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Post Retrospective Notes


ACTION ITEMS: RetrospectiveActionItem Query​

03/28/2024

Addressing Burnout:

Create an anonymous survey to gauge the team's sentiment on burnout and workload management. Discuss survey results and consider implementing strategies to mitigate burnout, such as adjusting workloads, improving task estimation, and enhancing time management.

Task Tracking Improvement:

Evaluate the current task tracking process for efficiency and effectiveness. Consider adopting a document-driven approach for discussing new features, where documentation is used to workshop ideas before meetings. This could reduce the number of ad-hoc meetings and streamline decision-making.

Meeting Management:

Measure and evaluate the time spent in meetings versus time spent on actual work tasks. Propose guidelines for when to book meetings and how to manage meeting invitations to avoid overwhelming team members' calendars. Implement a clear format for out-of-office notifications to minimize calendar clutter.

Documentation and Communication:

Establish or enhance documentation practices to ensure all team members have access to the information they need. Improve communication strategies for when team members are out of the office, potentially centralizing this information in a shared space or document.

Acknowledgement and Recognition:

Continue to acknowledge individual contributions and successes to maintain morale and motivation.

Follow-Up:

Schedule a follow-up meeting specifically dedicated to addressing the task tracking concerns and the burnout issue. Share the documentation on best practices from Jeremy's team to align practices across teams.

Leadership Engagement:

Engage with team leads like Keith and Don to further understand the concerns raised and work on solutions.

03/07/2024

Sprint Planning & Time Management
Team emphasized the importance of managing time efficiently during meetings, especially since the team has a packed schedule with many back-to-back meetings. Suggestion is for time-boxing discussions to ensure all topics are covered within the available time frame.

Communication & Transparency
The team discussed the need for clearer communication, especially when it comes to changes in sprint planning and priorities. There was a sense of frustration expressed by the QA team and others regarding the frequent shifts in focus and lack of visibility into certain repositories. Ashish Tripathi and Thomas Wynne acknowledged these concerns, stating that the direction from the product team should become more stable and transparent moving forward.

Deployment & Version Control
Michael Green and Prashanth Kumar Gona discussed recent deployment issues and the discrepancies between ratified versions and those after hotfixes. A process was proposed to ensure that version numbers are tracked through stories rather than communicated informally on chat channels.

Product Vision & Objectives
There was a collective agreement that the product vision and objectives need to be clearly defined and communicated to the entire team to prevent confusion and instability. Michael Green outlined the process of pruning the feature backlog and aligning it with the product objectives for better clarity.

PR Review Process
Concerns were raised about the PR review process being bottlenecked due to limited resources, with Thomas Wynne and Jeremy Elwood discussing the impact on the development workflow. The need for a more efficient review process was highlighted, and it was suggested to address this in the upcoming Sprint planning.

Repository Access & Transparency
There was a specific concern about the system architecture repository being private and not accessible to all team members who require visibility.

Asynchronous Communication
Suggestion for the team to try to resolve issues asynchronously before resorting to ad hoc meetings, to reduce meeting fatigue and improve efficiency.

Frustrations & Concerns
Team members expressed frustrations regarding the lack of transparency and the sudden changes in direction. The leadership acknowledged these frustrations and expressed a commitment to improving transparency and communication to mitigate these concerns.

02/15/2024

Delegate Responsibilities:
Summary: Strategies to distribute Thomas Wynne’s workload more effectively were discussed. Details: Concerns were raised about Thomas being overburdened with responsibilities. The team discussed potential ways to delegate tasks to alleviate his workload.

Scrum of Scrums Purpose:
Summary: The need to redefine the purpose of this meeting to prevent it from becoming a refinement session was discussed. Details: Joe Parolin expressed concerns about the Scrum of Scrums deviating from its original intent, leading to unnecessarily long and detailed discussions. A call was made to revisit its purpose.

Ticket Management Protocol:
Summary: The debate on who should handle ticket management with a suggestion to decentralize and assign based on role and expertise. Details: The team discussed the challenges of ticket management, with some advocating for a decentralized approach where senior members and those doing research would take more ownership of ticket creation.

Config Migration Release and Burnout:
Summary: Jessie Marchio raised concerns about the sustainability of the current pace and the pressure on the QA team. Details: Jessie highlighted the strain on the QA team from back-to-back releases and the backlog of features. The team acknowledged the need to address burnout and find a more sustainable pace.

