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Team Practices Group/Retrospectives/2015-10-22

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

Action items from last time

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Significant events since last time

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  • Discovery offsite
  • Reading Web offsite
  • Kicked off possible phabricator use cases (potential upstream change requests)
    • Discovered true nature of “Sprint-Extension” relative to upstream
      • TML: Sprint Extension is independent from upstream Phabricator and is not supported much or at all by anyone
    • 2 fixes might have WMF solutions. 3 others are still potentials for upstream
  • 4 x 90 minute Strategery meetings (+ much homework)
    • Strategic problem decided
    • Possibilities generated and narrowed
    • Cascades drafting
  • Multiple WMF initiatives around process change and design (Wes, SPDPP, Rachel, others)
  • Discovery vertical leadership changes
  • Completed VE <-> DR and VE <-> RelEng SLUs (Service Level Understandings)
  • TPG cancelled Team Health Checks for 2015Q2
  • Quarterly review
  • Phlogiston launched burnups for ~4 teams
  • Ongoing Comm Tech engagement (Kevin is helping them with retros, agile workshops, and now some kanban/scrum/sprint coaching)--relatively shallow engagement.
  • Maintenance Fraction data is trickling in slowly
  • VE Launch team and decision making changed
  • VE Launch plan changed (launch to IPs won’t happen until 2016)
  • Conversations around overwhelmingedness
  • Failed attempt at organizing last-minute IRL meeting for TPG
    • Renewed attempt to meet in December
  • SPDPP progress
  • Goal setting & goal setting redux
  • Community Engagement started doing MPL
  • Engineering updated the MPL for this quarter
  • CSAT survey


Worked well/keep doing?

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  • WMF Phab admins are highly responsive and helpful
  • Level of maturity in thinking around TPG strategy process
    • Strategy process is making me think too hard← works well? (yes, in the sense that chemo that doesn’t make you sick probably isn’t working)
  • Facilitation, learning, and changing on the fly of strategy process
  • TPG meetings seem to work well (grooming, review/planning/staff, tea time, retros)
    • +1
  • Some great offsite experiences (Reading Web, Discovery)
  • Dropping THC this quarter helped a lot +1+1+1 (did I already +1?)
  • Overwhelmedness discussions were really helpful
  • Great thinking and conversations around updating quarterly goals
  • Comm Tech engagement (by Kevin) seems like high benefit for the cost
  • TPG CSAT survey; having data from it for quarterly review was huge help
    • +the support received from Edward +1+1+1



Has not worked well/stop doing?

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  • Dropping THC also was one fewer window into individual team health +
  • Not sure what the THC plan is yet
  • We skipped some tea-times
  • Not a lot of [informal] TPG team-time
  • TPG retros still feel a little too infrequent -1 +
  • Kevin didn’t budget any time for post-offsite documentation (it will take ~8 hrs)
  • Still feeling a bit overwhelmed, but catching up (KS) ++
    • DS scaling back promises/tasks (this might also be a positive?)
  • Still no SOP for Epics in the TPG board ++
  • Strategy stuff is going slowly...probably by necessity, but can be frustrating ++++++
    • Strategy taking a loooot of time [hours per week] +1 +1
  • SPDPP still feels vague and distant (like a meteor heading toward us that we can’t see) +++
  • Efforts within TPG feel a bit siloed/isolated ++++
    • +1
    • 1 Riot, 1 Ranger (however, see brutal history of Texas Rangers)
  • Still feeling disconnect between management groups



Action items for next time

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  • Strategy stuff is going slowly...probably by necessity, but can be frustrating ++++++
    • Strategy taking a loooot of time [hours per week] +1 +1
    • Next steps: continue these points on the timeline email thread
      • option 1: can we time-box any of these steps?
      • Could we prune more aggressively/incrementally?
      • sub-grouping
  • SPDPP still feels vague and distant (like a meteor heading toward us that we can’t see) +++
    • Next steps: Joel will write something up
  • Efforts within TPG feel a bit siloed/isolated ++++
    • +1
    • Next steps:
      • SPDPP update will help.
      • Over communicate all TPG projects (focus on FYI and tl;dr how this will impact you) [ALL]
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