[teampractices] A tool for keeping action items accountable?

Thu Apr 28 19:25:32 UTC 2016

As a facilitator of (monthly) retrospectives for Discovery, shortly after
the meeting I have emailed an "action items" reminder to anyone who was
assigned one. Typically that's a few days after, at the same time the notes
get put on wiki. Then, during the following retrospective, we start off by
reviewing the status of previous action items. Similar to what Guillaume
described, but a bit lighter.

Recently, I have started to create a calendar event for myself at the
midpoint between retros (at about the 2 week mark). At that point, I email
a reminder to action item owners. I don't yet know whether this is
appreciated, and/or if it will help increase the rate of action items being
completed.

If I create the retro etherpad/google doc a few days before the next retro,
I might send yet another email reminder to action item owners. But I'm not
committing to that.

Once someone owns an action item, I trust them to create a phab task, or
not, as they see fit. Often the action item is "Create a phab task for X",
and adding a task to create another task would be silly. I think most
action items are along the lines of "Convene a meeting about X", or
"Discuss X with Y".

Kevin Smith
Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation

On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 1:23 PM, Greg Grossmeier <greg at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> That's basically how we do it in releng during our meetings.
>
> --
> Sent from my phone, please excuse brevity.
> On Apr 27, 2016 10:20 AM, "Guillaume Lederrey" <glederrey at wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
>
>> In another life, I have been facilitating a few retrospectives. Not
>> here yet, so the context is probably different and this past
>> experience probably does not apply without the necessary amount of
>> tweaking. Still:
>>
>> The usual rule we put in place with our teams was: "A retrospective
>> action must have a fairly limited scope and be possible to implement
>> before the next retrospective". Larger items are not considered to be
>> retrospective actions, but might be put into the team backlog. Action
>> items are the responsibility of their owner (if we can't find an owner
>> for the action, the action is dropped). The facilitator responsibility
>> is to check the status of those actions at the next retro. If those
>> actions have not been completed by the next retro, they are either
>> dropped (if we did not make progress, they are probably not as
>> important as we thought), converted as backlog item (they were larger
>> than we initially thought), or kept as action item for the next retro
>> (rare case).
>>
>> With those rules, we don't rely on specific tools...
>>
>> No idea how this applies at WMF...
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 9:55 AM, Quim Gil <qgil at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> > Could you provide examples of these "action items"? It will help
>> > understanding the relevance of "non-dev/product" action items coming
>> out of
>> > (presumably dev/product) sprint retrospectives.
>> >
>> > This sounds like a matter of threshold:
>> >
>> > * If an action item is purely personal, then sure, use the purely
>> personal
>> > tool to deal with it.
>> > * If an action item has an impact on the team, then use the team tool to
>> > deal with it, no matter how simple, small, "non-dev/product".
>> >
>> > Is it fair to assume that most actions coming out of a sprint
>> retrospective
>> > will have impact on the team?
>> >
>> > This is where the fear to i.e. bringing back Trello doesn't sound any
>> > visceral to me, but well justified. Someone starts creating strictly
>> > personal actions in Trello (Asana, etc), they continue adding other
>> small
>> > actions because 'since we are using this tool anyway and I'm writing the
>> > actions quickly after the meeting'... Three months down the road that
>> > parallel board has got a life on its own, they start having tasks
>> > duplicating with the team's tasks in Phabricator, some things fall
>> between
>> > the cracks...
>> >
>> > Yes, I know this would not happen to *you* or *your* team (whoever *you*
>> > are), but looking at our history we have solid reasons to think that
>> this
>> > will certainly happen to *someone*, and then that will be taken as a
>> > reference by * someone else* not reading this thread today, and then...
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 1:49 AM, Max Binder <mbinder at wikimedia.org>
>> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> The first thought was to use existing Phabricator boards, but the team
>> >> agreed that Phab was a lot of overhead for reminding folks to follow
>> up on
>> >> non-dev/product tasks.
>> >
>> > Why overhead? Creating a minimally acceptable Phabricator task takes one
>> > title and one project to associate it with. Even a description is
>> optional.
>> > If that project is #Team-X-Internal-Stuff, then the rest can't be
>> bothered.
>> >
>> > If the "overhead" concern also (or actually) encompases a concern about
>> lack
>> > of privacy (i.e. "John to get a headset that actually works in
>> hangouts")
>> > then you can always request a private space for your team in
>> Phabricator.
>> >
>> > The public / private aspect is sometimes tangential, sometimes
>> orthogonal in
>> > these discussions. The test is the following: those suggesting Trello,
>> would
>> > like to have a public or a private board for this? If privacy is
>> relevant,
>> > ask for a private space in Phabricator, where all tasks will be
>> integrated
>> > to personal backlogs and teams workboards, and where privacy settings of
>> > tasks can be modified, being all of them available in the same tool.
>> >
>> > --
>> > Quim Gil
>> > Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
>> > http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > teampractices mailing list
>> > teampractices at lists.wikimedia.org
>> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/teampractices
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Guillaume Lederrey
>> Operations Engineer, Discovery
>> Wikimedia Foundation
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> teampractices mailing list
>> teampractices at lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/teampractices
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> teampractices mailing list
> teampractices at lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/teampractices
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/teampractices/attachments/20160428/900fbfe2/attachment.html>