01/25/2024

Topic: Release Process and QA Collaboration

Summary: Paula discussed the progress made towards a more efficient release process, collaboration with Quality Assurance (QA), and other pods. The aim was to have a better streamlined process for releases, hotfixes, and environment management. She mentioned that progress and actions were visible in the tagged items in the Empower backlog and on the internal wiki page.

Topic: Technical Architecture Decision-making

Summary: Michael raised a concern about the lack of a central figure or group for making tough technical architecture decisions. The discussion opened up on whether to have a central technical designer or use the Architecture Decision Records (ADR) more effectively. The team discussed possibly having a central decision-making committee for cross-pod technical decisions and the need for a process to handle these decisions.

Topic: Customer Communication

Summary: The issue of obtaining clear information from customers was revisited from the last retrospective. The team discussed the need for better contractual language to enforce customer responsiveness and the possibility of involving project managers to improve communication. They talked about the potential to establish an enforcement mechanism within the Statement of Work (SOW) to hold customers accountable for timely responses, which could affect sprint timelines.

01/04/2024

Topic: Release Process and Pacing

Summary: The conversation focused on the slow pace of the release process, which has been a recurring issue affecting effective deployment. The team discussed the importance of establishing an ideal process map, conducting root cause analysis after each release, and holding specific meetings to address these challenges. Action Items:
Schedule a dedicated meeting to align on the release process and determine improvements. Conduct a focused retrospective after each release to identify issues and improve processes.

Topic: Discovery Pod Challenges

Summary: Discussion revolved around the Discovery Pod's struggle with prioritization and communication. It was noted that foundational issues have persisted even before current challenges arose, such as the departure of an SME and the addition of Enterprise Chat to their responsibilities. Action Items:
Hold a 10:15 Central planning meeting to realign the Discovery Pod's work and address communication and prioritization issues.

Topic: Bug Reporting and Handling

Summary: Issues with bug reporting and the transition between pods were acknowledged. There was confusion about ownership and next steps for bug resolution, leading to a loss of information during transitions. Action Items:Improve the bug reporting and handling process to ensure clarity and efficient resolution.

Topic: Enterprise Chat Work Prioritization

Summary: The need for more structured prioritization and management in the Discovery Pod was discussed, particularly regarding the Enterprise Chat service. The abrupt departure of an SME led to gaps that need filling, and the project requires a clear release timeline and infrastructure setup.Action Items:
Appoint a product manager to oversee the prioritization of Enterprise Chat. Set up foundational elements for Enterprise Chat in the backlog for proper tracking and release planning.

Topic: Customer Communication Difficulties

Summary: Difficulties in obtaining clear information from customers were mentioned but not extensively discussed due to time constraints.Action Items: Reserve this topic for more in-depth discussion in the next retrospective meeting. Participants agreed on the importance of these action items and recognized the need for collective effort to systematically address the identified issues.

12/07/2023

Topics of Discussion:

Acknowledgment of team members' contributions and welcome notes to new members. A review of successful items and areas that went well during the Sprint. Detailed discussion on the config migration feature, which faced significant hurdles and lacked proper communication and a testing plan. The need for a more formal process for release steps and SRE dependencies. The importance of setting expectations for CapEx rollouts and better communication of issue statuses.

Action Items:

Design a formal process for release steps that can fit into the existing release management process, with potential ownership from Don Gauthier, Michael Green, Joe, and Micah. Consider implementing a tagging or labeling system in the Agile management tool to indicate potential infrastructure, configuration, security, or license implications in user stories. Schedule a follow-up meeting before Christmas to discuss the CapEx rollout process and the urgency of addressing issues found there. Establish a time-bound approach for handling CapEx to ensure timely resolution and release rollout. Improve daily communication and visibility of the status of issues during the CapEx phase.

Assigned Tasks:

Don Scott and Chris Hanks to work on the expectation document for CapEx rollouts. Michael Green and Chris Hanks to collaborate on addressing the feature release process issue.

