Hi team. I’m coming to you today to make official something that has been evident (at least to me) for a long while. The Program Management Team has not functioned as I hoped. I blame myself, not you. I appreciate everyone who has volunteered to help. But it’s time to officially retire the idea of a Program Management Team, at least for now.
So where did it go wrong?
There are three things that I see.
- The timing was bad. I started this right around the time I was wrapping up the bootstrap of the CentOS Stream program and also trying to get my kids (who were 6 and 9 years old at the time) through e-learning every day. I was completely drained emotionally and wasn’t able to invest in this team.
- I tried to scale up too fast. Initially, I expected to find one person to mentor and train up and grow from there. The response to my callout was a lot larger than I expected. This, in combination with point 1, meant that I couldn’t provide you with the support you needed.
- It’s very difficult to match capacity and demand. Even apart from the previous two points, this one may have led us to this point. The work that I intended for the team to do is important. But it’s hard to have a team that’s just people sitting around waiting for someone to ask for help. And it’s hard for other teams to get help when there’s no capacity to provide it.
Where do we go from here?
I’m going to remove everyone from the Pagure group so that you stop getting spam. (And I’m sorry for not doing this before the F38 inactive packager cleanup cycle). I’ll also pull down the team-specific docs. I’ll keep the resources page available for your reference and for anyone else who is interested in learning more. I haven’t decided what to do about the chat channel and the Discussion tag yet. I’ll probably keep them for now.
I’m still available to answer your questions or help you gain new skills. I love teaching people. I’d love to see more of this work being done embedded directly in teams instead of us trying to maintain a dedicated team. So if you’re currently providing support to a team, please keep doing that. And feel free to stop by the office hours (most Wednesdays at 2:00 PM and 9:00 PM in #fedora-meeting-1) to ask questions. Or find me in another channel, via email, etc, etc, etc.
I’m mentoring someone at Red Hat who will be able to step in and cover my basic duties when I’m out of the office.
Thank you
Again, I truly appreciate everyone who volunteered to participate in this experiment. It means a lot that you were willing to try something out. It’s a shame that the experiment didn’t work, but that’s not because of you. I’ll see you all around Fedora!