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Team Practices Group/Retrospectives/2015-07-22

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

TPG Retrospective 2015-07-22

Previous retrospective was 2015-07-01 (3 wks ago)

Review status of previous action items

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  • Feel like we don't have time to talk about TPG stuff
    • Action: Kevin to enter into backlog (DONE)
    • Further action postponed by wikimania, but ideas have been kicked around, and will be implemented "soon"
    • No further group action required
  • Epics v Goals v Quarterly planning
  • who owns phabricator internally and how do we coordinate communication to upstream?
    • Action: Arthur to point David to owner of who to work with upstream, David to enter Phab item to fix wikis
    • David has added many tasks and is in progress.
  • Documentation seems more as a collab space of where to solidify ideas and process rather than documentation
    • +1 to scattered and incomplete documentation
    • Issues of pub & private documentation still unresolved
    • Action: TPG to model good behavior
    • no further retro action planned

What has happened since last Retro (2015-07-01)

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  • Wikimania!
    • Hackathon different than what Kevin anticipated
    • not small teams focused on specific projects
    • indivs working on their own
    • unfocussed
    • cool stuff showed off in showcase
    • less of a party and more of a conference
    • good talks
    • social events were poorly coordinated
    • going to Wikimania could generate work for TPG
    • our proposed talks were rejected
  • THCs started crankin'
    • observed different levels of engagement at different teams
    • Google Docs are getting less interaction than etherpads (2 of 3 THCs observed)
    • so many chat channels, lots of uncoordinated chatting
    • wide disparity of sharing / Diversity of sharing levels between participants
    • Should we do a retro of the THC? (I think we will)
      • we will :)
      • No signs that we need a mid-THC course correction
  • Quarterly Review
    • Infrastructure was enlightening
    • Managers appreciate the new streamlined format
    • the Advancement review had interesting notes about goals. (80% of goals is a good target to hit--goals that push you are good). The expectation is not clear or well distributed.
  • (Potentially) Interesting Team Work
  • I AM AN AGILE COACH (ALL CAPS!!)
  • We started doing Tea Time
    • Struggling to find the groove
    • conflict with Wikimania and other schedule issues
  • Performance reviews, comp adjustments
    • Promotion email fatigue
    • "Cool and valuable experience"
    • Managers seemed to handle it well
  • Sync up with Andre
    • TODO: schedule a second Andre chat

Not so goods

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  • no room scheduled for this meeting today
  • Phab+
    • Phabricator is really not user friendly
    • Phabricator lacks documentation... period
    • Phragile continues to be a frustrating project (responsible but no authority)+
    • still waiting to find out if we have any money/leverage to get changes+
  • Grace working with Joel less
  • Not everyone has offline IRC buffering++
    • TODO: Joel to invite Kristen to IRCCloud (and we should confirm that IRC scrollback/attention is an SOP/expectation for TPG)
  • Tea Time++
    • tea time- would prefer agenda ahead of time and could it be optional attendance?
    • tea time on Fri- only day I usually take off
    • people late for Andre tea time meeting
    • Discussion: should tea time have an agenda, or is this antithetical to the spirit of tea time?
    • having an agenda might make it more appealing that discussing ad-hoc topics
    • having an agenda could make clearer what it is
  • Still stuck a little bit in deep conceptual issues about work planning and tracking+
    • David is unsure where to find conversation. Lots of information in multiple channels +++
    • overlapping discussions and overlapping Venn circles of who and different technologies (email, IRC, flow, talk page)
    • Not clear where the tip of the conversation is
    • Kristen: don't have a problem with this, not sure why
    • Kevin: org-wide problem; can't imagine a total solution
    • root causes?
      • tools are problematic
      • team hasn't fully gelled in habits/shared assumptions
      • maybe we don't fully understand what our team is actually doing (as a team). what is our mandate, what is our balance of priorities?
        • ambiguity in our Vision -> Mission -> strategy -> tactics?
          • not at Vision level, but below that
        • balance of individual team members working with teams / areas of interest vs TPG function as a whole team
          • TPG people helping other TPGers as "peer review" on each other's specific areas
        • TPG people doing TPG-level work
          • coming up with best practices for WMF and disseminating them
          • TPG-focused work (THCs, what else?)
        • open questions at the vision/mission/strategy level
    • one consequence: feeling unproductive, divorced from "real work"
  • Scope creep on RelEng task writeup++
  • THC scheduling - much rescheduling, next week is THC ClusterF$*k
  • Wikimania/vacation drag+
  • VE wants out of Scrum of Scrums, doesn't find it usefulhaha, Reading team just asked for more VE presence at SoS Haha! Ed showed up today just to listen in++
    • TODO: Joel and Grace to follow up. Kristen can provide examples of inter-team communications that reading things would have gone better.
  • Ops dependencies are still slowing Discovery (although it seems better than in the past)
  • Arthur jetlagged and distracted

Goods

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  • We have significantly improved the phabricator search and dashboard documentation
  • Intra-TPG collab:+
    • Kevin in Mex with Grace, muchas gracias!
    • Grace working with Kristen more
    • Grace chatting with David more- proximity FTW!
  • Making headway on Reading strategy process+
  • Turned the corner on Burnup charting tools and am now fairly productive at doing new kinds of analysis
  • Moved from Master -> Coach
  • THC guidelines seem to be working+
  • 2 x TPGERS in vertical (KL/Max)++
    • "having two TPG people assigned to teams in the same vertical (Reading) has provided some benefits"
  • Editing team was able to push back on Lila's Wikimania demo request+

"Interesting"

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  • Some teams are moving Scrum->Kanban, but Discovery is moving Kanban->Scrum <- Kanbum?+

retro retro notes

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  • we could try digging into good/not-so-good while doing the "what happened since" list
  • Variability from retro to retro is arguably a good thing--keeps things fresh
  • is there a way to spend less time on (uncontroversial) information sharing and more on identifying gaps and conflicts?
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