Team Practices Group/Retrospectives/2015-07-01

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

TPG June Retrospective 1 July 2015

Action Items(from May- June 5 mtg):

Action! Joel is goign to put together a survey to captue what each of our teams is doing [JOEL] status: started

Action Items from June:

• Feel like we don't have time to talk about TPG stuff

• • Action: Kevin to enter into backlog (DONE)
• Epics v Goals v Quarterly planning

• • Action: Joel & Max enter item in Phab to collect user requirements
• who owns phabricator internally and how do we coordinate communication to upstream?

• • Action: Arthur to point David to owner of who to work with upstream, David to enter Phab item to fix wikis
• Documentation seems more as a collab space of where to solidify ideas and process rather than documentation

• • +1 to scattered and incomplete documentation Issues of pub & private documentation still unresolved Action: TPG to model good behavior

Not So Good:

• Joel trying to get basic data about performance of his team- frustrating not to have it yet

• David found Maniphest lacking lots of functionality 

• Health check process is behind schedule

• June a maelstrom
  • quarterly planning, post reorg shuffle, supporting lots of people changing roles... feels like survival mode, not much reflection 

• VE impaired by getting only 1 hour of Lila time in last three months, while she has major demands on the team

• Senior leadership vaccuum, cascading downward, negatively impacting work at every level of the org

• Feel like we don't have time to talk about TPG stuff

• FR-tech still feels like there are too many locations for tracking goals 

• Goal-setting process for Q1 generally confusing, communication, deadlines,ownership, documentation

• Phragile project frustrating given that we are accountable for it but we are not in control of it, not doing it

• Documentation seems more as a collab space of where to solidify ideas and process rather than documentation
  • +1 to scattered and incomplete documentation
  • Issues of pub & private documentation still unresolved

• We have not yet decided how to decide ... things

• Phab's navigation challenges are pushing people to other tools (Google docs)
  • +1's to phab pain
  • We are adjusting our processes to accommodate phab's limits, rather than getting phab to do our bidding

Good

• • Offsite :)
    • +1
  • Strine has enjoyed his arrival and ramp up
  • KanbanBoardGame.com for experiential understanding of kanban
  • Transitioning Max into his role
  • Pair-documentation meetings (Max/Kristen)
  • Working with Joel on VE on behalf of research and ux research has been awesome! also with Kristen and Kevin
  • hat-tip to Joel who guest-starred at a meeting on backlog design (heterogeneous v heierarchical)
  • Grace pairing separately with Kristen and Kevin on THCs
  • General increase in one-on-one communication within the team
  • #SynergisticWorkEngine™
  • Working through my mixed feelings with Kevin about the public list
  • Kanban talk and dress-rehearsal with the mobile team (links getting passed around!)
  • Team-supported problem solving with Joel
  • We all have eachother's backs, like when Grace spilled water on her laptop
  • Intra-team trolling ("Joelling")
  • Challenges with on-boarding, but also full of cammraderie
  • David and Max are onboard and still here :)
  • SOPs are helpful in establishing shared understanding
  • Shared ownership over facilitation function
  • t-shirt design iterations
  • Basic infrastructure generally works: Email, hangouts, having emough meeting rooms, etc.
  • Remote culture
  • Leap-second party!
  • Grace has successfully brainwashed the analytics engineering team Analytics team getting into process-stuff and taking ownership of it

Puzzlement/mixed emotion:

• • tracking velocity - how can we do it better and consistently?
  • How does TPG deal with external (other team) support requests
    • “Small favor” that takes a few min or hours
    • Direct team support (scrum master, etc)
    • Self management vs team/Arthurial approval
  • who owns phabricator internally and how do we coordinate communication to upstream?
  • Epics v Goals v Quarterly planning
  • Adding things to wiki
    • When to be bold, and when to make it part of the workboard in order to loop in all of TPG?
  • Retros frequent enough for TPG?
    • Bringing up a few of things that seem long ago

Action items from last time (May retro):

• • Action! Joel is goign to put together a survey to captue what each of our teams is doing [JOEL]
    • status: started
  • Action! Start a thread about how to use our mailing lists [Kevin]
    • DONE- took us to the next step
  • Action! Weekly 1 hour long meeting, agenda to be coordinated [Arthur]
    • DONE- Tea Time
  • Fuzzy and Huge Action! Clarify requirements around Phabricator - add this to the backlog [Joel]
    • status: abandoned