Team Practices Group/Retrospectives/2016-09-28

Next facilitator: Natalia

NEW Action items

 * Grace to move discussion of actions for top voted items to email
 * Grace to publish notes
 * Grace to lead email discussion of Discuss in Depth items and Review Last Month’s Action Items

Previous Action Items
(Did not discuss)
 * Add a norm or practice in Team Norms: Meeting Hours or Meeting best practices to proactively add a half hour break buffers about every 2 hours to avoid multi-hour blocks of back to back meetings. Do what you feel you need to do to move towards calendar sanity (maybe add some examples) https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T146424
 * EVERYONE if you are having a problem balancing too many meetings, consider tracking your meeting load week-to-week to determine a sustainable number of hours, and decline lower-priority or optional meetings accordingly once established
 * KS to update norms page with instructions for voters to clarify with presenter if topic remains unclear (at which point presenter should update topic or update further)

What happened since the last retro (2016-08-24)?

 * Staffing
 * Natalia joins
 * Natalia shadowing Max
 * Natalia haaaaazing. You see nothing. oooooo
 * Events
 * Product & Technology Onsite in San Francisco
 * Some TPG IRL time w/some SF Wolves (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)
 * Two days of Wikileads, included some similarly introspective work
 * TPG has three different Assessment/Survey processes
 * Light Engagement Survey
 * Grace/Kevin did extensive co-wolfing to develop it and run the pilot
 * Thanks to Abbey, JMo and other research folks for input!
 * Light engagement survey pilots, wave 1, wave 2 rounds a and b
 * CSAT
 * Kevin and Grace co-wolfed on CSAT and Light Engagement Survey during
 * Quarterly CSAT went out, and got processed
 * Joel and Grace co-wolfed 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?”
 * Team Health Check
 * Grace presents THC Rethink at Leadership Roundtable
 * Embedded and ongoing-light engagement work
 * Grace’s engagement with FR-Tech re-upped 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
 * *hisssss*
 * “Thanks, Tinker!”
 * Meeting overload
 * Canceled a couple tea times
 * Acronym E.X.P.L.O.S.I.O.N.
 * 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
 * C-suite stable (second or third month in a row?)
 * 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)... I think that the org is very last minutey
 * 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)
 * NH Hazing
 * [3] MB KS KL Figuring out calendaring around GMT ( represents Max causing trouble )
 * 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)