Re: [Wikimedia-search] Thoughts on meetings

Thanks for the detailed reply, Nik! On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 8:43 AM, Nikolas Everett <neverett(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: I see them as quite different. My vision of the showcase (which could be quite different from anyone/everyone else's) would be that it would consist of presentations, and would focus on demonstrations (or documents), not discussion (although obviously things would be discussed). Two or three people or teams might each take 15 minutes showing something off, and most attendees would be "audience", not "presenters". The team checkin would be a mix of water-cooler talk and team issues like "Who is going to the hackathon?" or "Hey, we'll be releasing X next week". That is not to argue that we necessarily need both. Just that I see them as relatively non-overlapping. If we want the entire vertical to feel like "one team" (which is what I heard from several people), then I think some kind of "team" meeting weekly is pretty valuable. If the whole team is meeting weekly for other reasons, that could fulfill that purpose. Makes sense to me. And we have already proven that we are capable of ending meetings early, rather than always dragging them out to their full allotted time. I'm fine with each subteam figuring out what will work for them. You're right that some 2-person teams probably don't need anything, and some of the other teams might work well with 2x per week. Email is also an option for daily contact, when synchronous is not an option. Personally, as a developer, I found value in having regular checkins, because it helped me stay on track. Was I not meeting my commitments because I was getting dragged into other projects? Too many meetings? Distracted by shiny objects? Surprised by unexpected issues? Or, in cases where I was working efficiently toward my commitments, it was nice to take a scheduled moment and consciously say: "Yup, everything is on target." Sounds fine. The main reason I mentioned biweekly is that in a pure scrum environment, they do these at the end of every sprint, which is often 2 weeks. But especially given the nature of the work this team is doing right now, monthly makes sense. Monthly feels a bit infrequent to me, but I'm open to trying it. An alternative to the back-to-back would be to have a meeting every two weeks, and alternate between a showcase and a retrospective. Just a thought. Cool. The sprint planning is about pulling work from the product backlog into the sprint backlog. This grooming activity (which would not necessarily be in the form of a meeting) is all about the product backlog, triaging new issues, making sure task titles are clear, setting roadmap-level priorities, and figuring out what tasks are likely to be candidates at the next sprint planning meeting. Maybe. I suspect this one will change over time, as our UX team is built up. You are proposing having a combined Showcase+Cross-sub-team issues meeting? Interesting, but I a wary of combining those two unrelated topics. Perhaps this goes back to our differing interpretations of the showcase. Well, plus our current twice-weeklies give a voice to UX, Data, PM, VP, etc, whereas a standup would typically be developers only. But yes, they are currently quite similar in structure. More thoughts (from anyone/everyone)? Kevin