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How we track content work.

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For a while, we were tracking our work by creating a backlog of scnearios, prioritizing them, then planning the top scenarios for our next iteratoin of work. We broke the scenarios down into tasks and tracked progress on those tasks over the course of an iteration. I mentioned that in my last post. We've refined that. We still use scenarios to design our content, but we break those down into new or changed topics, and then we track the progress of those topics. It's great because we can measure our progress in terms of our deliverables. That's harder for software projects because the deliverable unit isn't always so distinct, but for us, tracking progress on topics is just terrific.

There was one challenge - how do we report on the progress using topics as the unit that we track? We have a content management system that provides limited access for reporting and, because it's used by many teams across Microsoft, is difficult to enhance to meet a single team's needs. We decided to mirror our content into TFS and add the metadata that we need for our tracking purposes. That's turned out to be a great decision. Because our topics are mirrored to TFS, we can asscoiate them with the planning artifacts that the product team uses. We can now explain our plans, demonstrate our progress, and express our needs (like technical reviews) more effectively. I'll write a post on each of those points soon.

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