11/16/2023

  • Sprint planning continues to be a challenge without dedicated product management.//Fuzzy requirements at start of sprint (transition process related). The team discussed the challenges of not having enough Product Owners per Pod to help with prioritization and creating/refining user stories. Leadership has acknowledged the frustration of the lack of Product and are actively recruiting/interviewing to fill the positions. At the moment, candidates that have interviewed were not aligning with whom we are looking to hire.
  • We need to establish process for API feature flags: The team has expressed challenges especially during release planning/ QA deployment and are trying to understand how we can make this an easier process with some sort of documentation or criteria that will set us up for success. Suggestions/Action Items: Dedicate a 1-pointer user story to clean up feature flags, Pod leads to help create document for handoff to QA
  • Publishing flow requirements are still in flux. Action Item:Proper documentation and communication is needed.
  • Client feature needs not being well communicated: The teams are wanting a more effective way to understand what client needs are from the delivery side and how to hand-off tickets to our teams. Action Item: Leads/Paula to work with Delivery side and create a more seamless process in handoffs and prioritization.

10/26/2023

  • too much productivity lost to being blocked: The team discussed the importance of addressing blockers and improving communication to prevent productivity loss. They emphasized the need to be transparent about any issues faced and to prioritize tasks effectively. Action Item: Reza's team to document next steps for reducing productivity loss due to being blocked and improving communication: Reza's team will work on creating documentation outlining the steps they will take to minimize productivity loss caused by blockers and improve communication within the team. In addition, measure how long a team is blocked for.
  • hotfix release process doesn't exist and needs to: The team discussed how tickets do not include full details, no documentation process, or defining what it means in our environment. Action Item: Prashanth to finalize and document the process for initiatives and feature design: Prashanth will work on finalizing the process for creating and refining initiatives and feature designs, ensuring that the entire team is aligned and that documentation is easily accessible.
  • Initiatives in word docs. Product (me: Michael :)) needs to move this to readme and work on getting more feedback Action Item: Documentation will lie in ReadMe
  • Still have PBIs in sprint which weren't refined: Action Item: During refinement or when a ticket is assigned, communicate out to the team if more details are needed when picking up a ticket.
  • Intermittent database connection issues causing problems for APIs: The team will research tools and methods for quickly flagging database connection issues and develop a process for managing support tickets related to these issues. Action Item: Create a ticket for intermittent database connection issues causing problems for API and assign it to Reza: A ticket will be created to address the intermittent database connection issues causing problems for the API, and it will be assigned to Reza for resolution.
  • Action Item: Thomas and Reza to work together on release cadence. Meeting will include service owners and QA by end of next week.

10/05/2023

Team burnout and its impact on communication and morale: The team acknowledges that burnout is affecting their performance, communication, and overall morale. They discuss potential reasons for this, such as overwork and challenging features.

Steps taken to address the issues: Some team members mention that steps have been taken to address the burnout and communication problems, but more needs to be done.

The need for a chief architect: The team agrees that a chief architect could help guide them and improve communication across different functional areas.

The importance of communication: The team emphasizes the need for better communication within and across teams to improve their performance and address the burnout issue.

Suggested actions and next steps: The team discusses potential actions and next steps, such as increasing transparency, hiring more resources, and revisiting the discussion during the innovation hour to gather anonymous feedback.

In summary, the conversation focuses on the team's concerns about burnout, communication, and the need for a chief architect to help guide them. The team is open to finding solutions together and plans to revisit the discussion during their innovation hour to gather further input and feedback.

09/14/2023

  • Sprint 42 burndown charts for different pods: The team discussed the burndown charts for each pod, highlighting the progress made during the sprint, and identifying areas that needed attention or improvement. Action Item: Improve communication during sprint planning and refinement to adjust for potential issues and scope changes. Allow extra room in sprints for unexpected tasks or issues, and consider trade-offs when planning new sprints.

  • Retrospective feedback and discussion on improving processes: The team shared their feedback from the last retrospective and discussed potential improvements and actions to address the issues raised. They also discussed the importance of accountability and maintaining a record of action items. Action Item: Update and maintain documentation for environment variables and specs, with clear ownership and approval process.

  • Issues related to front door integration and how to avoid last-minute crunches in future sprints: The team discussed the challenges faced during the front door integration, which led to last-minute crunches. They emphasized the need for better communication, planning, and prioritization to prevent similar issues in future sprints. Action Item:
    Pod leads should work on prioritizing tasks and setting realistic expectations to avoid overloading team members and compromising output quality.

  • Bug triaging process and potential improvements in communication and prioritization: The team discussed the current bug triaging process and identified areas where communication and prioritization could be improved. They talked about establishing a clear escalation path and ensuring that the appropriate teams and individuals are involved in addressing bugs. Action Item: Establish a clear escalation path for bug triaging, starting with pod leads and escalating to PMs and engineering managers when necessary.

