Team Practices Group/Retrospectives/2016-09-28

= 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)