Team Practices Group/Retrospectives/2015-10-22
The Team Practices Group (TPG) was dissolved in 2017.
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Action items from last time
[edit]- TPG members to document and share amount of time spent on Team Health Check (see bottom of Overall Results doc and Rethink meeting agenda - https://docs.google.com/document/d/162ZMqt6W4I9q0mIImsRb1VTZKhbsNEvtEuIH39tEfrw/edit [ALL]
- Arthur will set up a meeting to talk about overwhelmingedness [DONE]
- Arthur will explore a TPG meeting in SF in mid-Nov [DONE]
Significant events since last time
[edit]- Discovery offsite
- Reading Web offsite
- Kicked off possible phabricator use cases (potential upstream change requests)
- Discovered true nature of “Sprint-Extension” relative to upstream
- TML: Sprint Extension is independent from upstream Phabricator and is not supported much or at all by anyone
- 2 fixes might have WMF solutions. 3 others are still potentials for upstream
- Discovered true nature of “Sprint-Extension” relative to upstream
- 4 x 90 minute Strategery meetings (+ much homework)
- Strategic problem decided
- Possibilities generated and narrowed
- Cascades drafting
- Multiple WMF initiatives around process change and design (Wes, SPDPP, Rachel, others)
- Discovery vertical leadership changes
- Completed VE <-> DR and VE <-> RelEng SLUs (Service Level Understandings)
- TPG cancelled Team Health Checks for 2015Q2
- Quarterly review
- Phlogiston launched burnups for ~4 teams
- Ongoing Comm Tech engagement (Kevin is helping them with retros, agile workshops, and now some kanban/scrum/sprint coaching)--relatively shallow engagement.
- Maintenance Fraction data is trickling in slowly
- VE Launch team and decision making changed
- VE Launch plan changed (launch to IPs won’t happen until 2016)
- Conversations around overwhelmingedness
- Failed attempt at organizing last-minute IRL meeting for TPG
- Renewed attempt to meet in December
- SPDPP progress
- Goal setting & goal setting redux
- Community Engagement started doing MPL
- Engineering updated the MPL for this quarter
- CSAT survey
Worked well/keep doing?
[edit]- WMF Phab admins are highly responsive and helpful
- Level of maturity in thinking around TPG strategy process
- Strategy process is making me think too hard← works well? (yes, in the sense that chemo that doesn’t make you sick probably isn’t working)
- Facilitation, learning, and changing on the fly of strategy process
- TPG meetings seem to work well (grooming, review/planning/staff, tea time, retros)
- +1
- Some great offsite experiences (Reading Web, Discovery)
- Dropping THC this quarter helped a lot +1+1+1 (did I already +1?)
- Overwhelmedness discussions were really helpful
- Great thinking and conversations around updating quarterly goals
- Comm Tech engagement (by Kevin) seems like high benefit for the cost
- TPG CSAT survey; having data from it for quarterly review was huge help
- +the support received from Edward +1+1+1
Has not worked well/stop doing?
[edit]- Dropping THC also was one fewer window into individual team health +
- Not sure what the THC plan is yet
- We skipped some tea-times
- Not a lot of [informal] TPG team-time
- TPG retros still feel a little too infrequent -1 +
- Kevin didn’t budget any time for post-offsite documentation (it will take ~8 hrs)
- Still feeling a bit overwhelmed, but catching up (KS) ++
- DS scaling back promises/tasks (this might also be a positive?)
- Still no SOP for Epics in the TPG board ++
- Strategy stuff is going slowly...probably by necessity, but can be frustrating ++++++
- Strategy taking a loooot of time [hours per week] +1 +1
- SPDPP still feels vague and distant (like a meteor heading toward us that we can’t see) +++
- Efforts within TPG feel a bit siloed/isolated ++++
- +1
- 1 Riot, 1 Ranger (however, see brutal history of Texas Rangers)
- Still feeling disconnect between management groups
Action items for next time
[edit]- Strategy stuff is going slowly...probably by necessity, but can be frustrating ++++++
- Strategy taking a loooot of time [hours per week] +1 +1
- Next steps: continue these points on the timeline email thread
- option 1: can we time-box any of these steps?
- Could we prune more aggressively/incrementally?
- sub-grouping
- SPDPP still feels vague and distant (like a meteor heading toward us that we can’t see) +++
- Next steps: Joel will write something up
- Efforts within TPG feel a bit siloed/isolated ++++
- +1
- Next steps:
- SPDPP update will help.
- Over communicate all TPG projects (focus on FYI and tl;dr how this will impact you) [ALL]