Team Practices Group/Light engagement survey reports

Light Engagement survey, round 1 results
2016-09-14

Summary
The one-off New Readers engagement generated an NPS of 50, with no detractors. Comments called out the value of retrospectives facilitated by TPG, and a regret that they had not involved TPG earlier.

The ongoing Scrum of Scrums engagement generated an NPS of 14, which is still positive. The comments were mixed, with some participants seeing benefits of TPG’s facilitation, and others questioning the value of the current format. The comments from attendees or former attendees who see room for improvement inspired a full-group retrospective to be scheduled, with the hope of improving the overall productivity.

Context
In August 2016, TPG (the Team Practices Group) launched a pilot to start surveying recipients of its “Light Engagements”. This first iteration of the survey ran from August 17-31, 2016, and was sent to 2 separate groups, both served by Grace Gellerman: Both parties were emailed the survey separately in the form of a generic survey that included questions about a variety of skills, not just the ones applicable to that engagement.
 * New Readers
 * Scrum of Scrums (“SoS”)

Skills (Likert)
New Readers project requested facilitation and process design, while the Scrum of Scrums engagement focused on facilitation.

Expected skill ratings
Facilitation, common to both engagements, scored:

From 9 total responses across SoS and New Readers, 2 agree and 7 strongly agree with the the statement: “The facilitation provided improved the overall quality of the discussion”

(Note:1 SoS participant, confused by the survey form, emailed me to say "Scrum of Scrums and what I think about you leading it every week. Which I think is great and appreciate very much.")

The New Readers project also received process design support.

From the total of 2 responses, 1 agree and 1 strongly agree: in response to the Likert question “The process design provided improved my team’s productivity”

Unexpected skill ratings
Interestingly, many recipients scored Likert questions for skills outside of what TPG thought we were bringing to the table:

Net Promoter Score (NPS)
New Readers: 50

SoS: 14

There was 1 detractor and 2 promoters. The other 4 participants were passive promoters: 2 7s and 2 8s

Overall across New Readers and SoS: 22

According to Wikipedia, “An NPS that is positive (i.e., higher than zero) is felt to be good, and an NPS of +50 is excellent.”

Open-ended questions
Was there anything you were expecting to get out of this engagement that you didn't? Was there anything you got that you weren't expecting?
 * 3 said no- that expectations were met
 * “I'm a fan of TPG work and I'm always just expecting more TPG resources. I think, up to a reasonable point, TPG folks make the organization better. If you compare where we are now with cross-team collaboration vs. 4 years ago, the progress is obvious.”
 * “I expected to get solid support from other teams in SoS, but didn't really receive answers to about half of the questions/requests I posed in the meetings.”
 * New Readers:

Do you think improvements could be made to how this engagement was structured? If yes, please explain. Do you have suggestions for how TPG could improve its performance in engagements like this?
 * Retros
 * “Help with enabling a neutral, balanced conversation in retro”
 * “Help understanding the function of a retro (ie, not to react, to feel empowered to offer differing opinions)”
 * SoS:
 * “I'm impressed by the efficiency of this meeting”
 * New Readers:
 * Both respondents wished that they’d gotten Grace involved sooner
 * SoS:
 * “Yes. If SoS is to succeed, representatives from every team should be present, and cross-team dependencies should be more accurately mapped.”
 * “It seems that the we have diverged from the SoS starting notion of blockers/blocking into a more generic format of ‘Here's some updates and please take a look into this.’ It might very well serve us better in the end but it'd be nice if we actually had agreed on the new format”
 * 2 responses of “no”
 * “Not really, I think the facilitation of SoS is fantastic, but the meeting itself is basically useless to my team in its current form.”
 * “I wonder if something similar for product managers would make sense.”

Next steps

 * The responses from SoS participants opened the conversation to convene a retrospective on that meeting’s format.  Tentatively scheduled for 2016-09-28.