Team Practices Group/Retrospectives/2015-04-27

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

Big events since our last retrospective (26 March 2015)

• Joel started
• Engineering reorg
  • Erik’s and Jared’s departures
  • Changed reporting structure (TPG -> COO)
• Grace’s bathroom remodel is done!
• Kristen gave her Team Health talk
  • Kristen was in SF for a week!!!
• Team attended facilitation training
• Grace attended Influential Agile Leader training
• WMF now has a COO
• Arthur’s poorly timed vacation
• Phabricator stuff - being asked to improve Phab reporting/project management tools
  • Kevin becoming PO for Phab improvements
• Significant WMF growth/turnover (eg 10-12 ppl starting in Apr)

What’s worked well?

• Grace excited to have more people to nerd out with given TPG’s growth
• Joel’s experienced good support from the team as he’s started
• Continuing as TPG rather than reframing as PMO
• Weekly backlog meetings
• More timely tackling previous quarter’s health check than we’d previously done
• Getting a brief head’s up about the reorg so it didn’t feel like it came out of the blue
• Knowing that Kristen’s load will be lightened when Max starts
• Team’s response to the reorg - Arthur super pleased proud and impressed
• Aspects of Phabricator that are working well

What hasn’t worked well?

• Lots’ of email at the WMF and it’s difficult to respond to the important ones in a timely way. As TPG has grown, increase in team email- want to respond, but hard to keep up.++++
  • proposals for some team norms around email
    • prepending standardized codes to the subject line of email
    • ‘action needed’ at the top of the body of the email
  • ACTION: Grace to come up with proposal for codes, circulate with the team via Phab ticket
  • ACTION: Experiment with this convention til next retrospective, though we reserve the right to bring it up sooner if things really aren’t working well

• Stalled initiative with RelEng around improving tech debt and testing+++++
  • who owns this?
    • we left the last meeting with RelEng with an owner for next steps (Kristen, Dan Duvall)
    • there’s a tiger team waiting! ROAR!
    • but no owner for the initiative overall
  • ACTION: Arthur to create a phab ticket documenting this issue and own finding this an owner

• Aspects of Phab that aren’t working well+++
• Joel struggling to stay in sponge mode as so much is changing in the org and in VE, have the sense that he’s missing opportunities to impact the changes or make change+++
  • proposal to have joel step out of ‘sponge’ mode
• Platform reorg + engineering reorg has greatly limited Kevin’s productivity +
• We’ve gotten better at softening the landing for new TPGers, but still could have done better with Joel’s onboarding+
• Repurposing meetings, particularly last week
• Some lingering uncertainty about the reorg - what happens after this quarter in regards to our assignments? Have to wait and see the dust settle around the reorg
• There’s resentment in the org around how the reorg was executed

What puzzles us?

• Given the shift to verticals, unclear how to support the support groups within the verticals (like design, ops) - what are the boundaries around how we support the teams within the vertical?++++
  • in some cases, teams used to have embedded support folks, now they don’t, in other, they didn’t before but now will