08/24/2023

  • Sprint burn down metrics and trends: The team analyzed the sprint burn down chart to identify trends, such as stagnant plateaus, dips from removing stories or bugs, and spikes from adding new stories. Action Item: No specific action items were mentioned for this point. The team will continue to monitor the burn down metrics and trends to inform their sprint management and identify areas for improvement.

  • Impact of war room on team productivity: The war room created a bottleneck, with team members working on production issues and hotfixes, leading to challenges in managing, prioritizing, and communicating about these tasks. Action Item: Schedule a dedicated meeting to discuss improvements to the QA environment and addressing production issues more efficiently.

  • Communication and planning issues: There were concerns about the lack of communication and planning regarding tasks that required collaboration between different teams, causing last-minute requests and scope changes. Action Item: Improve communication and planning for cross-pod collaboration, and involve the appropriate team members in the planning process. Ensure that all needs are documented in tickets to avoid significant changes in the scope of work.

  • QA environment improvement: The team discussed the need to improve the QA environment to better replicate client scenarios and catch issues before they reach production, reducing the number of bugs and issues to address.Action Item: Collaborate with the QA team to enhance their testing environment and provide them with the necessary tools and resources. Allocate dedicated resources or contacts from each pod to support the QA team.

  • Context switching and distractions: Team members were being pulled in different directions, causing context switching and making it difficult to focus on assigned tasks. Improved communication and planning could help manage priorities and avoid distractions. Action Item: Establish a process for handling production issues and prioritizing tasks to minimize context switching and distractions. Consider allocating dedicated resources to specific tasks or teams to help manage priorities and avoid distractions.

08/03/2023

What went well

  • Completed sprint goals effectively.
  • Improved velocity overall.
  • Better QA process and faster transfer of items to QA with fewer issues.
  • Enterprise chat deployed to NEO.
  • UX requirement sessions went well.
  • Praise and recognition were given to team members who contributed significantly.

What did not go well

  • Significant challenges and unforeseen delays in 1.14 Release.
  • Involves massive infrastructure changes and data migrations.
  • Identified as a major release rather than a minor one.
  • 1.15 Hotfix had issues deploying and testing embedded reports.
  • Insufficient documentation for critical features.
  • Some team members felt siloed or lacked collaboration within and between pods.

Action Items for next time

  • Improve communication and knowledge sharing within and between pods for better collaboration.
  • Consider a separate classification for major releases with more buffer time for unforeseen challenges.
  • Strengthen test cases, especially for edge cases and possible bug scenarios.
  • Ensure more robust documentation, particularly for critical features, to avoid misunderstandings and reduce dependencies on specific team members.
  • Proactively identify potential bottlenecks and spread the corresponding knowledge beforehand to avoid overburdening specific team members.
  • Monitor workload balance among team members and allocate sufficient buffer time for unplanned issues.

07/13/2023

Most Voted Topics

  • Some visibility into what is being deployed into Tiberius pre-release code freeze and when. The team started the conversation with numerous bugs in Tiberius with not all PRs in yet which can be challenging. This could have been due to some functionality not being available, in ADF, desired behaviors did not occur which bugs turned up and release wasn't ready yet. This could have been a missed opportunity with scope difference and features being available. Action Item: Evan and Thomas to work together on features. QA and Pod Leads will need to communicate with each other so that there is alignment and everyone knows what is going in or not.
  • Add "Reopen" state to the bugs. When QA is testing a bug for example, sometimes it does not go as planned. Therefore, one would need to "reopen" the ticket but the issue is where would that particular ticket lay in the sprint board. Action Item: QA, SM, and PM to discuss the naming convention on the additional column needed in the board.
  • Last minute rush to complete, review & merge story work. No action needed but team has noticed an improvement when it comes to working through his or her stories and making sure it is completed before the sprint. There have been times when team does need to rush in for example, a PR, but we are able to communicate with each other and understand best practices for next time.
  • Training on Empower 101, both for the team and for customers. Empower 101 & 201 are still in flight with Michael Green, Tina, and Don working together on 101 & Micah and Sree on 201. Showing the unity vision will also help our client feel at ease and stable knowing what we are doing for them. This will help everyone have a better understand on what Empower is and what it does.

