The Next 90 Days

long enough to finish something, short enough to be concrete

Learning Objectives

Planning at the Right Timescale

Ninety days is the right planning horizon for a project at Jess's scale: it's long enough to finish something substantial and short enough to be concrete. Three kinds of work must appear in the plan. The first is development of new features. The second is maintenance, including bug fixes, pull request reviews, answering user questions, dependency updates, and compliance reviews. This work is invisible until it isn't done, and it will reliably consume all available time if it isn't explicitly allocated.

The third kind of work is getting support for future work, which usually means writing impact summaries and grant proposals. This tutorial doesn't cover the second, but it's worth remembering that funders and administrators usually make resource decisions based on impact, not on elegant design.

Jess's Situation

Jess's first 90-day plan had five priorities, none of which could realistically be finished in that time. She wrote a second plan with three priorities, each with a clear definition of done. Her supervisor read it and asked, "What's the first thing you'll do on Monday morning for each of these?" Jess couldn't answer for the third one, so she replaced it with something smaller.

"What's the first thing you'll do on Monday morning?" is the most useful question you can ask about any goal. If you can't answer it, the goal is too vague. "Work on the documentation" is not well defined; "write the installation guide section for users on Windows, starting with the GDAL dependency" is more likely to get done.

Exercises

Draft Your 90-Day Plan (12 min)

Prompt the LLM like this:

Based on this project health audit [paste rubric from Session 1] and these open issues [paste items from your project], create a 90-day plan with three concrete priorities. For each, explain what will be done, how I will know it's done, and what could prevent it from being completed.

  1. Note any priority the LLM suggested that you know won't happen because of a constraint it doesn't know, such as a funding gap, lack of team capacity, or an external deadline.
  2. Make a list of two people you need to talk to (either by name or by role) and what you need.

Monday Morning Test (8 min)

In pairs:

  1. Read one priority from your plan to your partner.
  2. Tell them what the first thing you'll do on Monday morning is.
  3. Ask them for feedback on whether your description is specific enough.

Wrap-up (5 min)

  1. What is the single most useful thing you learned or produced today?
  2. What was included that you don't think you'll use?