Team Practices Group/Retrospectives/2016-06-29

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

Facilitator (chosen last month): Joel

Previous Action items

• Grace to spin up ticket for putting THC on hold, add checkboxes
  • Done: T133815
• Joel (or Arthur) will (in a month or so) do something about offsite timing issues
  • Plan early so TPG’s offsite isn’t in the same last-minute time period as everybody else
  • Push everybody else to plan earlier
  • Talk to finance about avoiding the get-it-in-this-fiscal-year crunch from the money side, like teams being able to spend this-FY money in next FY
  • Joel to meet with Arthur; ask again next month.
• Kristen: Look into improving the peer feedback loop (more frequent than annual)
  • Met with GG and with AR
  • AR to discuss at staff meeting
  • Done

What has happened since the last retro?

Previous retro was 2016-06-03

• Annual/Cyclical things
  • Annual peer reviews
    • Did we discuss last time?  Yes.
  • Annual reviews
  • Annual planning
  • Defining Q1 goals
• Wikimania
  • Board meetings and announcements and appointments and term-completions
  • Katherine permanent ED/Katherine became non-interim ED
  • Max saw a hawk play a giant theremin
  • 3 very quiet weeks in the office
• TPG-oriented things
  • Moar interviews for Agile Specialist
  • CSAT 4.0 deployed
  • Swarming/pairing/sprinting on TPG Q4 goals
  • Discussed changes to backlog cruft and subproject-ing
  • Announced TPG move to Product
  • Announced TPG Strategy outcome
  • Kevin’s RelEng engagement ended
    • Main area where Kevin could benefit ended up being moot; Greg is back part-time.
• Multiple Arthur outages
• Work Travel
  • Max has completed all travel for the foreseeable future (vacation aside)
  • Joel in London for VE
• Design Research happened in India
• Arthur worked with designers, Grace, too
• Designers (and design-ish-ers) onsite
  • For brand party
  • had an on(ff)site
  • There are 2.5 designers (Pau, Rita, Nirzar)

What went well or poorly

NOTE: Votes for discussion below are initials at the start of the item

What Went Well

• We have an ED and 2 new board members
• RelEng engagement ended early by mutual agreement
• Kevin’s schedule has had whitespace, which is a welcome change
• VE Offsite: good feedback
• Joel got help from TPGers to groom his backlog
• Good to clean up TPG backlog
• Q1 goal setting
  • And having it be driven from the annual plan
• [1] KS Finishing Q4 goals:
  • Pairing to get Q4 goals done was fun and effective/Grace pairing with Kevin on goals sprint!
  • We adapted and adjusted our Q4 TPG goals as we learned more
  • Seeing notifications come through Phab was great- it’s functioning as it should
  • GG felt like Phab was becoming pull-driven :)
• Grace had good pairing with Arthur on Designers
• Good Tea Times: Buzzword Debate and a-synch work
• Grace and Joel being interview buddies (Max and Kevin, too)
• Kristen for stepping in to help with a delicate situation
• Grace’s push to hear and honor people on the team’s concerns, notably yesterday in goal setting (wanting to ensure Kevin was heard) and today in working through Joel’s backlog (“if it matters to you, i want to talk about it”)
• Good conversation around backlog cruft and options we’ll try for improving backlog processes
• Arthur feeling supported during challenging times
• [1] GG We are applying our April offsite norms (e.g. 5 minutes at end of meeting; announcing decisions)
  • Is it working?
• TPG flexibility with Max being out sick and/or traveling, covering Max during his travel absences
• [1] MB Good to get feedback via Annual Review
• Agile specialist pipeline and interviews

