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Team Practices Group/Retrospectives/2016-10-26

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

Facilitator for Nov retro

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  • Kevin (Thanks, Kevin!)

New retro actions

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  • Joel to add to checklist:
    • Windows for rooms/better norms around venue needs
    • Prep survey ahead of time
    • Get an admin on your trip?
    • Hacking room
  • KL to check if she can share the offsite calendar (to be checked with Wes) DONE
  • Joel to reschedule next month’s retro to not be the day before Thanksgiving holiday
  • Natalia to edit the notes, send to the team and publish on wiki DONE

Previous retro actions

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  • GG to move discussion of actions for top voted items to email DONE
    • Calendaring
    • Feedback convo (tinker-ish)
    • ID goal shepherds
    • Not duplicating task lists in Phab descriptions with subtasks

What has happened since our last TPG retro on Sep 28, 2016

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  • Shadowing
    • Natalia shadowed Max
    • Natalia shadowed Grace
    • Natalia started shadowing Kevin
  • Shifted almost all meetings to fit with everyone’s working hours
  • Org stuff
    • Shine Theory meeting (WMF women)
    • Black Lives Matter discussion group starts
    • WMF Values conversations started
    • Wikilead module 3 (Grace and Joel)
    • Wikimedia movement strategy introduced
    • “Leadership Levels” framework introduced
  • Quarterly Goals
    • Closed out the end-of-quarter phab tasks; created new ones for this quarter
    • Q2 work kickoff
    • Light Engagement Survey
      • LE survey “howto” written and used for RelEng offsite survey
  • Offsites
    • RelEng Offsite [Kevin]
    • VE Offsite (Editing Offsite?) [Joel, Max]
    • Wikilead
  • DevSummit
    • Dreams of a coaching clinic at DevSummit
  • Embedded and ongoing-light engagement work
    • Draft definition of embedded
    • ArchCom engagement put in suspended animation (until next week)
    • Progress on Annual Planning Retrospective engagement
    • TPG/fr-tech engagement renewed for Q2
    • Kevin helped Web team talk about tech debt
  • Facilitation
    • Knowledge Engine retrospective (internal; then at the public conference)
    • Natalia facilitated Reading kickoff & retro
    • WMF Values facilitation
  • External stuff
    • Dreamforce conference next door
    • Last presidential debate
    • High Holidays
  • Quarterly Reviews
  • Arthur at MS in Organizational Development intensive
  • Quarterly check-in on strategy, values, and norms

What went well

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  • GG: Discussion at our quarterly strategy checkin was a bit hard to get started, but I think that it turned into a good discussion where I felt that Joel was expressing some of the same thoughts that I had. Thanks, Joel!
  • GG: Good discussions with Kristen during pairing sessions on definition of embedded
    • KL: +1
  • GG: It was nice that Max agreed to join Joel at Editing offsite JA +1
  • GG: I appreciate Kevin's generosity with his time in taking on the RelEng offsite
  • GG: I want to celebrate Natalia's pluckiness for volunteering shepherd a quarterly goal
    • NH has volunteered for several things--great to see rapid immersion
    • +1 and already helping to take some load off of other wolves
  • GG: I enjoyed a break from Light Engagement Survey (have not sent or processed one this month)
  • Kevin helped Web team talk about tech debt; Web grateful
  • Quarterly transition is getting better and better
  • [2] MB: Editing offsite went smoothly (more “couldn’t have done this without TPG” commentary) NH KS
    • Max’s support was very helpful/stress-reducing
      • Joel made Max’s life easy
  • MB: Natalia filled in for Web facilitation and left me great notes
  • MB: Grace covered Android retro while I was at offsite
  • Shadowing proved useful when facilitating Reading planning & retro
  • RelEng offsite went well, partly due to the new offsite planning checklist
    • One TPGer (plus logistical support from RF) for 7 participants worked fine
  • Really happy to see progress on definition of “embedded”!
    • MB +1 to “spectrum” JA +1
    • When do we tackle “Essential Functions”?
  • Sending out an LE survey 2 days after RelEng offsite ended felt great
  • Some good email thread convos happening (“frequent feedback shower thoughts”)
  • I was pleasantly surprised how we got through the norms proposals pretty easily
  • Good feedback on quarterly review

