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Team Practices Group/Retrospectives/2016-09-28

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

Facilitator for Oct retro:

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  • Natalia (Thanks, Natalia!)

New retro actions

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

Previous retro actions

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(Did not discuss)

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

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  • 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

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  • 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

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  • [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

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  • [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)
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