To me, a light engagement is pretty much anything we do with a team that's not part of being embedded. It can be light in either (or both) of two ways:

• Short duration, such as facilitating an offsite
• Small but ongoing effort, such as spending 2 hrs/wk consulting with ArchCom

@ksmith

I agree with much of your definition about the small but ongoing and the short duration- such as my time boxed effort in Feb 2016 to support the Learning Dashboard.

I see facilitating offsites as a different type of work, perhaps worthy of its own character.

Also, @KLans_WMF raised the idea of Org Initiatives

@MBinder_WMF @JAufrecht @Awjrichards - please chime in with your respective definitions of Light Engagement. Thanks!

I don't think I have a lot of experience with light-engagement in my role at WMF. Maybe my brief consultation with Recruiting to discuss diversity hiring, but that was extra light, and was not really TPG-sanctioned work, so it's a stretch.

I think I currently understand a light-engagement as, potentially:

• heavy but explicitly temporary
• ad-hoc but ongoing (that is, available in an official capacity but only as-needed)
• lightweight and one-off
• etc.?

More impressions:

• A light engagement is less than a full-time week of work
• both total work and intensity of work matter. Contradicting Max - I don't think a light engagement can be "heavy" even if temporary. One full day could be a light engagement; two consecutive full days would be iffy.
• A light engagement precludes travel
• definitely one-off.

@JAufrecht

I think of my ongoing work with Designers and Analytics Engineering and even facilitating Scrum of Scrums as light engagements. So not definitely a one-off ;)

@ggellerman @Awjrichards @MBinder_WMF @ksmith @JAufrecht

We probably have enough of a rough definition to, for the first round of measuring, pick the handful of engagements that we agree are unambiguously light engagements.

What do you say?

Catching up, and I wanted these responses to be in the same place as what prompted them, although we should probably shift all the content from this thread to our google doc, so it's all in one place while under heavy discussion/modification.

• I disagree that it should be constrained to less than a week of full-time work, because if I understand it, that would eliminate Scrum-of-scrums.
• I believe that facilitating a 4-day offsite should be a light engagement, which would break both the "not more than 2 full days in a row" and also the "no travel" rule.

At review, team did not have consensus on terminology, and was concerned with the spreading out of discussion to many points. Need to consolidate discussion (doc, email, this task) and get through the groan zone of agreement on definition.

@JAufrecht

I recall a suggestion to refer to Embedded work and call all other work Non-Embedded.

To me, light engagement is either something that is regular but low time constraint - the ArchComm, SoS - or brief and more effort- supporting the Learning Programs dashboard.

Work could also transition from Embedded to Non-Embedded if the time involved is significantly reduced over time.

Accord? Dissent?

@ggellerman : I agree with what you said. Does that mean you are now in favor of "Embedded" and "Non-embedded" as the two categories? I could live with that.

@ksmith
I will miss the term "light" as a way to illustrate that even a small effort can yield an impact. That said, I could live with "Embedded" and "Non-embedded."

@ggellerman @ksmith Not to open a can of worms, but...

Are there lightweight embedded engagements? That might throw a wrench into this naming.

@MBinder_WMF : My understanding is that "Embedded" implies deep embedding. So "light" embedding would be considered non-embedded. If that makes sense.

That's why I kind of prefer "Scrummastering" rather than "Embedded": It is more precisely defined and easily understood. However, I suspect that @JAufrecht would say he is embedded but not doing scrummastering. Which itself is a different can of worms.

@ksmith
I am in that same different can of worms you describe re: scrummastering....that said, I can live with Embedded and Non-Embedded if others can.

Works for me, at least until I develop my own morass of "light" engagements. :)

A different option would be to go with "Ongoing" vs. "Timeboxed".

That would mix SoS and scrummastering, but would avoid the need to define a sharp (and in some cases arbitrary) cut-off between the two. Is 5 hrs/wk "embedded"? What about 8? 10? 20?

@ksmith

I still prefer "Embedded/Non-Embedded" to "Ongoing" vs. "Timeboxed,"

The right answer to how we should categorize our works depends on the purpose. Kristen has identified the purpose as, if I recall correctly, for making it easier to report our total work plan and possibly also to help plan people assignments/loads. @KLans_WMF, is that accurate? If it is, then which of:

• Embedded vs Non-Embedded
• Embedded vs Light Engagement
• Coaching vs Embedded
• go back to the drawing board

is the best minimally viable category set for TPG team work right now?

If we go back to the drawing board, we should both figure out exactly what this is for and also break out all of the dimensions in play (type of work: coaching vs scrummaster vs facil. vs other; duration of work: short vs long vs open-ended; depth of participation; etc).

Why not have three buckets, like: Embedded, Coaching (timeboxed), Coaching
(ongoing) (or something like that)?

In the interest of getting this task done, I propose that we continue to use the term "light engagement" for now, and continue to look for a better term later.

Meanwhile, for the purposes of this quarterly goal, I would propose that the scope be "Any non-trivial TPG engagements which are not evaluated by our existing CSAT". This might include short but intense work, or ongoing work with a small time commitment.

It would exclude, for example, a one-off half-hour discussion with a PO about their backlog, because measuring satisfaction of such small engagements would not provide enough value to be worth the cost. We can iteratively figure out exactly where the cutoff should be.

Within the doc, I copied some of the comments into the main doc text, and have thus been able to resolve all the comments.

I propose that although we don't have consensus on the definition yet, it is in fact defined enough for us to move forward with this quarterly goal. Of all of the items listed in the document, we can select some subset to experiment with.

@ksmith
I agree with your proposals for the most part. I think that for me, the original spirit of the light engagement was in promoting the idea that sometimes a small effort or intervention can have a big influence.

That said, I am happy to drop the one hour meetings with a PO.

@ggellerman : To be clear, I would include a one-hour PO meeting as being a "light engagement", but not one that would warrant a satisfaction survey.

@ksmith
thank you for clarification

We still want to define (or rename) "light engagements", but doing so is not a blocker for this quarter's goal of measuring satisfaction of so-called light engagements.

What if we called this "non-embedded engagements" instead? We can always refine this bucket of work in the future if needed.

For the record, @JAufrecht suggests calling this simply "engagements"

Our working definition of "light engagement" seems to be "any work TPG does for others that is not part of an embedded assignment".

Suggested possible names for work falling into that definition:

• Engagement
• Non-embedded engagement
• Bounded engagement
• Finite engagement
• Limited engagement
• Delimited engagement

@ksmith

Of the options you propose, I like "Engagement."

Might we also benefit from defining what "embedded" means?

In our backlog grooming, we re-affirmed that this might get done as part of T151232: Definition of "embedded", and if so, it should get resolved as part of that. But in case it doesn't, we're fine leaving this in the backlog for now.