What could have gone better

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  • GG Grateful that Arthur agreed to facilitate 30 min SoS retro for me  (NB: he was also the only one who offered to)
  • GG: Glad that I got to share my opinions about frequency of feedback and my assessment of Tinker's fitness to help with that at Tea Time and also grateful that when I called it, "Tinder" people didn't laugh as much because Joel had already done that ;)....On the flip side, I am growing weary of discussing the subject of feedback
  • KS: I would have preferred to have done more prep before NH shadowing (was difficult because I was out the previous week)
  • JA: Making a proposal to TPG re: Phabricator modifications seems agonizingly far away
  • MB: Was out for 2 vacation days and teams necessitated a lot of catching up
  • [2] JA: Scrambled.  Between Jewish holidays, staff holidays, Offsite, and Wikileads, four consecutive very disrupted weeks, and lots of stalled work. MB JA
    • MB +1, Offsites can be murder on schedules (generally leaving work for any amount of time leads to buildup that must be taken care of when returning)
  • [5] JA: Aspects of the Editing offsite were frustrating KS NH NH MB KL
    • Attendees liked many details but expressed dissatisfaction with some planning compromises
    • Roles (Trevor/Joel/LA)
    • participant needs not fully matched by offsite goals
  • Scheduling all of TPG remains challenging (and moreso now that we span more time zones)
  • [1] KL: I was lonely at the beginning of the week KL
  • [5] JA: Quarterly transition doesn’t feel any better.  Seemed like two months of quarterly goal emails compared to one month of working on them. MB KS KL JA NH
    • Related: It’s Oct 26 and I haven’t started working on the QGoal I’m shepherding.
  • It was a bit frustrating trying to wrap up LE survey docs with GG then KS being out
  • [4] MB: Covering Q goals in staff meeting MB KL KS JA
    • Why not do this as part of work review?
    • JA: Currently three places where we sort of review goals.
  • [4] MB: Got a Phab feature request/use-case from multiple teams, upstreamed to WMF Phab, sent to Phacility, Phacility made me make a new ticket, made the ticket, Phacility merged it with a less relevant request, I reiterated my request in that task and was told it was not happening, back to WMF Phab where I was told it would likely be rejected KS MB JA JA
    • Phrustration that Phab is not really “open”
      • JA: (they don’t take patches; we can’t support a hot fork; so in practice we can’t change it)
      • MB: Extra phrustration because we are using it, rather than superior tools, because it is “open”
    • JA: +1, time to start a discussion about this in the foundation
  • [2] MB: What of new (TPG) values? KL NH

Discussion in depth

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[5] JA: Aspects of the Editing offsite were frustrating KS NH NH MB KL

ACTION! [JOEL] Add to checklist:

  1. Windows for rooms/better norms around venue needs
  2. Prep survey ahead of time
  3. Get an admin on your trip?
  4. Hacking room

Discussion:

  • People felt happy about the facilitation but not about the whole experience
  • Checklist helped
  • MB: Felt similar to reading offsite; establishing clearer roles would help. Adjusted well to changing needs day-to-day (would happen regardless of prep). In some cases, sessions were helpful to Trevor but others didn’t understand why. Steward for each meeting would have been helpful.
  • Joel will debrief w/Max.
  • Probably should have had 24/7 hacking room open all week
  • Last-minute changes by managers
  • Windowless room for 4 working days
  • 39 participants
  • Venue could have been improved; venue 4 blocks from hotel; venue closed to the public, so some access issues. Main problem was mgrs not communicating about the venues. In the end, mostly fine.
  • Roles and responsibilities, and who should act in case of various complications, weren’t 100% clear.
  • MB: In reading offsite, the scope of the agenda was the issue. This one was much better focused. Lots of hacking and unconference time. Seemed to work well for both mgmt and individuals.
  • There was a reasonable amount of organization, but not enough for a 40-person event.
  • Were the logistics the biggest pain point? Yes. Close second was that some people got what they wanted but others didn’t, but half of that could have been solved with better logistics.
  • JA: Add to checklist: Windows. Hacking room. Have survey ready before you start so you can survey immediately.
  • What admin support was there? Worked with all of them, but nobody on site.
  • Congrats to JA/MB for pulling this together and doing their jobs well.

[5] JA: Quarterly transition doesn’t feel any better.  Seemed like two months of quarterly goal emails compared to one month of working on them. MB KS KL JA NH

Discussion:

  • Seems like we try to cram too much in, then at the end of the quarter we have to scramble, so into the next month/quarter we’re still cleaning up
  • Our overhead is disproportionate to the work. Concrete suggestion: Could we get permission to run a couple goals as 6-month rather than 3-month
  • KS: alternate suggestion: monthly goals, rather than quarterly goals, embrace the pain (and solve it), rather than try to spread it
  • KL: quarterly transition feels better to me; everything seemed earlier this past quarter than we had done previously. Continual improvement (not perfect yet).
  • Was this quarter as bad/worse? JA: Might have been better but for 4 weeks straight there were emails in my inbox that required heavy thought about q goals.
  • KL: Seems like blind person and the elephant story. Each of us have a different perspective.
  • KL: I tried to take more on myself rather than taking to the team, so I wonder what the objective data would say. (Subjective feelings are legit regardless).
  • KS: I feel like we have been improving about how we do goals; maybe now we can shift our attention to improving the meta stuff

[4] MB: Covering Q goals in staff meeting MB KL KS JA

Discussion:

  • MB: More fitting to talk about goals in work review?
  • KS: Can we make a proposal to drop it from staff meeting?
  • KL: Nice lean idea. But what problem were/are we trying  to solve? People were feeling disconnected from goals, particularly people working on embedded teams (no pairing). It was proposed to share the visibility of goals and I’d not want to lose that. It’s less of a status update and more of a knowledge-sharing update.
  • MB: Might be nice to connect the work to the goal. The more we talk about it here, the less I’m concerned about it. I want to avoid doing the same thing across several meetings (as JA has mentioned)
  • KL: Standup overlaps with goal updates (for shepherds). Maybe standup is enough?

(reference: process notes)

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