Team Practices Group/FY2016Q4 Skills Assessment

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

Goal: “Assess skills within TPG related to WMF capacity enhancement needs”

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T131304

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Team_Practices_Group/Our_skills

Actions:

• Joel will create a phab task for the creation of The Matrix (T138997)
• Grace will somehow generate quarterly reminders to update the list (T139001)
• Grace to retro post notes on wiki

What went well

• How we created it
  • We scoped the goal down to be less about matching skills with needs and more focused on what our skills are and how people can engage with us
  • Despite ambiguities, we pushed ahead, which gave us information that helped us gain clarity about what we really wanted
  • Pairing with Kevin was great for Grace (and Kevin), we had a cadence going that really reinforced that we were making progress
  • Once we dove in, it went pretty quickly
  • Streamlining from “create an inventory of needs” to just providing a tool for others to engage with us was a nice shift, consistent with our values
• What we created
  • Apparently TPG has a lot of skills that can be clearly articulated
  • I feel it was a worthwhile exercise - clarified our understanding of each other’s skills, overall team skillz, and will give us something to point to when people ask “what does TPG actually do?”
  • Impressive to see the diversity and breadth of skills
• How we will use it
  • Grace thinks that the output (= the list) will help customers to engage with us
  • The “how to engage with us” page should also help customers engage with us

What we might change

• The original posted goals on our wiki page had the KR’s reversed (cut and paste error), which caused confusion
• How we created it
  • We probably should have started working on this earlier (or at least more intensively, earlier)
    • It worked out well this time, fortunately
  • We frequently shifted between “what we do” and “what we do related to capacity-building”
    • Ambiguity between doing and teaching
  • During list generation, some confusion between a) making individual lists and then reconciling, or b) making a mega-list containing everyone’s skills from the beginning
  • Maybe we missed an opportunity to refer to existing community of practice documentation instead of re-creating a list?
    • KL: what book?  JA: something like the PMBOK
    • So our list may not sync with external lists, if that’s ever a thing to do.
  • The list kept getting more detailed and less broad which GG thought made it less useful
    • KS thought it became more useful
• What we created
  • KS continued to be confused between our “light engagements” goal and this “skills and how to engage with us” goal, since they had some commonalities
  • It was nice to see how the list matched up with Light Engagement goal and how both work toward the EPIC of “Improved status quo”
  • It would be neat to know which skills map to which people on the TPG, and to what degree
    • See for example: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Release_Engineering_Team/Skill_matrix
• How we will use it
  • Shrinking the scope from “match needs to skills” to “make list of skills” delayed the point at which we can proactively invite engagement with WMF
    • Increasing engagement wasn’t part of the Q4 goal.
  • It still feels unclear to me how the list of skills maps to how others request our services (sometimes people don’t know the specific skills they need to solve some problem or challenge they’ve articulated)
  • Not clear exactly what we’re going to do with the list and if it’s well tailored for its purposes.
• The future
  • How do we keep this up to date? ACTION!  Grace to open Phab ticket
    • Review it annually?
    • DECISION: Quarterly reminders
    • SEMI ANNUALLY!
    • PROPOSAL: Add to onboarding/offboarding docs