Master timeline

The one spreadsheet where everything about an event lives: the runway of milestones working back from the event date, the budget, the sponsor pipeline, and the volunteer stations and shifts, one tab each. Also called the master sheet. Its value isn’t the format, it’s the rule that comes attached to it. If it matters, it goes in here, and nothing important lives only in a chat thread or in somebody’s head. That rule is what makes work distributable, because a volunteer can pick up a tab but cannot pick up your memory.

Source: course-coined as a single named artifact. The practice underneath it is standard: event checklists, budgets, and run-of-show documents are conventionally kept in spreadsheets, and the DevOpsDays organizing guide builds its whole model on distributing named responsibilities across a team, which only works when the state of each responsibility is written somewhere shared.

First used in: 0.3 · Install the operating system. Filled tab by tab across Levels 1 and 2.