When to use this
- When you need a lightweight project planning process
- When you want a process optimized for engineers, only plain text
- When the effort estimate is 4+ weeks
When to not use this
Why to use this
- When you want to de-risk the project by reducing unknowns early in the project process, like Tracer Bullet Development
- When you are dependent on other teams, and you want to make sure that you are following up with partner teams on what needs to be done by when
Notes on the template below
MMM DD
is the date of the start of the week, i.e. Monday.
- Dependencies can include the meetings you want to schedule with partner teams for alignment on the timeline and tasks, and later follow-ups on integration
- Milestones can include initiatives to be launched as part of OKRs
- Tasks are specific next action items with the task owner listed, usually related to the milestones above
- "Highlight of the week" and "Lowlight of the week" is to track the wins and challenges, for sharing with teammates and management, as well as for later inclusion in your self-eval perf review doc.
- The goal is to have a realistic plan, so account for on-call weeks, etc. in the plan itself.
- If you want to use this, fill this out before the project kicks off, because it's not going to happen later, you'll be busy in the details.
- Looks to reduce unknowns in the early weeks with spike work
- Add weeks, in correct sequence, for company processes like arch review, ops review, security review, deploy process, staging process, integration testing, sandbox for customer success and sales engineer, etc.