Team Practices Group/Retrospectives/Team Health Check - FY2015Q3

What worked well

 * conversational nature of the exercise proved insightful and enlightening
 * reputation of THC preceded it - new teams were excited to go through the process
 * revised focus areas worked well - nothing crashed and burned
 * getting people in a room to talk is going to surface interesting, valuable stuff
 * quarterly is about the right frequency
 * tech lead from app team wants to do it monthly!
 * 90 minutes felt like the right amount of time
 * research and data got through it quicker this time
 * teams who've been through it seem to be much more comfortable with it- went smoother
 * calling it "THC" ;-)
 * I think we got the setup and facilitation documented well enough
 * new rating scale, generally speaking
 * helped with facilitation
 * Seeing several THC's was very helpful before running one
 * Genericized (non-tech) revisions seemed to work
 * Language Eng team was especially delightful; great sense of rhythm allowing eachother to speak, listening well - perhaps because fully remote team and they have specific communication practices to enable that - some nugget of wisdom to the 'we are all remote' thing
 * Kevin met with one team lead immediately after, to reflect and try to come up with action items

What puzzles us?

 * how do we start measuring that the health check is accomplishing anything?+
 * mission and goals being lumped together caused confusion
 * people getting hung up on semantics of focus areas - eg communication internal to the team vs external to the team
 * Why doesn't TPG do the THC?
 * Can we cross-polinate the THC - eg have different TPGers facilitate different teams? Is it best for us to facilitate with the teams we usually work with?

What didn't work well?

 * lack of coherency of sequencing of the focus areas+++ [kevin]
 * in some cases, the focus area examples were anti-examples++ [kristen]
 * 90 minutes was too long for one group, and too short for a few others (time management)+J+ [arthur]
 * Doing it before the quarter is over caused some confusion/tension+J
 * rank the focus areas before discussing them?+
 * privacy concerns about etherpad (raised by at least 2 teams)+J
 * fun, quality, value, community involvement, destiny (as a result of org changes/C2A), pace
 * new rating scale as words - numerous folks preferred to use numbers (eg 1-5)
 * people still wanted to use half-points on the scale
 * facilitating two health checks back-to-back; including one team that was especially challenging - scheduling
 * Rushing at the end of the session isn't healthy
 * Communication has to span incoming/outgoing AND in-team/WMF/external, so 6 areas