Team Practices Group/Retrospectives/2016-09-28

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

Facilitator for Oct retro:

• Natalia (Thanks, Natalia!)

New retro actions

• GG to move discussion of actions for top voted items to email DONE

Previous retro actions

(Did not discuss)

What has happened since our last TPG retro on Aug 24, 2016

• Staffing
  • Natalia joins
  • Natalia shadowing Max

• Events
  • Product & Technology Onsite in San Francisco
  • Some TPG IRL time w/some SF team members (breakfast @ The Grove)
  • Planning RelEng offsite
  • Planning Editing offsite
  • Dev Summit registration opens
  • Joel & Grace co-facilitated CR onsite
• So much facilitation and facilitation prep
  • Arthur’s Design intervention facilitations (other TPGers facilitated some)
    • Design Statement Of Purpose (DSOP) validation sessions
  • Product/Tech offsite (Kristen, Arthur, Max, Grace, Joel all helped)
  • WMF Values prep (see below)
  • Annual Planning Retro project: Kevin dove in to help Arthur
  • Kevin facilitated (and Max observed) an “air clearing” session for a team
  • Kevin created a “planning offsites” page
• Several different Values threads at once
  • TPG values discussions
    • Extensive TPG “neighborhoods” work
    • TPG value process paused
  • WMF Values Process facilitation prep (Joel, Kristen, Arthur)
  • TPG has three different Assessment/Survey processes
  • Light Engagement Survey
    • Grace/Kevin did extensive pairing to develop it and run the pilot
    • Thanks to Abbey, JMo and other research folks for input!
    • Light engagement survey pilots, round 1, round 2 waves a and b
  • CSAT
    • Kevin and Grace paired on CSAT and Light Engagement Survey
    • Quarterly CSAT went out, and got processed
    • Joel and Grace paired on analyzing CSAT
    • Grace asked, “Is there value in doing the CSAT the way we’ve always done it or could we get more value from simplifying it?”
      • Simplifying also made processing much easier
  • Team Health Check
    • Grace presents THC Rethink at Leadership Roundtable
• Embedded and ongoing-light engagement work
  • Grace’s engagement with FR-Tech renewed for another month
  • ArchCom engagement renewed
• Process and Tools
  • Max and Joel diving deep into Phab/process
  • Max and Joel (and Kevin a bit) talking Phlog improvements
  • Tinker has been down for weeks but still sends reminders
    • “Thanks, Tinker!”
• Meeting overload
• Canceled a couple tea times
• Org stuff
  • Org change interest group evolves
  • WMF Engagement Committee solicits staff ideas and Committee working groups are formed
  • WMF Diversity Alliance kicks off
  • Org experiment with remoting and relaxing
  • Interruptions to the deployment train! No deployments this week! (Ops offsite)
• External stuff
  • US presidential debate
  • Baseball season, and summer, coming to a close

Stop

• Tinker aggravations
• [2] MB Over-booking by time or by cognitive load
  • Don’t do lots of similar but different projects at the same time.
  • GG Examples in last month: three different facilitation projects, two different values projects, three different TPG survey projects all active at the same time.
  • GG +1 KS +1
• [3] GG KL KL Doing work breakdown for work that other people are going to do or pair on
• Stop setting target response rates without asking our experts in Research
• [1] GG Last minute is not the same as just-in-time- striking the right balance (with JIT, you probably know that the nature of the request that is coming and it’s a matter of when to pull trigger)... MB +1
• Be less bureaucratic in our staff meetings/TPG conversations
  • Norms around meeting hours and tea time
• Stop having train/deployment interruptions in the last 2 wks of the quarter
• [1] KS ...starting, and start finishing
• [3]JA KS KL Stop duplicating task lists in task descriptions (lossy/error-prone)
  • MB +1
  • JA -1 task graph is illegible and unsequenced
    • Death to graph, life to projects

Start

• [1] GG Including prep and other costs when estimating costs for volunteering for new work
  • GG +1
• [2] JA MB More consistent and usable tools for tracking team-wide tasks
  • When there is a call to do work, I feel like it should be tracked with our other work. Getting an email to contribute to a doc, that has its own checkboxes, seems weirder/riskier to me than doing all the same in a Phab task.
  • Resolve checkbox vs subtask vs other debate and impose consistency
• [4] JA KS KL GG Identifying goal shepherd from the start of quarter
• Start actual work on goals earlier (it was better this quarter, but room for improvement)
  • GG +1
• Goal shepherds do their own work breakdown
• [1] MB Figuring out a way to use TPG retro time more efficiently
  • Took 20 mins to populate “recent events”, which was the necessary amount of time but sucks to have less time to discuss actual emergent talking points
• Socializing Light Engagement survey SOP so any wolf can deploy at will (but let’s first decide what is an appropriate level of engagement to use LE survey for)
  • Documentation step captured as https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T141138
• [3] MB KS KLFiguring out calendaring around GMT
  • Planning times further in advance
  • 1 PM Pacific time sweet-spot

Keep

• [3] KS JA MB Giving/receiving feedback weekly, when our tools work (or even when not?)
• Choosing our own fonts
• Using better fonts in our emails
• Using browser extensions to mitigate evil font choices. #science! #whygeorgiawhy
• Improving our onboarding docs
• Experimenting with new retro formats
• Pairing!!!!
• Soliciting feedback
  • the bad feedback I got from Light Engagement survey was super-helpful to me!
  • +1 JA (also got useful constructive feedback, from Tinker)
• Light Engagement survey! It’s rad.
• Letting Natalia shadow
• Evaluating (and often renewing) ongoing non-embedded engagements on a quarterly basis
• Cleaning up backlog before monthly grooming meeting
  • Keep purging the backlog
• Asking each other for help when we need it
• JA Reserving last few minutes of meetings for next steps/wrap-up
• Synch-ups before facilitations like DSOP were really helpful
• Having interesting conversations on mailing list (e.g. interesting articles)