Team Practices Group

The TPG facilitates the use of practices that support team health.

Group:	Product
Team:	Arthur Richards (Sr. Agile Coach: Organizational Collaboration) Grace Gellerman (Agile Coach) Kevin Smith (Agile Coach) Joel Aufrecht (Agile Coach) Max Binder (Scrum Master)
Management:	Kristen Lans (Director of Team Practices)
Since:	2014-07-01

Team mission statement

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.

Team values

Personal agency through collective ownership
Adaptability, embracing change
Sustainability

Overview

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.

The team

Kristen Lans - Team Practices Director

Arthur Richards - Senior Agile Coach: Organizational Collaboration

File:Gellerman, Grace 2014.jpg

Grace

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

Kevin Smith - Agile Coach (Discovery)

Joel Aufrecht - Agile Coach (VisualEditor)

Max Binder - Scrum Master (Mobile Apps)

Our work

Goals from previous quarters

Current Quarterly Goals

The Team Practices Group (TPG) was dissolved in 2017.

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.

Team Practices Group/Goals/FY2017Q4

The Team Practices Group (TPG) was dissolved in 2017.

FY2016Q4 (Apr - Jun 2016) Quarterly Goals and Milestones

Goal	Milestones	ETA	Dependency	Status
Goal 1 - STRENGTHEN T131304 Assess skills within TPG related to WMF capacity enhancement needs	Wiki page describing needs/requests Wiki page with TPG skillsets/specialty areas	EoQ		Done Tasks in Phabricator
Goal 2 - FOCUS T131303 Define a plan for measuring satisfaction of "light engagement" customers	Survey instrument drafted Process for processing and analyzing results defined and documented Q1 rollout plan in place	EoQ	Design Research	Done Tasks in Phabricator
Goal 3 - STRENGTHEN T131312 Support Annual Planning Retrospective	TBD	EoQ	Jaime, Wes	In progress
~~Goal 3 - FOCUS~~ ~~T131305~~ ~~Support Quarterly Planning and Review Improvements~~	~~Support the delivery and planning of quarterly planning and review improvements~~	~~EoQ~~	~~Communications, Vertical Heads, Managers, Staff Representatives~~	~~DEPRECATED~~ ~~Tasks in Phabricator~~

FY2016Q4 (April - June 2016) Essential Functions

Tasks in Phabricator

Goal	Initiative	FY2016Q4 Milestone
Provide periodic external team support.	Evidence-Based Project Planning	Lightweight engagements: Collaboration, Language,
Provide periodic external team support.	Other	Lightweight engagements: RelEng, ArchCom, Designers Mentoring in team practices: Analytics Engineering, Designers, OIT, Wikipedia Education Program/Dashboard Events: Planned/facilitated Reading offsite, planned/facilitated Discovery search offsite, planned Editing Department Retrospective
Provide ongoing external team support.	Provide embedded Practices support	Teams Agile Coached this quarter: VE, Engagement Metrics, Discovery Search, Discovery Portal, Discovery Analysis, Research & Data, Design Research, Analytics Engineering Teams Scrum Mastered this quarter: Reading Web, iOS, Android.
Provide ongoing external team support.	Other direct team-level services	Weekly engineering-wide Scrum of Scrums facilitated.
Internal metrics and continual improvement	TPG has a strategy (T113053)	Strategy and strategy process documented and shared
Internal metrics and continual improvement	Management	TPG managed this quarter. TPG Offsite (T131399) TPG uses work tracking in Q4. (T132402)
Organizational and cross-team initiatives	Design across all verticals	Develop shared understanding of design pain-points across all verticals and define plan to resolve pain-points
Organizational and cross-team initiatives	Product/Community communication & workflows	Lightweight engagement with Technical Collaboration

Essential Functions

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

Our skills

TPG is able to perform various functions, like meeting facilitation or Scrummastering. When practical, we like to teach those skills to others, in order to increase capacity and empowerment throughout the organization. Here is a list of some of the skills that TPG can offer: