Team Practices Group/Retrospectives/2017-03-20

The Team Practices Group (TPG) was dissolved in 2017.

Action Items

• Joel to take on a retro on TPG weekly meeting structure
• Joel to catch up on posting Jan retro notes
• Kevin set up a wildcard page for TPG
• Kevin to create a task for himself to work it out with eng-admin

Next Facilitator

Grace

What happened since the last retro (2017-03-02):

• TPG
  • Wolves on leave
  • Engagements milestones
  • TPG team calendar
  • CSAT rethinking
  • TPG Google Drive restructure—no feedback, no worries?
  • Facilitation bootcamp
  • Annual planning

• WMF
  • Annual planning
  • First of many random arbitrary WMF holidays
  • Entering Offsite Season (discovery, reading, web)
    • Also known as Spend the Budget Season
    • Teams that did their offsites already this Fiscal Year:
      • Editing
      • RelEng
      • Research

• Other
  • Daylight saving time started (in 98% of the US)
  • Firefox (almost) stopped supporting hangouts
  • International Women’s Day

❌ Drop

• Daylight saving time (I wish)

➕ Add

• New perspective on the local conversation about women in Tech (not sure where this belongs) NH [1]

✅ Keep

• KS: Experimenting and reflecting and adapting
• MB: Pairing on lots of things, like offsites, EMMO conversations #accountabilibuddy #accountabilibuddyable

• GG: Like the willingness to morph the CSAT GG [1]
• GG: Facilitated a couple retros for other teams that went long and were difficult but were challenges that I enjoyed as facilitator
• GG: A team calendar collaboratively owned by the team feels more aligned with what we do than workarounds to make the previous calendar function as a shared artifact
• One of the engagements with design came to a conclusion with appreciation from them and contentment from GG that they will self-organize
  • GG: have been working with designers since Dec 2015.
• Closing EPICS!  GG’s SAFe epic and starting to see practical applications for some of its practices within the Foundation KS [1]
• GG: Finishing series of workshops- Affordability Workshops are done!
• Sharing individual/outside experiences, such as readings, workshops, events, etc
• MB: Good convos around TPG-Engagements

💡 Improve

• MB: clarity around SOP for Staff Meeting and Work Review.MB KS JA GG NH MB [6]
  • It’s been weeks since we updated the schedule and what we do on Mondays vs Thursdays, but it still seems there is confusion every time we meet on one of those instances. What do we need to get clear? Or what do we want to change?
  • Consider Modular agenda?
• Tooling Working Group NH MB KS [3]
• Having inspected the the Light Engagement Survey, GG thinks that it could benefit from some adaptation GG [1]
• Link all retrospectives from the Index page (missing Jan, Mar 2017) GG JA [2]
  • Maybe just have a page that uses wildcards to list all retros?
  • That would fix March, but JA forgot to redact and publish Jan.
• Maybe normalize our monthly/quarterly meetings to avoid collisions--maybe reserve and recycle a single slot? KS MB [2]

More conversation

MB: clarity around SOP for Staff Meeting and Work Review. MB KS JA GG NH MB [6]

• It’s been weeks since we updated the schedule and what we do on Mondays vs Thursdays, but it still seems there is confusion every time we meet on one of those instances. What do we need to get clear? Or what do we want to change?
• Consider Modular agenda?

MB: I think we get done what we need to get done. It’s just a pattern that I noticed - the lack of group confidence in what we’re supposed to be doing.

KS: I hoped we would go back and adjust. The meetings don’t feel coherent. I would like to rethink which things go into which meetings.

GG: We did retrospect (thumbs up/thumbs down).

MB: I might remember a quick retro.

JA: There’s no meetings for such a meeting.

GG: It was a agenda item, not a specific meeting.

KS: I have a vague recollection but nothing specific.

KL: That was more like a check-in, not a retrospective.

GG: If we start using the engagements board, standup might go away.

MB:Less disrupting our patterns. we are using much less time for Phab things lately, which clouds the issue of evaluating our new format.

JA: I’ll take on the retro on TPG weekly (not Monthly etc) meeting structure.

Tooling Working Group NH MBKS [3]

…

…

GG: Group has met once. Drafting an email with 6-7 people commenting on it. Tl;dr is “if you are in product/tech, you use phab”

MB: Members of the group are at least 50% pro-phab. We have been curious about where it has been working well.

KS: There are 2 or 3 different angles. For some it’s usability, for others free software vs paid software, for some it’s 1 system vs multiple systems, for some it is phab vs. non-phab. If you’re not clear about which axis you’re talking about it, it ends up sounding like noise.

MB: GG, I’d like to support you in this conversation, subject to availability.

Link all retrospectives from the Index page (missing Jan, Mar 2017)GG  JA [2]

• Maybe just have a page that uses wildcards to list all retros?
• That would fix March, but JA forgot to redact and publish Jan.

…

KS: I set up a wildcard page for Discovery. If we want that for TPG, I’d be happy to set that up.

JA: I made a note to clean up and publish January, and will write up update the SOP to include Kevin’s tag.

Maybe normalize our monthly/quarterly meetings to avoid collisions--maybe reserve and recycle a single slot? KS MB  [2]

KS: If we could find a 1h weekly slot, we could use that for retros, strategy check-ins, some other things that we do.

GG: Can we do a list of what those meetings are?

• Monthly TPG retrospective
• Quarterly strategy/values/norms checkin
• Monthly backlog grooming
• Ad-hoc, e.g., hiring.

KS: The slot would be reserved every week but we would use it only when needed.

GG: Not opposed to try it, I wouldn’t volunteer to find that hour ;)

Putting more meetings on the calendar is a slippery slope to having more meetings.

KL: What is the actual problem?

KS: Every month the retro collides with my meeting. When I schedule a recurring meeting, I’m not gonna know that it collides with TPG monthly thing.

KL: So the idea is to find a time every week that’s unambiguously available every week?

GG: We can try, it’ll be easier to see if it works once we find the slot and try it.

KS: Will create a task for myself to work it out with eng-admin. (Thank you, Kevin!)