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

[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

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[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

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[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

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[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

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[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

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[slide 11]

Kristen supported rapid growth in Mobile

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[slide 12]

Quotes from anon surveys (1-2 weeks ago)

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[slide 13]

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[slide 14]

What's next

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[slide 16]

Flexible depending on call to action from AllHAnds next week

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[slide 17]

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

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[slide 18]

Asks

Discussion

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