Review status of previous action items

Feel like we don't have time to talk about TPG stuff
- Action: Kevin to enter into backlog (DONE)
- Further action postponed by wikimania, but ideas have been kicked around, and will be implemented "soon"
- No further group action required
Epics v Goals v Quarterly planning
- Action: Joel & Max enter item in Phab to collect user requirements
  - Carry over
  - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T105243
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
- David has added many tasks and is in progress.
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
- no further retro action planned

What has happened since last Retro (2015-07-01)

Wikimania!
- Hackathon different than what Kevin anticipated
- not small teams focused on specific projects
- indivs working on their own
- unfocussed
- cool stuff showed off in showcase
- less of a party and more of a conference
- good talks
- social events were poorly coordinated
- going to Wikimania could generate work for TPG
- our proposed talks were rejected
THCs started crankin'
- observed different levels of engagement at different teams
- Google Docs are getting less interaction than etherpads (2 of 3 THCs observed)
- so many chat channels, lots of uncoordinated chatting
- wide disparity of sharing / Diversity of sharing levels between participants
- Should we do a retro of the THC? (I think we will)
  - we will :)
  - No signs that we need a mid-THC course correction
Quarterly Review
- Infrastructure was enlightening
- Managers appreciate the new streamlined format
- the Advancement review had interesting notes about goals. (80% of goals is a good target to hit--goals that push you are good). The expectation is not clear or well distributed.
(Potentially) Interesting Team Work
- Backlog Analysis: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1vGDe0FYb2e0B1FZIoAWaOSElxmd1dwt1py9_qpPCjC4/edit#slide=id.p
- Phragile development
  - David starting to coalesce Phabricator needs/pain points
I AM AN AGILE COACH (ALL CAPS!!)
We started doing Tea Time
- Struggling to find the groove
- conflict with Wikimania and other schedule issues
Performance reviews, comp adjustments
- Promotion email fatigue
- "Cool and valuable experience"
- Managers seemed to handle it well
Sync up with Andre
- TODO: schedule a second Andre chat

Not so goods

no room scheduled for this meeting today
Phab+
- Phabricator is really not user friendly
- Phabricator lacks documentation... period
- Phragile continues to be a frustrating project (responsible but no authority)+
- still waiting to find out if we have any money/leverage to get changes+
Grace working with Joel less
Not everyone has offline IRC buffering++
- TODO: Joel to invite Kristen to IRCCloud (and we should confirm that IRC scrollback/attention is an SOP/expectation for TPG)
Tea Time++
- tea time- would prefer agenda ahead of time and could it be optional attendance?
- tea time on Fri- only day I usually take off
- people late for Andre tea time meeting
- Discussion: should tea time have an agenda, or is this antithetical to the spirit of tea time?
- having an agenda might make it more appealing that discussing ad-hoc topics
- having an agenda could make clearer what it is
Still stuck a little bit in deep conceptual issues about work planning and tracking+
- David is unsure where to find conversation. Lots of information in multiple channels +++
- overlapping discussions and overlapping Venn circles of who and different technologies (email, IRC, flow, talk page)
- Not clear where the tip of the conversation is
- Kristen: don't have a problem with this, not sure why
- Kevin: org-wide problem; can't imagine a total solution
- root causes?
  - tools are problematic
  - team hasn't fully gelled in habits/shared assumptions
  - maybe we don't fully understand what our team is actually doing (as a team). what is our mandate, what is our balance of priorities?
    - ambiguity in our Vision -> Mission -> strategy -> tactics?
      - not at Vision level, but below that
    - balance of individual team members working with teams / areas of interest vs TPG function as a whole team
      - TPG people helping other TPGers as "peer review" on each other's specific areas
    - TPG people doing TPG-level work
      - coming up with best practices for WMF and disseminating them
      - TPG-focused work (THCs, what else?)
    - open questions at the vision/mission/strategy level
      - when (if ever) should TPG speak as a single voice?
        best practices for speaking authoritatively
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA3dzBrXYtc
- one consequence: feeling unproductive, divorced from "real work"
Scope creep on RelEng task writeup++
THC scheduling - much rescheduling, next week is THC ClusterF$*k
Wikimania/vacation drag+
VE wants out of Scrum of Scrums, doesn't find it usefulhaha, Reading team just asked for more VE presence at SoS Haha! Ed showed up today just to listen in++
- TODO: Joel and Grace to follow up. Kristen can provide examples of inter-team communications that reading things would have gone better.
Ops dependencies are still slowing Discovery (although it seems better than in the past)
Arthur jetlagged and distracted

Goods

We have significantly improved the phabricator search and dashboard documentation
Intra-TPG collab:+
- Kevin in Mex with Grace, muchas gracias!
- Grace working with Kristen more
- Grace chatting with David more- proximity FTW!
Making headway on Reading strategy process+
Turned the corner on Burnup charting tools and am now fairly productive at doing new kinds of analysis
Moved from Master -> Coach
THC guidelines seem to be working+
2 x TPGERS in vertical (KL/Max)++
- "having two TPG people assigned to teams in the same vertical (Reading) has provided some benefits"
Editing team was able to push back on Lila's Wikimania demo request+

"Interesting"

Some teams are moving Scrum->Kanban, but Discovery is moving Kanban->Scrum <- Kanbum?+

retro retro notes

we could try digging into good/not-so-good while doing the "what happened since" list
Variability from retro to retro is arguably a good thing--keeps things fresh
is there a way to spend less time on (uncontroversial) information sharing and more on identifying gaps and conflicts?