06/22/2023

Most Voted Topics

  • Bunch of tickets were deployed at the last day of the sprint. Not match time for testing them all in time: Deployed when resolved; misunderstanding of timelines; stories pulled in mid to end of sprint; stretch goals - need to plan more? ; Devs should test in dev; 2 deployment strategies. Action Item: @<Chris Hanks> to add to Team wiki, PRs testing- similar process to all: merge to IN nightly - add existing doc
    • Adding stories into active sprint- why is this happening?: Team will continue to communicate with everyone if stories are being added or removed from the sprint, SM to work with team on creating a backlog and/or have a list prepared to discuss with team.
  • We need QA load testing, model building one model may not be representative of actual deployments: Needed to be vetted out with team. Action Item: @<Michael Green> to work with QA team on model builder config files - extract on load tests
  • Need to get better at chunking by having more referencable process diagrams: Common language that will allow team to understand and optimize what's in scope or not. We should have referencable content, high level understanding, and conceptual documentation.
  • Empower 101: Similar to conversation about "chunking", team discussed creating an onboarding experience with our roadmap and making it easier to understand. Action Item: @<Michael Green> creating a deck to present to team.

06/01/2023

Most Voted Topics

  • Cost Management: Data Pod would like to have a retro on how we could have remediated this issue and what we could have done. Action Item: Paula to set up a Focused Retro this sprint.

  • Design Activities Planning and Backlog: This topic was discussed due to one of our PMs being OOO and our designer went into our backlog and picked up items that he was able to complete! Action Item: Work with the team in the Design Review chat to see how everyone would like the meetings to be structured-agenda.

    Suggestions:

    1. Take one of the sessions to review client requests where we can create PBIs and groom them appropriately.
    2. Design Roadmap Priorities

  • Introduce Load Testing: This topic was discussed about how we can handle the load currently, what is released versus what's in production, and how are we defining it. Action Item: CoreAPI Team will first create a Spike for this and refine it next week.

  • Postmortems: The team discussed on repeating the same mistakes, reviving processes,and having root cause analysis. I.E. Cost Management. Action Item: Paula and Ashish to collaborate together on creating Focused Retros on issues that come up in the future.

  • Defining a process for Wiki versus documents in draft: As we continue to grow, we want to ensure that documentation being added to the Wiki is relevant, up-to-date, and fulfills what we need. Action Item: Bring this as a topic to discuss in the Cross Pod Pull Up on Tuesday.

05/11/2023

  • Included "Kudos" column to start giving shoutouts to each other and "Previous Action Items" for accountability purposes and see if we have accomplished them or still WIP.

Most Voted Topics

  • Deployment Process/Branching Strategy: This topic was discussed when Reza traveled to the Chicago office to discuss on how we can improve this process. Action Item: Thomas and Reza to provide documentation of the conversation that will be available to the group.
  • API Endpoints: We discussed how this related to the DAQ pg 500 error that occurred and was tested too late due to the code freeze. We are looking to improve this process which is to include QA as well. A fix has been established in the hopes that this would not occur again.
  • Code Freeze: The bulk of our time together, we need to come up with a strategy. Some suggestions were to adopt a pattern so we don't need a freeze HOWEVER we would need a documented pros and cons list for it. Another suggestion was to follow the steps leading to the code freeze and even prioritizing bugs first then development. Something that I brought up was if there was a "support member/POC/whatever you'd like to call them" when it comes to bugs. This could be effective if we either have a rotating "support person" that can be the first person to review the bug then trickle down the issue to the team. This correlates with the 500 error bug that was a huge issue. We discussed how we need have a way to find bugs first, establish an alerting/notification system. Action Item: Paula to determine which centralize channel / POD responsibility we would like to align on.
  • Best Practices for Backlog Refinement/Carry over Stories: The group discussed that during these conversations in any meetings together where we are discussing and creating new user stories, we are empowering the team to speak up if they do not understand the ask within the story or if one needs additional context. This is especially crucial to speak up early in on the sprint too for carry over work as we can review the story if need be to see what outstanding tasks are needed to be completed or if anyone on the team can assist. Overall, be empowered to speak because we are all here to help each other out.
  • Innovation Hour/ Freestyle Friday [naming convention TBD]: We brought up from last retro having an optional meeting where team members can showcase current work, share interesting articles/finds, or anything else. Majority voted yes so Action Item: Paula to propose meeting in the empower team channel. Team also proposed have an agenda with 2-3 developers presenting.