Wikimedia monthly activities meetings/Quarterly reviews/Legal, HR, Finance, Communications, TPG, July 2015
Notes from the Quarterly Review meeting with the Wikimedia Foundation's Legal, Finance & Administration, Human Resources, Communications and Team Practices teams, July 10, 2015, 9:30 am - 11:00 am PDT.
Please keep in mind that these minutes are mostly a rough paraphrase of what was said at the meeting, rather than a source of authoritative information. Consider referring to the presentation slides, blog posts, press releases and other official material
Present (in the office): Geoff Brigham, Garfield Byrd, Katherine Maher, Kim Gilbey, Jacob Rogers, Stephen LaPorte, Zhou Zhou, Yana Welinder, Luis Villa, Tilman Bayer (taking minutes); Lila Tretikov, Terry Gilbey, Victoria Baranetsky, Anna Lantz; (joining for the HR team's presentation:) Maria O'Neill, Amy Elder, Joady Lohr, Elena Hernandez; (joining after the Legal and HR team's presentation:) Juliet Barbara, Heather Walls; participating remotely: Manprit Brar, Tiffany Li, (joining after the Legal and HR teams' presentations:) Arthur Richards
Terry: welcome
first half of meeting confidential: Legal and HR
Legal edit
Geoff:
[slide 2]
objectives summary:
- core workflows - takes up about 80% of our time
- NSA lawsuit
- Monthly board meetings (support)
- Public policy
- Privacy
[slide 3]
[slide 4]
Lila: how well are you covered budget-wise regarding fielding requests?
Geoff: should be fine for now unless we receive costly or resource-intensive unscheduled or unanticipated work flow
[slide 5]
trademark portfolio is in good shape, further work on it will be incremental (due to budget constraints)
Lila: love the scorecard format, could be used as example for other teams
Talent & Culture (HR) edit
Joady:
[slide 2]
objectives summary
(LOA = leave of absence)
many of us are not fans of ADP, but at least got it upgraded
[slide 3]
[slide 4]
successes
Lila: are you monitoring time between first contact with candidate to closing?
Amy: Greenhouse can track that, I will make sure we make use of that
Terry: we probably only used 1/8th of Greenhouse's capabilities until some weeks ago
Lila: I love the new approval mechanism
Terry: had invested in various tools, but not exploited them fully
Joady: also need hiring managers to update information about their candidates in the system
Lila: recruiting experience is fundamental to getting good people in, it's exposing org to many other people (besides those we end up hiring)
they should take away impression that this is a fantastic org to work for
Joady: SafeGuard migration complex, lots of individual concerns
ADP upgrade brought lots of improvements, but still lots of shortcomings, investigating options, big push to identify alternatives this q
Lila: want to get stats on employee churn, especially unwanted losses
is this not possible with ADP?
Joady: it would be a simple thing, but no, ADP data is flawed even with a simple request like turnover, due to their irregular processes
Terry: to the team's credit, they are putting in manual processes as a workaround
Joady: annual reviews: 98% by deadline
employees value 360 feedback, for managers though the scheduling is stressful
--> Lila: at minimum would like some sort of checkpoint, say twice a year, where employee and manager meet to check in
how does perf look like (at least rough assessment: low/medium/high), and where they are developing/what needs to be done
get at least that kind of baseline
Geoff: quality of reviews?
Joady: getting better and better
a couple not so good, could provide additional training there
[slide 5]
compensation reviews
[slide 6]
core workflows and metrics
Kim: do a survey about how well 1:1s went?
