Team Practices Group/Retrospectives/2015-07-01

TPG June Retrospective 1 July 2015

Action Items(from May- June 5 mtg): Action! Joel is goign to put together a survey to captue what each of our teams is doing [JOEL] status: started

Action Items from June:
 * Feel like we don't have time to talk about TPG stuff


 * Action: Kevin to enter into backlog (DONE)
 * Epics v Goals v Quarterly planning


 * Action: Joel & Max enter item in Phab to collect user requirements
 * who owns phabricator internally and how do we coordinate communication to upstream?


 * Action: Arthur to point David to owner of who to work with upstream, David to enter Phab item to fix wikis
 * Documentation seems more as a collab space of where to solidify ideas and process rather than documentation


 * +1 to scattered and incomplete documentation Issues of pub & private documentation still unresolved Action: TPG to model good behavior

Not So Good:

 * Joel trying to get basic data about performance of his team- frustrating not to have it yet


 * David found Maniphest lacking lots of functionality


 * Health check process is behind schedule


 * June a maelstrom


 * quarterly planning, post reorg shuffle, supporting lots of people changing roles... feels like survival mode, not much reflection


 * VE impaired by getting only 1 hour of Lila time in last three months, while she has major demands on the team


 * Senior leadership vaccuum, cascading downward, negatively impacting work at every level of the org


 * Feel like we don't have time to talk about TPG stuff


 * FR-tech still feels like there are too many locations for tracking goals


 * Goal-setting process for Q1 generally confusing, communication, deadlines,ownership, documentation


 * Phragile project frustrating given that we are accountable for it but we are not in control of it, not doing it


 * Documentation seems more as a collab space of where to solidify ideas and process rather than documentation
 * +1 to scattered and incomplete documentation
 * Issues of pub & private documentation still unresolved


 * We have not yet decided how to decide ... things


 * Phab's navigation challenges are pushing people to other tools (Google docs)
 * +1's to phab pain
 * We are adjusting our processes to accommodate phab's limits, rather than getting phab to do our bidding

Good

 * Offsite :)


 * +1


 * Strine has enjoyed his arrival and ramp up


 * KanbanBoardGame.com for experiential understanding of kanban


 * Transitioning Max into his role


 * Pair-documentation meetings (Max/Kristen)


 * Working with Joel on VE on behalf of research and ux research has been awesome! also with Kristen and Kevin


 * hat-tip to Joel who guest-starred at a meeting on backlog design (heterogeneous v heierarchical)


 * Grace pairing separately with Kristen and Kevin on THCs


 * General increase in one-on-one communication within the team


 * #SynergisticWorkEngine™


 * Working through my mixed feelings with Kevin about the public list


 * Kanban talk and dress-rehearsal with the mobile team (links getting passed around!)


 * Team-supported problem solving with Joel


 * We all have eachother's backs, like when Grace spilled water on her laptop


 * Intra-team trolling ("Joelling")


 * Challenges with on-boarding, but also full of cammraderie


 * David and Max are onboard and still here :)


 * SOPs are helpful in establishing shared understanding


 * Shared ownership over facilitation function


 * t-shirt design iterations


 * Basic infrastructure generally works: Email, hangouts, having emough meeting rooms, etc.


 * Remote culture


 * Leap-second party!


 * Grace has successfully brainwashed the analytics engineering team Analytics team getting into process-stuff and taking ownership of it

Puzzlement/mixed emotion:

 * tracking velocity - how can we do it better and consistently?


 * How does TPG deal with external (other team) support requests
 * “Small favor” that takes a few min or hours
 * Direct team support (scrum master, etc)
 * Self management vs team/Arthurial approval


 * who owns phabricator internally and how do we coordinate communication to upstream?


 * Epics v Goals v Quarterly planning


 * Adding things to wiki
 * When to be bold, and when to make it part of the workboard in order to loop in all of TPG?


 * Retros frequent enough for TPG?
 * Bringing up a few of things that seem long ago

Action items from last time (May retro):

 * Action! Joel is goign to put together a survey to captue what each of our teams is doing [JOEL]


 * status: started


 * Action! Start a thread about how to use our mailing lists [Kevin]


 * DONE- took us to the next step


 * Action! Weekly 1 hour long meeting, agenda to be coordinated [Arthur]


 * DONE- Tea Time


 * Fuzzy and Huge Action! Clarify requirements around Phabricator - add this to the backlog [Joel]


 * status: abandoned