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| title | draft | lastmod | description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 October Insights Monthly Report | false | 2023-10-31 | Monthly Report of Insights |
Executive Summary
Key Updates
Personnel
A senior and junior software engineer have been brought on to support the ongoing development of SpiffWorkflow.
- Michael is a senior python developer with years of experience. He also contributed to SpiffWorkflow in the past by giving it an external security review before it was launched. He will be leading the internal development and mentoring the junior dev.
- Kayvon joined as a junior dev to contribute to the ongoing development and web3-ification of SpifWorkflow.
Monthly Highlights
SpiffWorkflow
The project has received two new in-house developers so that ongoing maintenance and development can continue. The entire Kanban board is currently held in Notion but may move to somewhere more public in the near future.
A new release happened that brought about a bunch of bug fixes and improvements, namely (copy/paste from Sasha's Discord post):
- UI/UX changes across the site have been made to make it cleaner and easier to navigate
- No more copying and sending process instance ID and sending it to someone. There is now a shareable link on each process instance that produces a short link to share.
- A new way to quickly understand where the process is upto. Rather than just seeing in-progress, you will now see things like “Pending Approval - Insights” or “Request Approved” etc. You will see this on the home page and all tables across the platform, under the column name: Last milestone
- How many times have you wanted to look at the data previously entered into forms? You can now do this with the addition of a new section called My completed tasks, which can be found on the Process Instance Detailed page. This is one of the most requested features!
- We now support the ability of parallel processing for tasks. Things like calling 3 different APIs can be done in parallel now, significantly speeding up all processes.
- Spiff now allows external systems to call it using APIs. I.e. on some trigger, external systems calls Spiff to start a process or complete a task for an existing process. This will be extremely powerful when integrating with of our systems.
- README files about a process are now embedded in Spiff. When you head to the process model page, you will see the About tab, which has a readme.md file with everything you need to know about a process.
- Markdown support added across the platform
- Added a tooltip component to the checkboxes in forms to enhance the user experience. Now, when you submit a travel request and are unsure about the Per Diem, simply hover over the checkbox and the help text will appear.
- Auto-approvals for processes. In order to reduce approval time, when someone holds both the role of Budget Owner and is part of the SME group, double-approval is not required. For example, if an Infra Lead provides approval as a Budget Owner for software and licenses, the Infra team review step will be automatically completed (approved). You can find the list of Budget Owners here.
- Added Event categories to the Request Goods/Services process. The list of purchase categories can be found here
- Fixed bugs and errors
- Implemented admin functionality to improve the support team's ability to assist users when needed
- We can now invite any external user to complete one/multiple steps in a process, without that user being created within Keycloak/Spiff. This allows us to do things like ask a vendor being onboarded to complete a form or perform a step in process, by simply sending them an email with all instructions. The access is time based password protected.
- If you come across a missing City in the Travel request drop-down, simply inform the support team. They can add it for you, allowing you to proceed with your request.
Kudos to the team for such an awesome amount of work.
A technical roadmap has begun to be developed which outlines the process of "DAOification" of the organization. The initial focus is on understanding the time-cost of the project and required resources.
Contract Extension Negotiations with Sartography
- Summarizations provided by Eric in legal:
- Just to summarise where we’re at with Sartography as of the latest agreement, Sartography has indicated that they will develop additional SpiffWorkflow components called “SpiffWorkflow Extensions”. The negotiations with Sartography revolve around the issue ownership and licensing of the IP for these SpiffWorkflow Extensions as developed for Status. The points are as follows:
- (i) Commercial license instead of an open source license: Originally all Spiffworkflow software would either be open source or be delivered to Status for its ownership. Sartography are insisting on deviating from this approach for the Extensions and intend to apply a commercial license to it. This is an unacceptable position. If they develop IP with Status’ money, then it must align with the original approach.
- (ii) Waiver of fee for commercial license: Sartography have indicated that they are willing to “waive” the fee for any commercial license for the Extensions (referring this as a “gift” to Status). The terms of the commercial license will still need to be negotiated and are unknown to us right now. The waiver of a fee for a commercial license which we don’t have any view on may not be worth much if it turns out to be very restrictive.
An image of what Sartography aims to do, important to note this is not funded by Status:
For the avoidance of doubt, all “original” Spiffworkflow Software still aligns with our original agreed approach i.e. Sartography is obliged to keep it open source and any thing it delivers to Status will belong to Status who is obliged to make it open source.
Path Forward - Still needs to be finalized by legal; however, Sartography is building an ability to commercialize features that they are developing outside of development with Status. They will extend a commercial license to us and waive all fees associated if Status uses any of those features. All feature they've expressed they are building are not features Status would leverage. For example, datastores for personal data and data stores for financial data.
Real Options Analysis
Frederico lead the way on developing a framework (and explainer) for performing Real Options Analysis on Keycard. Keycard was chosen based on its smaller project size and traditional evaluation methodology as a project (the easiest one to start with) with the goal in mind of generalizing the framework for all projects within Logos and Status. The current analysis and framework can be found in Notion for now. Once finalized and reviewed, it may be released for public consumption.
This framework is expected to allow us to identify performance and evaluation trends for projects within their respective ecosystems, thus adding valuable insight to the decisions we as an org can make to steer them in the direction of success. More info on this can be seen in Jarrad's previous townhall (Org internal link - sorry - picture below for public) where he discussed it.
!
Revamping Accounting with Finance
Work continues with the Finance team to revamp the budgeting process for projects and services. The dashboard (mentioned below) being developed has helped track and monitor how money is being spent and allocated across the org.
Project Dashboards
A lot of work has been done to create various dashboards for cohorts across the org. The project dashboards are mainly created from the development activity we can glean from Github thus is heavily dependent upon the team's reporting and Github tagging process at the moment.
Currently, the following dashboards are being worked on and iterated with their respective teams to ensure they're providing appropriate and correct information (ask Lalo if access if you feel you should have it and don't):
- Project Reporting (Waku)
- Project Reporting (Status)
- Budget Reporting
- Milestone Table
- Process Performance for Spiff
- Waiting for Twitter API v2 access to be purchased to complete the social engagement dashboard.
The Waku team gave a presentation on their adapted project reporting process to the PMs across the org and work has been started to adapt projects to something similar to allow for more automation and dashboard creation.
The Waku team has reported usefulness in their dashboard already despite it being incomplete (no weighting of work done yet, only tagging issues to epics and epics to milestones).
Future Plans
Next month, the insights team plans to focus on increasing the coverage of project roadmaps within this website as well as the backend development activity automation coverage for projects.
The more we cover projects development activity, the better dashboards we can make to serve them.
NEED MORE HERE