Team Practices Group/Retrospectives/2017-06-17

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

Last Retro

2017-05-25

Old Action Items

• JA: Will give non-present wolves until next week to react to notes before beginning redaction.
• Next month’s facilitator: ? using spontaneous self-facilitation for this meeting.

What happened (Since May 25)

• Organizational Changes
  • Tune-up was implemented
    • Totally new roles for GG, KS, KL, AR
    • Post-tuna changes
    • Joel’s moving to Technology!
• TPG/uild Business
  • Annual performance reviews
  • First TPGuild meeting
  • Offsite
    • Wolves GG and KS won’t be at the offsite 😥
    • Decided not to do whale watching cause JA and NH get seasick 🌊
      • And sadly no trip to the cape cod potato chip factory either :(
      • NH didn’t know :( that’d be a great trip
  • MB back, mostly missing for events between retros
• Engagements/projects
  • JA got fully busy with Editing re-org
    • Very interesting
  • Possible re-emergence of phlogiston (“I’m not dead yet!”)
    • (Victoria is keenly interested)
  • Krarthur™’s development conversation workshops
  • Kevin is diving into coordinating 19 programs across 12 teams in Technology
• Other org stuff
  • Engagement survey
    • and the aftermath of not having a recording: epicly long email thread
  • Two interesting visitors to WMF gave interesting talks
    • Uzo Iweala
    • Adam Hochschild
• Non-Work
  • Arthur went on vacation and got poison oak-poisoned
    • Is poison oak actually poison if you don’t eat it? Note: don’t eat it.
      • “Venomous” Oak?
      • Some people claim that by eating fresh, young poison oak leaves you can develop an immunity
        • And an inside-rash

What went well

• AR: Inaugural TPGuild meeting
  • MB: +1 Thanks to Natalia for leading the charge with a pro presentation
  • KL +1 well done
• KS: Kevin’s post-tuna experience has been quite pleasant
• JA: Editing Re-org coaching—very productive so far, IMNSHO.
  • Could still collapse spectacularly.
• JA: Excited to (still) be pairing closely with KS (and GG)
• KS: Getting Joel into Technology makes me really happy
• JA: Technology job gives me a clear path to work on annual and quarterly planning.
• 1st T & C assignment - Loved doing hiring manager trainings (developmental conversation) with Arthur +1
• Annual Reviews
  • Great annual performance review conversation +1
  • AR: reflecting and pulling together peer/self reviews
  • Enjoy doing reviews, esp. celebrating/reviewing accomplishments (KL)
  • JA: reviews was much simpler than I expected.
  • NH: Writing reviews was harder than I thought but a beneficial exercise
• NH: I like my 1/1s with Jon Katz

What went poorly

• Tuna issues
  • MB: Still feeling apathetic about a lot since the Consultation. Got the sense that it has been challenging for others, too, based on the check-in at the first Guild meeting (sorry Natalia)
  • AR: post-tuna changes have been somewhat surprising, hard not to feel like the TPG legacy is disappearing
  • MB: Post-tuna feels disjointed, both in separation from former TPG teammates as well as org-feel. Lots of uncertainty now.
• JA: went from very underworked to about 2.5 full-time threads + travel and leave coming up.
• JA: 3–6 month plan for Editing Re-Org was squished into 1 month due to Tuna.
• JA: Editing Department’s medium-term needs for Coaching/management still very vague
• KS: Peer review deadline was frustrating (the deadline was announced while I was on vacation, and passed while I was still on vacation)...but it ended up being easy to clean up after I got back
  • MB: +1, and hard on hackathon and vacation time
• AR: sad about GG and KS not attending offsite
  • MB: +1
  • NH: +1
  • JA: +1
• AR: MB getting trampled
  • MB: +1 no bueno
• KS: No signs of retrospectives about the tuneup (understandable given all the pain and stress, but not great from an organizational learning perspective)
  • MB: +1, I also recall that there was an offhand comment that we would retro, but have heard nothing since. Additionally, Stillwell seemed to like our idea of retro’ing the changes themselves in 3-6 months’ time, but nothing has been scheduled and I fear it dropping off.
• JA: wasn’t going to Wikimania, then maybe going to facilitate offsite in Montrèal after Wikimania, then not going, now going to facilitate other offsite in Montrèal after Wikimania.
  • MB: I’ll be there too (offsite only, too) let’s party.
  • I hear the food and nightlife in Montreal are excellent
    • MB: Poutine is gross.

Other

• KS: Not sure how well we’re doing at closing out TPGroup work
• KS: Feels like longer than 2 weeks since TPG split upmorphed into a Guild, but still feels really weird
  • MB: Also personally felt weird that the transition happened while I was on vacation, not sure if I missed out on something (processing or something else, etc)
• Feeling mildly weird/unsettled about Offsite

Followup

Joel to lead getting notes posted.