Wikimedia monthly activities meetings/Quarterly reviews/Team Practices/January 2015

The following are notes from the Quarterly Review meeting with the Wikimedia Foundation's Team Practices Group, January 14, 2015, 10AM - 10:30AM PT.

Present (in the office): Howie Fung, Grace Gellerman, Erik Moeller, Tilman Bayer (taking minutes), Rob Lanphier, Toby Negrin; participating remotely: Arthur Richards, Greg Grossmeier, Kristen Lans, Tomasz Finc

Presentation slides from the meeting


slide 2

[slide 2]

Arthur: First ever quarterly review of team practices team
Kristen joined in July as first ScrumMaster hire, supporting mobile web & app teams
Grace joined in November as Agile coach
2 positions open:
Agile coach, ScrumMaster

What we said edit

 
slide 4

[slide 4]

Assumption: Healthy teams driver better products
Measure team health
Identify and implement improvements
Strategy so far:
Focus on force-multiplier teams
And grow our own

 
slide 5

[slide 5]

Piloted team health survey
Not enough teams taking the survey in Q1 to reach statistical significance (though this should change for the data we gathered in Q2)

What we did edit

 
slide 7

[slide 7]

- all of that (caveat: survey not yet delivered to all teams, but finished this week)
ErikM: which ones left?
Arthur: mobile apps, and FR tech

What we learned edit

 
slide 9

[slide 9]

through health checks and 1:1 with team members:
Teams feel health checks are valuable
Much more demand for support than we were able to provide

Metrics and callouts edit

 
slide 11

[slide 11]

Kristen supported rapid growth in Mobile

 
slide 12

[slide 12]

Quotes from anon surveys (1-2 weeks ago)

 
slide 13

[slide 13]

 
slide 14

[slide 14]

What's next edit

 
slide 16

[slide 16]

Flexible depending on call to action from AllHAnds next week

 
slide 17

[slide 17]

Objectives (table)
Deliver health check survey (#3) depending on 2 additional reqs

 
slide 18

[slide 18]

Asks edit

Discussion edit

RobLa: Really appreciates team's work
Need to fill that open position
Tomasz: Are these two open reqs sufficient to support [all those 6 teams], or are you looking at further hiring beyond next q?
Arthur: TechOps is potentially on the horizon; I will attend their retreat next week to see what we can do there
C2A will impact our team and inform our thinking on this
Erik: Did we invite Quim to this meeting? no
should probably do so next time
e.g re intersection points with Phabricator
Arthur: agrees
Erik: call from Lila to increase predictability, also for other stakeholders
more consistency [across teams]
many teams do a lot of hard work, but don't have good capability to predict/estimate, need to become more self-aware
team practices team could go around and ask teams "why aren't you doing X yet" (e.g. use Phabricator)
Arthur: yes, and that's why I'm excited about the upcoming C2A
improve delivery, make commitments and deliver on them
Toby: Team has opportunity to help Lila and execs to understand what org is doing
Erik: we have 3 delivery focused priorities (in prod and engineering)
VE team furthest behind in these practices - could this inform your focus (instead of further surveys...)?
Arthur: will look at that
Erik: this is what we had hoped for, and it's bearing fruit now