA, MDT/MST
LinkedIn Profile: /caroline-smoke-swanson-pmp-a869b685
Kayoko Cooper - Business Systems Analyst
GitLab handle: @kayokocooper
Slack handle: @Kayoko Cooper
Location and Timezone: USA, EDT/EST
LinkedIn Profile: /kayoko-cooper-a1063522
Kristina Koceban - Senior Business Systems Analyst
GitLab handle: @kkoceban
Slack handle: @Kristina
Location and Timezone: Ireland, WEST/GMT+1
LinkedIn Profile: /kristinakoceban
Nico Sandoval - Business Systems Analyst
GitLab handle: @nicosando
Slack handle: @Nico Sandoval
Location and Timezone: USA, EDT/EST
LinkedIn Profile: /nicolas-sandoval-331900b3
The IT Program Management Office (PMO) mission is to provide:
The IT portfolio planning & prioritization process has 6 steps:
The inventory of all committed and planned projects for the quarter in IT Operations and Enterprise Applications. The IT Portfolio: Quarterly Commits is available for internal team members to track IT planned initiatives. All projects on the IT Portfolio have a Team & Corporate Stack Ranke to align with the overall global optimization.
The IT Project Prioritization tracker is used to log new projects / initiatives with the IT team. The IT PMO team will review it as part of the IT Quarterly Portfolio Planning:
Achieved by:
All projects added to the IT Portfolio: Quarterly Commits have:
Consists in identifying the project’s:
All projects added to the IT Portfolio: Quarterly Commits are part of the Business Technology OKRs for:
The release management plan helps the IT team:
Visit the Governance and IT Program Management page to understand the methodology adopted by the IT PMO team for all GitLab IT programs aimed at achieving the following objectives:
Every week, the IT PMO Management team review the IT-Intake-PMO board, with only a single outcome for the issues listed under the Open list:
When assigned to a project, the IT PMO team is responsible for creating and maintaining the project Epic. A single parent Epic is created together with (up to) 5 child Epics, each representing a distinct phase of the System Development Lifecycle (SDLC). Issues are used as a means to collaborate on ideas, troubleshoot problems, and strategize for their tasks. By using issues, teams can share and discuss proposals internally or involve external collaborators in the process.
To maintain uniformity across all PMO-led projects, the team follows the same Epic templates.
The System Development Lifecycle outlines a structured set of activities conducted at each project stage.
The intake process starts with the completion of a business requirements document. It is the bridge between business stakeholders defining what is to be worked on and the development group that will build it.
During Define, the project team articulates the business problem and definition of done. This phase covers uses cases, technology impacted and requirements. The ultimate goal of Define is not to figure out everything but to document the process and what is impacted. Finally, before beginning the design, we request approval sign-off from key stakeholders to ensure business requirements are accurate and all-inclusive.
This phase creates the roadmap of how things will work in the future. The project team work with the business to design a future state process and refine the requirements to build it. This phase should iron out all the details and questions from above.
In the Build phase, the project team collaborates with other stakeholders to develop solutions that meet the business requirements but also that are scalable and aligned with best-practices.
During the test phase, the project team collaborates with other stakeholders to develop test scripts and facilitates the user acceptance testing (UAT) process.
The project team owns developing a deployment plan and collaborating with other implementation teams to ensure completeness. This involves launch plans, user enablement, and go-live communications.
Hypercare is the period that immediately follows the deployment / launch of a new process in Production where an elevated level of support is available to ensure the seamless adoption of a new system.
The maintenance phase occurs once the new process is fully operational to ensure it continues to function as it was designed to, and repairs or upgrades are performed as needed.
In order to track the progress of each program efficiently, all Epics are assigned a Start and End dates, and the GitLab Roadmap is used as a timeline.
The IT teams use issue boards in GitLab to strategically plan, organize, and visualize their work managed through GitLab issues. To understand how IT teams organize and manage their issue boards, visit each team’s respective page.
The IT teams use labels to categorize issues and epics effectively. By maintaining a concise list of labels, teams can efficiently organize and tag their work, enabling dynamic filtering and streamlined management of epics and issues. All labels are created in the gitlab.com/gitlab-com top-level group so they can be applied to any projects that we work on.
