Team Practices Group/Retrospectives/Team Health Check - FY2015Q3

What worked well[edit]

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

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?

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