Team Practices Group/Retrospectives/2016-07-26

Next facilitator: KL (thanks!)

NEW Action items

Kristen will schedule monthly grooming meetings
GG to sched 30 min phab discussion DONE
EVERYONE add your decision rationale to Greenhouse
MVP: Comments explaining your overall rating
Frosting: Relevant/interesting comments on individual topics
EVERYONE watch for situations where we might not have shared understanding

Previous Action Items

Joel (or Arthur) will (in a month or so) do something about offsite timing issues
Joel to meet with Arthur; ask again next month. PROBABLY DONE
Parking lot: this retro format doesn’t provide a means to say “I don’t want to discuss X, but I do think we should have an action item about it” TRYING IN THIS MTG
GG & AR to pair on how to deal with Radar column on Team Practices board DONE
TPG is meeting to do spring/summer/winter backlog grooming MONTHLY (Kristen will schedule)

What happened since the last retro (2016-06-29)?

Hiring
- More interviews
- Some candidates dropped out
Phlogiston
- Phlogiston was down almost the whole time (people are asking about it)
- Not much re: Phate of Phlogiston
Starting to plan next TPG offsite
Process
- Converted “This week” to be a milestone
- * Backlog is looking good
- Exploded epics for quarterly goal(s)
- Agreed on some process changes (splitting off staff meeting, etc.)
Org-level stuff
- WMF Values process kickoff
- Quarterly review presentation
- TPG presentation at Leadership Roundtable
- Several new/hot requests for TPG engagements
Sustainability Wolves
- KL vacation during 4th of July week
- MB vacation
- KS vacation
The world
- politics
- violence
- Portugal won Euro, basically without Ronaldo
Kevin joins IRCCloud <--Welcome, Kevin! Resistance was futile
Grace facilitated EchoCentralAuth retrospective
- retrospective on Quarterly Goals
- Annual plan retrospective survey ALMOST ready to go out
- Design engagement ongoing, reps from design drafting statement of purpose of design (stalled at the moment)
- Grace is Light Engagement survey shepherd

Keep

Retro’ing on one-off processes (such as interview process)
Pairing
- Pairing on things (eg Grace/Arthur with the radar stuff)
- GG & KS pairing!
- GG & Joel interview buddies!
- MB & AR
Phab
- Keeping the backlog in order
- Feeling empowered to remove TPG from Radar tickets
  - Good that we purged
Process
- This Week Milestone
- No Radar
- “Improving the Status Quo”
  - Which status quo? Process? (<--our current operating strategy)
- Continue incremental improvements to TPG backlog and SOP until it’s not a pain point for anybody
Softer stuff
- Interesting Tea Times
- Taking more vacations
- Joel being more open about his feelings about Agile- GG likes that it feels safe to share
Cross pollinating CSAT processing
Showcasing what we can offer the wider org
Swarming on quarterly goals
Planning the offsite well in advance
Experimenting with Tinker for weekly feedback
- Tinkering with Tinker
Using the [DECISION] tag in emails
Saving the last 5 minutes of meetings for decisions/actions
TPG covering TPG’ers for things like vacation/travel

Stop or Change

(2) [MB] [AR] Get more engagement for CSAT
Hiring
- (3) [MB] [KS][JA] Hiring process—okay to take a long time to find someone, but uncomfortable leaving so many candidates hanging for so long
  - MB +1 KS +1
- It seemed like, even though we had an explicit definition of what candidate we wanted to hire, we underestimated how adjusting to the hiring process would affect how we looked at candidates (and maybe contributed to us losing sight of the candidate-goal).
(1) [MB] Epics? (MB proposal to replace epics with projects)
Feel pretty meh about Tinker
- Joel gave up on Tinker when it didn’t seem to register completed tasks
(1) [KS] Planning offsite far into future (March 2017) feels uncomfortably unagile even though I can see it as a necessary “evil”
(2) [MB] [JA] Talking about how to limit bias and leading the witness in the same conversation. Both can be okay on their own but were dissonant for Grace.
(1) [AR] Phlog could use some love from outside TPG (Phate of Phlog?)

Start

Hiring
- (3) [JA] [MB] [AR] Discussing candidates as a group more frequently
- (4) [MB] [KL] [AR] [GG] Interview process is drawn out, so start recording rationale for go/no-go
PDPs
- Sharing my (KL) personal development plan :-/
- Sharing my (MB) personal development plan :-/
- Sharing my (KS) personal development plan :-/
(2) [KL] [GG] Invoking “we” cautiously (as it relates to ‘we the team practices group’)
(4) [JA] [KS] [KL] [GG] Really focusing on shared understanding on team-wide things (eg strategy, what we’re looking for in candidates)
- What GG was trying to get at with the decision thing in meetings - came up in the interviewing (criteria)
- MB +1
- (1) [AR] KS thinks there was an example of a significant lack of shared understanding related to one of our (past?) goals, but can’t remember the details
TPG process changes
- Getting more serious about goal status and shepherding
- Longer staff meeting, sharing everyone’s up to 3 priorities, better ownership of TPG backlog
- Putting Actions from retros at the top in notes DONE
- Clarify and document guidelines for redacting notes before publishing
Skillz ended up being about our common skills, would like to highlight our unique ones- don’t feel that this went over well in the retro and still think that it’s valuable
Resolve the ongoing debate: If we [don’t] scrummaster teams, who will? [KL note: I am not aware of this debate :-)]
- And why wouldn’t whoever does become a part of TPG?
- And if they don’t, should we have a guild-like connection with them (Runa, bd808, ...)
- NOTE: This has been added as a tea time candidate
Make a proprietary Tinker? Google Apps Scripts…
- -1 [AR]
- +1 to Max’s moxie
- (building your own stuff is always more expensive than you think)
(6) [MB] [KS][AR] [JA] [GG] [KL] Resolve Review the ongoing debate: Who owns how to use phabricator? How does TPG feel about how TPG ought to relate to Phab?
- “Not it”
- Straw wolf: TPG for team-specific workflows, Quim’s team for wider volunteer norms :-)