Team Practices Group/Engagement definition questions

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

When the Team Practices Group is asked to take on a new engagement, we ask the requester to clarify their expectations. The Engagement model is another important tool for clarifying new engagements.

Here are some questions to help understand objectives of the engagement:

• Expectations of TPGers role
• What would you like to see from the team/group?
  • What’s your sense of team culture and collaboration? Where would you like to see the team go?
  • What’s your sense of the team’s development or working process? Where would you like to see that go?
  • Examples:
    • “We want to be able to understand what we’re all working on at any given time.”
    • “We want to try ways to unblock our code review queue.”
    • “We want to see if trying kanban helps us improve our speed and quality.”
    • “We want the product launch to go smoothly”
• Clarifying other expectations for the engagement, e.g.
  • What team meetings to attend
  • Facilitation of offsites
  • Involvement in quarterly planning
  • Email list participation

• Time period expectations
  • “We think we’ll need TPG support through the fundraiser.”
  • “We think we’ll need TPG support through this multi-quarter product rollout”
  • “We think we’ll need TPG support for several months, as this new team defines and implements its processes.”
    • For several full cycles of the new process
  • “We’re not sure - we think we’ll need TPG support for as long as we are doing scrum - can we check in quarterly?”

• What impact would you like this engagement to have?

• Defined check-in point for renewal and retrospection with key stakeholders
  • “We’ll check-in quarterly to see if need to renew, change, or update this engagement, and reflect on the progress we made (or didn’t make)”.