Team Practices Group

The Team Practices Group believes that healthy teams reliably deliver customer value and innovative products. Through dedicated resourcing, coaching, and workshops at the Wikimedia Foundation, we facilitate the use of practices that support team health, with a strong emphasis on creating conditions of clarity, trust, and continuous improvement.

• Personal agency through collective ownership
• Adaptability, embracing change
• Sustainability

The Team Practices Group (TPG) supports the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) teams in their continual improvement.

The TPG works with individuals and teams to facilitate their discovery and implementation of methodologies/approaches that work best for them, guided by the agile manifesto and agile principles.

The TPG supports WMF teams by offering the following services:

• Providing dedicated resourcing for a team's Scrum Master (or similar) role, depending on availability/resourcing of the TPG.
  • e.g. A team wants a dedicated Scrum Master but does not currently have anyone on their team who wants or is able to take on the role. They go to the TPG, and the TPG provides them with someone who can fulfill that role.
• Periodic or one-off collaborative engagements to facilitate process improvements for individuals and teams.
  • e.g. A team getting ready to kick off a big project wants help in reorganizing their team practices to use the Scrum framework. They request support from the TPG, and the TPG provides Scrum training to that team.
• Mentorship and support for people in the Scrum Master (or similar) role.
  • e.g. An existing Scrum Master (not provided by the TPG) is looking for ways to increase and improve their skills. A request is made for support from the TPG, and the TPG provides mentorship and resources.

Engagement with the TPG is entirely optional for WMF teams.

• Teams may elect to receive all, some, or none of the TPG services at any given time.
  • The TPG facilitates and cultivates healthy team practices, to the best of its resources, as teams request.

• The TPG aims to not be prescriptive nor dogmatic.
  • The TPG is agnostic in regards to specific methodologies (e.g. Scrum vs Kanban).

Fridays we wear tropical shirts.

• Arthur Richards - Team Practices Manager

• Kristen Lans - Agile Coach (Mobile Web and Reading)

• Grace Gellerman - Agile Coach (Analytics engineering, Wikimedia_Research including Design/Research)

• Kevin Smith - Agile Coach (Search and Discovery, acting as Product Owner for Phabricator project management tooling improvements)

• Joel Aufrecht - Agile Coach (VisualEditor)

• David Strine - Scrum Master (Fundraising)

• Max Binder - Scrum Master (Mobile Apps)

• Goals from previous quarters

This page is obsolete. It is being retained for archival purposes. It may document extensions or features that are obsolete and/or no longer supported. Do not rely on the information here being up-to-date.

Goal	Milestones	ETA	Dependency	Status
Goal 1 - FOCUS Improved metrics for product project forecasting	Burn-up charts actively used by three teams	EOQ	Teams TBD	Done
	Five teams sample their maintenance fraction and two teams track it throughout the quarter	EOQ	Teams TBD	Done
Goal 2 - STRENGTHEN Team Practices Group achieves consensus on the team’s strategy.	Defined and documented strategy for the Team Practices Group	EOQ	COO, engineering management, possibly others TBD through strategy definition process	N Not done
Goal 3 - Experiment Determine whether or not we can drive changes to Phabricator to enhance its usability as a project management tool in an environment with diverse workflows and data-driven needs.	Five high-priority project management-related Phabricator feature requests upstreamed	EOQ	ECT, RelEng, Phacility (external to WMF)	Done

Goal	Milestones	ETA	Dependency	Status
Providing dedicated resourcing for a team's Scrum Master (or similar) role.	Agile Coach for Analytics for Q2 Agile Coach for Community Tech for Q2 Agile Coach for Design Research for Q2 Agile Coach for Discovery for Q2 Agile Coach for Research & Data for Q2 Agile Coach for VisualEditor for Q2 ScrumMaster for Android for Q2 ScrumMaster for iOS for Q2 ScrumMaster for Fundraising Tech for Q2 ScrumMaster for Reading Web for Q2 Agile Coach for Reading Leadership for Q2			Done
Mentorship and support for people in the Scrum Master (or similar) role.
Ad-hoc team/individual process coaching.	Work Breakdown aspect of SPDPP piloted for three teams			In progress
	Answer residual MPL questions			In progress
	Ad hoc meetings with Edward			In progress
	Facilitation for WMF Strategy ("platypus") process for Q2	EOQ		Done
	Facilitate Discovery Offsite			Done
	Facilitate Product Group Strategy Process, including Q2 Offsite			Done
	Facilitate Reading Web Offsite			Done
	Facilitate Reading Strategy Process			Done
Team Health Checks	Rethink Health Check			In progress
Scale Team Practices Group.	TPG Customer Satisfaction Survey (CSAT) Q2 TPG Management Transition			Done
Other work that advances TPG goals but doesn't have a tidy goal.	Continued efforts in Testing Initiative 2015 and Onboarding component			In progress
	Ad hoc Phab documentation improvements			In progress

1. Providing dedicated resourcing for a team's Scrum Master (or similar) role.
2. Ad-hoc team/individual process coaching.
3. Mentorship and support for people in the Scrum Master (or similar) role.
4. Team Health Checks
5. Scale Team Practices Group.
6. Other work that advances TPG goals but doesn't have a tidy goal.

• Test Coverage initiative
• Engineering Product Process Proposal
• Burnup Charts (and other forecasting devices)

• Best Practices Handbook
• Service Level Understanding
• Glossary
• Recommended Reading
• Useful Questions
• Phabricator tips (Sandbox, Work-in-Progress, DRAFT!!)
• Meeting best practices (including remote staff)
• WMF Processes Survey
• Workshop Planning
• Measuring Types of Work
• Scrum Ceremonies
  • Scrum Standup
  • Scrum Sprint Planning Meeting
  • Scrum Estimation Meeting
  • Scrum Sprint Retrospective

• Tech talk ("The state of Team Health across Wikimedia Engineering")
  • Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YfkxpJTuY4
• Tech talk ("Kanban: An alternative to Scrum?")
  • Recorded hangout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT8cUtMTGPI
  • Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1w51To_TUN5t8w5ay8rvRwDy56I9ac4Jbx9bZOCnDd4g/pub
• "Developing Distributedly: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Remoties" - Presentation by Arthur Richards at the Global Scrum Gathering in Phoenix, AZ on 4 May 2015.
• WMF Engineering Process Proposal

• Proposal for formation of the Team Practices Group

These procedures are customized for how TPG does its own work; see the Practices Library above for generic versions and templates.

• Creating, Managing, and Finishing Work in TPG
• TPG Team Norms
• Roles and Responsibilities of TPG team members
• Onboarding to TPG
• Health check survey
• Analysis of usage of public and private TPG mailing lists
• TPG Tea Time
• Google Drive Management

• TPG Retrospectives
• FY2015Q2: slides, minutes

• IRC: #wikimedia-teampractices ^connect
• Join the mailing list (or view its archives)
  • Send email to that public list: teampractices@lists.wikimedia.org