Runway

The stretch of working time between today and the event date, together with the plan of dated milestones that fills it. A countdown on its own is not a runway. The countdown with work attached to it is. A runway is read right to left, from the date backwards, because that is the only end of it that is fixed. Its minimum length is set by the longest chain of dependent tasks it has to contain, not by how much time feels comfortable. In this course a mid-size community event runs on a runway of roughly 10 to 16 weeks, which is the 12-month conference skeleton compressed.

Source: Course usage. The word is borrowed from the startup sense of time remaining before a hard limit. The planning model underneath it is standard practice: published timelines run 6 to 12 months for large conferences and 3 to 6 for mid-size events (Lyyti’s event planning timeline guide), and the most concrete volunteer-conference version is the DevOpsDays organizing timeline, which counts every milestone in T-minus months from the event date. The 10 to 16 week figure is this course’s compression of that skeleton for a 100 to 150 person community event, derived in the course’s industry map. It is a derivation, not a published benchmark.

First used in: 1.3 · The runway. Lives on the Runway tab of the master timeline built in 0.3 · Install the operating system.