Joady: will do that
Lila: know that team was running on low capacity. Yet it hit all milestones - this is fantastic
Finance and Administration edit
[slide 2]
Garfield:
Like Legal team, most of our work is dedicated to core workflows
[slide 3]
Terry: it takes a lot of collaboration across teams to get in all financial data in time
having more real time finance data will help us
Ben (UC Berkeley intern) dove into scorecard project and delivered
Lila: good evidence for HR team that it's worth continue pushing intern program(s)
Lila: should have a goal for each one of those
[slide 4]
successes
Garfield: Adaptive - learning: foreshadowing needs and implementing tools to meet them is very valuable
[slide 5]
misses
purchase workflows
[slide 6]
core workflows
will present others for Office IT next time
[slide 7]
Communications edit
Katherine:
this was a complicated q for Comms team, a number of complex collaborations, did not meet our original objectives
a lot of core strengthening, inspired by Legal team we investigated core workflows
highly reactive quarter for us
[slide 2]
objectives summary
did not meet (most) objectives
did a lot of preparation for these, esp in first third of q, after assessment
e.g. VE work was dependent on rollout, did not happen
[slide 3]
reassessed goals with Lila
--> Lila: add in slides when this reassessment happened
Lila: travel in #3 - does that feed into Q1?
Katherine: no, developing entirely new process for exec travel support, with Lisa M
Lila: ETA?
Katherine: in our goals for q1, so by end of q
[slide 4]
successes
Juliet: product marketing
our biggest contribution was escalating some usability issues we identified with VE to messaging issues, this was then reflected in UI
Fabrice led in-depth investigation for blog strategy
found that it's really a community resource, with social media being the primary distribution channels
Katherine: leads to reallocation of resources, historically has been high cost with low return
now focus more on social engagement
Lila: i'm not clear on the language, what does "community resource" mean?
Katherine: affiliates rely heavily on it too
Lila: ...
Katherine: brought in two new community members with journalism background
testing new forms, e.g. never surfaced WP content before
--> Lila: keep an ear what community wants (from information channels such as the blog)
want to know which other channels they listen on
biggest challenge i see is lack of information (in community, on what we do)
community team feeding questions to you, they then link communities back to answers
Katherine: some content forms we look at are explainers
Lila: yes but this is about channels
[slide 5]
misses
[slide 6]
scorecard
added signifier reactive/not
next time would like to map these against core strengths/...
[slide 7]
on social, less postings but more engagement
drop largely due to NSA lawsuit and Gamergate (having driven a lot of traffic) in Q3
[slide 8]
for blog, drop likewise due to NSA and Gamergate
[slide 9]
storytelling etc
[slide 17]
appendix D: yellow spike was a 3rd party promotion
--> Lila: Terry: need to standardize format (of q review slides in appendix)
Heather: stickers to be distributed to rise awareness about e.g. HTTPS
Lila: thanks for the attention on Appendix, really helpful to see the detail, great for context, and I think it will be great for community as well
- Further appendix slide for Communications
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Team Practices Group edit
[slide 2]
Arthur: TPG used to exist in in Engineering pre-reorg, so (like other Engineering teams) we were asked to have only one goal
if a team is not yet clear on practices etc, it requires a lot of work to unpack that first
[slide 3]
successes
VE process review: Joel and Neil (from VE team) worked on this, very collaboratively documenting processes and pain points with team and stakeholders
IDed areas of improvement, has the effect of very good team buy-in for improvements.
VE team had been a high-functioning team before, skeptical about outside advice. this process helped a lot
[slide 4]
core workflows and metrics
multi-day workshops
with Rel Eng, led by Kristen
best of its kind I have seen
burndown charts: turns out to be enormously challenging, on track end of July
unfortunately for some tech and political reasons this will need to happen in third-party tool / platform
worked with WMDE on their Phabricator extension
big goal for entire year was grow team itself. Pleased about new hires
health check surveys received great feedback
[slide 5]
Lila: is this slide your (TPG's) KPI slide?
is it workflows or top-level KPIs?
Arthur: these are our KPIs
--> Lila: (in this KPI slide), would like to see value that your team provides to org
e.g. does teams' cadence/velocity improve?
re workflows, compare Lega/Comms slides, which were much more specific on (the nature of requests)
Arthur: agree, it's one of the challenges for a team like us is to figure out what to measure
--> Lila: consider PMO analogy, some of that kind of measures should apply