Retrospective Q1 2024

The Intersect Delivery Assurance team is one of the supportive, servant-leader, functional teams at Intersect. They support the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) in the operation and oversight of contracts which are in delivery. In Intersect, the delivery assurance team sits within the Technical Operations function.

As Intersect formed, a number of continuity contracts were novated and to be managed on behalf of the community. Cardano “continuity” is defined or referred to in the contracts as any approved technical service needed to build or fix current and future areas of the Cardano blockchain.

The delivery team was charged with setting up bootstrap and interim processes to facilitate the management of these contacts, as well as being involved in the process of the novation's. This retrospective report is intended to give you an update on what the team has achieved during Q1 and what the team has in store for Q2 2024.

Suppliers Introduction & Program Increment (PI) Planning

• All continuity suppliers received an ‘Intro to Intersect’ evergreen presentation and a face to face with the team, outlining the changes in the ecosystem, reporting lines and details on proposed new billing and invoicing procedures.

• All suppliers brought into how Intersect intends to run planning for key continuity contracts. At Intersect we use PI planning and manage delivery in quarters at a time.

• We have and continue to work with our continuity suppliers to revisit the confidentiality terms which were in their novated contracts. Rightly, some confidentiality may need to exist, but in some cases there is a little too much. This has prevented Intersect from sharing as much as we would have liked. We are continuing with our suppliers to agree new terms, which better reflect this era of Cardano we are all working in.

Contractual Obligations

• We have set up and tested payment processes and systems so we are able to fulfil our contractual obligations and be able to pay suppliers and grantees.

• The majority of our continuity suppliers and grantees have been integrated into our payment process and have been tested, ensuring we send the correct payments at the right time.

Technical Steering Committee and Hard Fork Working Group

• The delivery assurance team has established a bootstrap TSC. Ensuring fundamental processes are in place for suppliers to provide updates, that milestones and acceptance criteria are captured and documented. Which in turn trigger our contractual processes mentioned above.

• The initial Hard Fork working group has been stood up, containing the continuity suppliers who will ultimately deliver the CIP-1694 and supportive technology.

• Details of both this committee and working group have been added to Intersect’s knowledge base. Ready for the community to start to take an active role in shaping additional value, information and processes.

Procurement Process

• The team has created a procurement process for the facilitation of contracts. Within the delivery assurance team we have a procurement function. A subset of the team who process, assess risks and facilitate contracts.

• The team have developed and reviewed the new Intersect Master Service Agreements, Statement of Works and other supporting documents.

• Developed a risk management process for contract management.

• The procurement team also supports internal Intersect and business contracts and have processed; people resources, back office tooling (such as Google suite and Hubspot contracts), website development contracts and all the legal documentation required for the migration of the GitHub repositories to Intersect.

Budget and Finance

• The delivery assurance team has also had responsibility to create and own the budget and finance process across internal Intersect functional teams and staff.

• Created a budget management process for functional teams (Technical Operations, Back-Office Operations, Marketing & Communications and Membership & Community) as well as budget management for suppliers, contracts, grants and our own people resources.

In a little over three months we have achieved a lot, but we understand that there is still some distance to go and there are always improvements we can make. As a team we have set some goals for the next quarter, below are some of the highlights.

• Introduce financial tooling to support and industrialize our initial processes.

• Create a legal playbook - to better facilitate changes in a quicker more controlled way, allowing for more sharing and collaboration from suppliers.

• Create a change management process. From time to time we will inevitably need to change the contracts we administer.

• New delivery assurance page and delivery information on our knowledge base.

• More regular delivery assurance updates and blog posts - we challenge ourselves to produce more regular and informative monthly and quarterly updates.

• Introduction of members to the TSC to start shaping the future.

You can read about the delivery assurance team here, on our Intersect knowledge base. In case you missed it, our last continuity update blog post is here.