What Went Poorly

• [2] JA MB It’s been so long since we anti-climaxed our way out of (into?) strategy that it was weird to “announce” it this week
• [7] JA JA KL KL AR AR  Frustrated by cruft in ‘Team radar’ and general backlog
• [4] AR JA KL GG Simultaneously unsatisfied with backlog design and fatigued with backlog design work
• Phlogiston servers kept failing; had to keep nagging for support
• Wikimania was faaaar away - travel time!
• James (et al) offline for 3 weeks
  • And left a ton of unripe work on DR’s plate
• [3] GG KS KL Comment wars in Goals (and Product move scope doc, and some others) docs made asynch development maddening (to some)
• Scheduling TPG has been challenging with people out/typical TPG calendars
• [3] MB KS GG Our understanding of our Q4 goal (goals?) changed significantly once we started working on it
  • Good that we adapted, but pattern of changing from published goals is problematic
  • KL it was incremental change, not dramatic
• [5] JA KL KS AR AR Annual reviews feel like they cover too much scope/time
• Arthur struggled to catch up/keep up with phab/keep up with TPG using phab as the primary source of truth
• [1] KS Max had a hard time keeping up with Q goal-setting
  • Feeling disengaged with quarterly goal-setting for several Qs, maybe capacity-related.
• 1 ED news was welcome, but felt abrupt (was expecting a long search period)
• [1] MB Heard one person ask, “So what does TPG moving to Product mean?” (had hoped we fully explained it)
  • Also heard one person express concern that TPG might be moving away from “culture” component
    • KL: not the intended impact; note Arthur’s T&C role.
  • And one person asked what AR does
    • Was it AR himself?
• Groan Zone of defining Light Engagement
  • We decided it shouldn’t block our Q4 goal, so we’ll deal with it in the future
• [1] MB We haven’t totally defined who should be getting the CSAT; or, we have, but we don’t cover everything we might need to be surveying (offsites, etc)

Discussion

• Frustrated by cruft in ‘Team radar’ and general backlog
  • Seems like we don’t really keep up with it. Feels kind of useless. Creates extra noise
    • We don’t tie the radar effectively to “what is supposed to happen when”
• Ambiguity around TPG’s engagement level
  • Sometimes there are legitimate support requests buried in there, but we don’t pick up on them. Is there some better way for people to engage with us?
    • KS: I haven’t seen this happen
  • Did we talk about associating an owner?
    • Each item in the radar should have an owner.
    • Not really an owner--each item has a TPG subscriber
    • We in TPG are afraid to take ourselves off of tickets. Other groups are bolder about that.
  • Other teams might not be aware of TPG’s scope, or might disagree with it. So when a task comes in, we don’t have a clear reference of what we do/don’t do, so things either linger, or get removed when they shouldn’t.
• A lot of the tasks in radar are poorly formulated. I don’t want to enforce task formatting in the WMF, but a lot of these were unclear what they wanted from us. That adds overhead when we do parse through radar.
  • In DR, we would @ the author and ask what they expected of us. Then if no answer, we would take ourselves off.
  • We need to not be afraid to say we don’t currently understand it, and be willing to ask for clarifications.
  • I’m not aware of tasks in radar that actually ask for TPG support; if that’s happening, that’s a breakdown in our process.
  • Next step
    • GG and AR to work on this
• Annual Reviews cover too much time/scope
  • Need to receive feedback more frequently and in smaller doses
  • Things 10 months ago feel irrelevant by now
  • AR: with KL, playing with tool called Tinker, a micro-feedback tool for teams
  • Could try it out with this team
  • KL: one cool thing is that it keeps record of all feedback over time, helpful at review time
    • GG: if this solves it, that covers one of my Qgoals
  • Next step
    • Arthur to talk about at staff meeting
• Backlog dissatisfaction combined with backlog-change-fatigue
  • MB: there is a task to pilot the subproject thing, on agenda tomorrow to discuss
  • JA: more changes - also on agenda for tomorrow.

Action Items

• Joel (or Arthur) will (in a month or so) do something about offsite timing issues
  • Joel to meet with Arthur; ask again next month.
• Parking lot: this retro format doesn’t provide a means to say “I don’t want to discuss X, but I do think we should have an action item about it”
• GG & AR to pair on how to deal with Radar column on Team Practices board
• TPG is meeting to do spring/summer/winter backlog grooming

Facilitator for next month: GG