Team Practices Group/Retrospectives/2017-06-17

The Team Practices Group (TPG) was dissolved in 2017.

Last Retro

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2017-05-25

Old Action Items

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  • JA: Will give non-present wolves until next week to react to notes before beginning redaction.
  • Next month’s facilitator: ? using spontaneous self-facilitation for this meeting.

What happened (Since May 25)

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  • Organizational Changes
    • Tune-up was implemented
      • Totally new roles for GG, KS, KL, AR
      • Post-tuna changes
      • Joel’s moving to Technology!
  • TPG/uild Business
    • Annual performance reviews
    • First TPGuild meeting
    • Offsite
      • Wolves GG and KS won’t be at the offsite 😥
      • Decided not to do whale watching cause JA and NH get seasick 🌊
        • And sadly no trip to the cape cod potato chip factory either :(
        • NH didn’t know :( that’d be a great trip
    • MB back, mostly missing for events between retros
  • Engagements/projects
    • JA got fully busy with Editing re-org
      • Very interesting
    • Possible re-emergence of phlogiston (“I’m not dead yet!”)
      • (Victoria is keenly interested)
    • Krarthur™’s development conversation workshops
    • Kevin is diving into coordinating 19 programs across 12 teams in Technology
  • Other org stuff
    • Engagement survey
      • and the aftermath of not having a recording: epicly long email thread
    • Two interesting visitors to WMF gave interesting talks
      • Uzo Iweala
      • Adam Hochschild
  • Non-Work
    • Arthur went on vacation and got poison oak-poisoned
      • Is poison oak actually poison if you don’t eat it? Note: don’t eat it.
        • “Venomous” Oak?
        • Some people claim that by eating fresh, young poison oak leaves you can develop an immunity
          • And an inside-rash

What went well

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  • AR: Inaugural TPGuild meeting
    • MB: +1 Thanks to Natalia for leading the charge with a pro presentation
    • KL +1 well done
  • KS: Kevin’s post-tuna experience has been quite pleasant
  • JA: Editing Re-org coaching—very productive so far, IMNSHO.
    • Could still collapse spectacularly.
  • JA: Excited to (still) be pairing closely with KS (and GG)
  • KS: Getting Joel into Technology makes me really happy
  • JA: Technology job gives me a clear path to work on annual and quarterly planning.
  • 1st T & C assignment - Loved doing hiring manager trainings (developmental conversation) with Arthur +1
  • Annual Reviews
    • Great annual performance review conversation +1
    • AR: reflecting and pulling together peer/self reviews
    • Enjoy doing reviews, esp. celebrating/reviewing accomplishments (KL)
    • JA: reviews was much simpler than I expected.
    • NH: Writing reviews was harder than I thought but a beneficial exercise
  • NH: I like my 1/1s with Jon Katz

What went poorly

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  • Tuna issues
    • MB: Still feeling apathetic about a lot since the Consultation. Got the sense that it has been challenging for others, too, based on the check-in at the first Guild meeting (sorry Natalia)
    • AR: post-tuna changes have been somewhat surprising, hard not to feel like the TPG legacy is disappearing
    • MB: Post-tuna feels disjointed, both in separation from former TPG teammates as well as org-feel. Lots of uncertainty now.
  • JA: went from very underworked to about 2.5 full-time threads + travel and leave coming up.
  • JA: 3–6 month plan for Editing Re-Org was squished into 1 month due to Tuna.
  • JA: Editing Department’s medium-term needs for Coaching/management still very vague
  • KS: Peer review deadline was frustrating (the deadline was announced while I was on vacation, and passed while I was still on vacation)...but it ended up being easy to clean up after I got back
    • MB: +1, and hard on hackathon and vacation time
  • AR: sad about GG and KS not attending offsite
    • MB: +1
    • NH: +1
    • JA: +1
  • AR: MB getting trampled
    • MB: +1 no bueno
  • KS: No signs of retrospectives about the tuneup (understandable given all the pain and stress, but not great from an organizational learning perspective)
    • MB: +1, I also recall that there was an offhand comment that we would retro, but have heard nothing since. Additionally, Stillwell seemed to like our idea of retro’ing the changes themselves in 3-6 months’ time, but nothing has been scheduled and I fear it dropping off.
  • JA: wasn’t going to Wikimania, then maybe going to facilitate offsite in Montrèal after Wikimania, then not going, now going to facilitate other offsite in Montrèal after Wikimania.
    • MB: I’ll be there too (offsite only, too) let’s party.
    • I hear the food and nightlife in Montreal are excellent
      • MB: Poutine is gross.

Other

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  • KS: Not sure how well we’re doing at closing out TPGroup work
  • KS: Feels like longer than 2 weeks since TPG split upmorphed into a Guild, but still feels really weird
    • MB: Also personally felt weird that the transition happened while I was on vacation, not sure if I missed out on something (processing or something else, etc)
  • Feeling mildly weird/unsettled about Offsite

Followup

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Joel to lead getting notes posted.