To better organize and manage their work, the IT teams have different label categories. Click on each category to view the current labels utilized by the IT teams:
The IT PMO team supports project stakeholders in gathering all the essential information required for SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act) and compliance purposes throughout the project’s lifecycle. We have developed multiple templates following the guidelines provided by the IT Compliance team. These templates aid in creating comprehensive and well-structured documentation, facilitating the gathering of essential information.
The IT PMO team collaborates with project stakeholders to create these documents and ensures that all necessary approvals are captured within them.
The IT PMO team takes the lead in initiating discussions regarding enablement and collaborates with the project lead to develop training materials and communication plans, as required.
There are several activities that take place to prepare for new OKRs / commits and report on the current ones:
Project List & Priorities from Business: The IT PMO team reaches out to Business stakeholders to get a list of projects and priorities for the upcoming quarter.
Update OKR(s) progress: The IT PMO works with IT Leadership to update the OKR(s) progress in gitlab.com.
IT PMO & Leadership - Upcoming Quarter Priorities Review: The IT PMO team reviews the business projects and priorities with IT Leadership to add initiatives to the upcoming commits tracker.
Quarter Commits - Corporate Rank: The IT Leadership works with the business leaders to rank the initiatives in order of priority for the company.
Cross Functional Meeting - Quarter Commits Review: IT PMO team hosts the IT Portfolio: Quarter Planning meetings to review the list of projects and priorities for the upcoming quarter with the Business stakeholders.
IT PMO - Quarter Commits (Adjustments): The IT PMO team makes all the necessary adjustments to the upcoming quarter commits following the meeting with the Business stakeholders.
IT Leadership - Quarter Commits (Adjustments): The IT Leadership team makes all the necessary adjustments to the upcoming quarter commits following the updates from the Corporate stakeholders.
Upcoming Quarter Commits Shared with the Business: The IT PMO team shares the upcoming quarter commits with the Business stakeholders.
Finalize Upcoming Quarter OKR(s): Upcoming quarter commits are completed.
IT All Hands Quarterly Meeting: The IT Leadership hosts the Quarterly IT All Hands.
The IT Integrations team designed the Rolly Bot, a tool aimed at automating the generation and distribution of weekly status updates. With this tool, the IT PMO Team can deliver consistent updates on ongoing projects. A new roll-up is produced every Monday.
| Concept | Definition | Purpose | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Service Request | A service request is a formal request from a user or customer for information, advice, a standard change, or access to an IT service. It involves predefined and well-documented procedures. | Service requests are typically routine, low-risk, and straightforward tasks that do not require major changes to the IT environment. They aim to fulfill specific user needs and provide predefined services quickly and efficiently. | Password reset, user account creation, software installation, email account setup, hardware procurement, conference room booking, etc. |
| Change Request | A change request is a formal proposal to modify the configuration of an IT service, system, or infrastructure in a controlled manner. It aims to introduce improvements, fix issues, implement new features, or make any other alterations that can potentially impact the existing environment. | Change requests involve making intentional changes to the IT environment, and they need to be carefully evaluated, planned, and implemented to avoid disruptions and minimize risks. Change management ensures that changes are controlled and align with business objectives. | Software upgrade, hardware replacement, infrastructure configuration change, service maintenance window, database schema modification, etc. |
| Incident | An incident is an unplanned interruption or reduction in the quality of an IT service. It can also refer to the failure of a configuration item (CI) that has not yet impacted service but poses a significant risk of doing so in the future. | Incidents are unexpected events that disrupt normal service operations and require immediate attention to restore service to its normal state. Incident management focuses on minimizing the impact of incidents on users and business operations. | Network outage, application crash, server failure, data loss, email delivery problems, etc. |
The main difference between a project and a change request in ITIL lies in their scope, nature, and the processes they follow. Projects are temporary, comprehensive efforts aimed at achieving specific goals, while change requests are smaller, routine or ad-hoc requests to modify existing IT services or configurations.
The team follows GitLab meeting practices and standards.
The IT PMO team primarily uses the below groups and projects on GitLab:
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