Difference between revisions of "Community and Ops Work Queue"

Revision as of 15:31, 27 September 2018

To ensure that all areas within my scope of work are provided adequate time and attention to make forward progress, I've broken down my primary work areas into the list below. The day of the week noted will be the time I focus on that particular area:

1. Monday: Operations Queue
2. Tuesday: Chapters / Community Queue
3. Wednesday: Events Queue
4. Thursday: IT / Infrastructure Queue
5. Friday: New improvements / Process Improvements to current ops (aka making OWASP better)

Queue Sizes: (updated 2018-09-26 at ~3:40 PM US central time zone)

All days will have the basic flow of work:

• Begin the day by reviewing any emails that came in overnight, sort them into the 5 areas above and move them into folders to hold queued request in that area (e.g. email request for a chapter would go into a folder for queued Chapter requests) - max 1 hour on email then close the tab
• Review any open cases in Salesforce (these are created by using the "Contact Us" form and other means like OCMS)
• Review any open/pending OWASP Service Desk requests - OSD requests are Jira/Service Desk request for Funding or other areas - see here for details.
• Spend the rest of the morning on that day's area of focus by removing queued items
• Mid-day, spend 30 minutes spot checking email that may have come in
• Spend the rest of the day on that day's area of focus.
• Close of day, spend max 30 minutes spot checking email that may have come in and get inbox to Zero

Several important notes to ensure requests are handled promptly:

• I keep my Salesforce cases at zero and work any new requests first thing every day
• After getting Salesforce cases to zero, I do any pending OSD work.
• I spend the rest of my day working a prioritized list of activities in that days area of focus.

What this means to people making request of me:

• If you want something resolved as quickly as possible, submit a case via the "Contact Us" form - these get the top priority
• OSD requests are also given equal priority as Salesforce cases - so use this before a direct email.
• Direct emails to me will be sorted by focus area and handled along with all other queued items on the day allocated for that area
  • Depending on timing, its quite possible to have a direct email wait a max of 1 week for me to work the request
  • Even if you direct email request comes in on the day I'm focusing on that area, I will prioritize it against the entire queue of items of work to be done

Why are you handling requests in this way?

In my time with the OWASP Foundation, too often the loud and latest gets the attention and fundamental improvements get sidelined over and over. This isn't simply budgeting or funding. There's been budgeted funding to improve the OWASP web presence for several years - what there hasn't been is patience and understanding (or even cover fire) to allow consistent work on the long-game items. By providing specific days allocated to improving OWASP, we allow for process improvement in a controlled fashion versus hoping to find the time while fire fighting. OWASP has suffered from treating symptoms first and foremost why neglecting to eradicate the disease. What this means is some part of the community may suffer 'symptoms' longer then anyone would prefer with the benefit that that disease will be successfully addressed by focusing time and resources consistently on the over-arching problem.