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2024 Announcements

Thanks to the visionaries Stefan, Brendon, and Cory, we have implemented an automation in Jira that will populate standard project releases when a new project is created! This removes the need for you to manually create releases for each client project, and allows us to see metrics more clearly across the same types of releases.

Visit Jira Hygiene for a list of the releases and example lists of the types of issues that can fall within them.

Please note that these releases are geared towards billable client projects. It’s expected that internal projects will have their own releases custom to the initiative, so when you create a new internal project you’ll need to edit these pre-populated releases.

We discovered that cloning issues for review has led to some inaccurate and duplicate story point counting. In an effort to correct our metrics and simplify the review workflow, we have removed the automation of creating a cloned issue for review. This means that now when you move an issue to “In Review” status, nothing else will happen. If someone else will be reviewing your work, you will need to create a Review issue for them. It is okay to pass your issue to someone else if it will be quick (read: less than an hour), but if it will require more time, they should have a Review issue assigned.

This change will help ensure that your original issue captures all of your story points, and the reviewer’s issue captures theirs—with no duplication or confusion. Additionally, in Sprint Planning we will be able to have Review issues planned to people’s sprints ahead of time, allowing us to have a clearer picture of upcoming workloads.

If you need assistance creating Review issues for in-progress projects, Amy can help get these set up.

Please reference the updated Startup Workflow for further details. It is recommended to account for and create Review issues while creating a project Roadmap.

We are officially implementing Post Mortems for all closed projects. These will be highly beneficial to identify learnings from projects, and of course to celebrate the incredible work we do.

Details have been added to the Project Startup and Project Closeout workflows in the handbook and Jira checklists, and the template can be found here (also available in the Docs template gallery).

I expect that the template will continue to be fine-tuned as we put it to use, but really appreciate your help getting it in shape to start implementing. Please pass along any questions or additional suggestions.

We have added a short section to the Communications page to clarify usage of @channel and @here in Slack. Since they send push notifications to everyone in the channel, they should be used sparingly and only in situations where timely communication with all members of a channel are required. Thanks all for your effort with this, so we can continue to minimize fractured time and focus 🙏

We’ve clarified with Take Command that the monthly reimbursements cover premiums for the current month, rather than reimbursing for the previous month, which is what we originally thought. This means that the reimbursements you’ll receive next week will be for August’s premiums, whereas before we thought they were for July. Nothing has changed in the system, it’s just that we have been understanding which month was being reimbursed incorrectly.

Calling this out because the reimbursements you’ll receive for this month will be labeled as “August” instead of “July.” With that, you may not see a payment labeled for July this year—but rest assured no payments have been skipped, we’re just correcting our labelling to reflect the correct month.

For those of you who use Recurring Tasks in Jira, we’ve learned how to enable rich text editing in the description. Enabling this setting is individual per user, so reference these details if you’d like to enable it for yourself.

Note that Jira will be making this the default in the next few months.

  1. Click on Apps in the top banner
  2. Select Recurring Tasks
  3. Select the three dots on the top right
  4. From the drop down, enable “Smart Edit”

We have added two new contractors to our bench! Please find their details below, which have also been added to the Contractors and Vendors Airtables. Both of them performed well on our skill assessments, have been great communicators, and have shown quick turnaround with high quality work so far.

Their rates, contact information, location, etc. are all collected in the Contractor Airtable above. For now I’ve listed the confidence level for both as Medium, anticipating we will update that as they start to take on more projects. Please note that they both can be reached directly via personal email—we have set them up through Justworks (Stacy) and Remote (Anthony), so won’t be hiring them through Upwork.

Huge shoutout to Jordan Boeder for your assistance with this evaluation process! 🙏 Let Amy or Jordan know if you have any questions.