Facilitator for Oct retro:

Natalia (Thanks, Natalia!)

New retro actions

GG to move discussion of actions for top voted items to email DONE

Previous retro actions

(Did not discuss)

What has happened since our last TPG retro on Aug 24, 2016

Staffing
- Natalia joins
- Natalia shadowing Max

Events
- Product & Technology Onsite in San Francisco
- Some TPG IRL time w/some SF team members (breakfast @ The Grove)
- Planning RelEng offsite
- Planning Editing offsite
- Dev Summit registration opens
- Joel & Grace co-facilitated CR onsite
So much facilitation and facilitation prep
- Arthur’s Design intervention facilitations (other TPGers facilitated some)
  - Design Statement Of Purpose (DSOP) validation sessions
- Product/Tech offsite (Kristen, Arthur, Max, Grace, Joel all helped)
- WMF Values prep (see below)
- Annual Planning Retro project: Kevin dove in to help Arthur
- Kevin facilitated (and Max observed) an “air clearing” session for a team
- Kevin created a “planning offsites” page
Several different Values threads at once
- TPG values discussions
  - Extensive TPG “neighborhoods” work
  - TPG value process paused
- WMF Values Process facilitation prep (Joel, Kristen, Arthur)
- TPG has three different Assessment/Survey processes
- Light Engagement Survey
  - Grace/Kevin did extensive pairing to develop it and run the pilot
  - Thanks to Abbey, JMo and other research folks for input!
  - Light engagement survey pilots, round 1, round 2 waves a and b
- CSAT
  - Kevin and Grace paired on CSAT and Light Engagement Survey
  - Quarterly CSAT went out, and got processed
  - Joel and Grace paired on analyzing CSAT
  - Grace asked, “Is there value in doing the CSAT the way we’ve always done it or could we get more value from simplifying it?”
    - Simplifying also made processing much easier
- Team Health Check
  - Grace presents THC Rethink at Leadership Roundtable
Embedded and ongoing-light engagement work
- Grace’s engagement with FR-Tech renewed for another month
- ArchCom engagement renewed
Process and Tools
- Max and Joel diving deep into Phab/process
- Max and Joel (and Kevin a bit) talking Phlog improvements
- Tinker has been down for weeks but still sends reminders
  - “Thanks, Tinker!”
Meeting overload
Canceled a couple tea times
Org stuff
- Org change interest group evolves
- WMF Engagement Committee solicits staff ideas and Committee working groups are formed
- WMF Diversity Alliance kicks off
- Org experiment with remoting and relaxing
- Interruptions to the deployment train! No deployments this week! (Ops offsite)
External stuff
- US presidential debate
- Baseball season, and summer, coming to a close

Stop

Tinker aggravations
[2] MB Over-booking by time or by cognitive load
- Don’t do lots of similar but different projects at the same time.
- GG Examples in last month: three different facilitation projects, two different values projects, three different TPG survey projects all active at the same time.
- GG +1 KS +1
[3] GG KL KL Doing work breakdown for work that other people are going to do or pair on
Stop setting target response rates without asking our experts in Research
[1] GG Last minute is not the same as just-in-time- striking the right balance (with JIT, you probably know that the nature of the request that is coming and it’s a matter of when to pull trigger)... MB +1
Be less bureaucratic in our staff meetings/TPG conversations
- Norms around meeting hours and tea time
Stop having train/deployment interruptions in the last 2 wks of the quarter
[1] KS ...starting, and start finishing
[3]JA KS KL Stop duplicating task lists in task descriptions (lossy/error-prone)
- MB +1
- JA -1 task graph is illegible and unsequenced
  - Death to graph, life to projects

Start

[1] GG Including prep and other costs when estimating costs for volunteering for new work
- GG +1
[2] JA MB More consistent and usable tools for tracking team-wide tasks
- When there is a call to do work, I feel like it should be tracked with our other work. Getting an email to contribute to a doc, that has its own checkboxes, seems weirder/riskier to me than doing all the same in a Phab task.
- Resolve checkbox vs subtask vs other debate and impose consistency
[4] JA KS KL GG Identifying goal shepherd from the start of quarter
Start actual work on goals earlier (it was better this quarter, but room for improvement)
- GG +1
Goal shepherds do their own work breakdown
[1] MB Figuring out a way to use TPG retro time more efficiently
- Took 20 mins to populate “recent events”, which was the necessary amount of time but sucks to have less time to discuss actual emergent talking points
Socializing Light Engagement survey SOP so any wolf can deploy at will (but let’s first decide what is an appropriate level of engagement to use LE survey for)
- Documentation step captured as https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T141138
[3] MB KS KLFiguring out calendaring around GMT
- Planning times further in advance
- 1 PM Pacific time sweet-spot

Keep

[3] KS JA MB Giving/receiving feedback weekly, when our tools work (or even when not?)
Choosing our own fonts
Using better fonts in our emails
Using browser extensions to mitigate evil font choices. #science! #whygeorgiawhy
Improving our onboarding docs
Experimenting with new retro formats
Pairing!!!!
Soliciting feedback
- the bad feedback I got from Light Engagement survey was super-helpful to me!
- +1 JA (also got useful constructive feedback, from Tinker)
Light Engagement survey! It’s rad.
Letting Natalia shadow
Evaluating (and often renewing) ongoing non-embedded engagements on a quarterly basis
Cleaning up backlog before monthly grooming meeting
- Keep purging the backlog
Asking each other for help when we need it
JA Reserving last few minutes of meetings for next steps/wrap-up
Synch-ups before facilitations like DSOP were really helpful
Having interesting conversations on mailing list (e.g. interesting articles)