March 2022 Sprint Retrospective

Training Team works in monthly sprints. At the end of each sprint, we ask ourselves the following questions. Below is a compilation of the responses from the team:

What went well?

• Additional contributors
• TrelloTrello Project management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing. -> GithubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ MigrationMigration Moving the code, database and media files for a website site from one server to another. Most typically done when changing hosting companies.
• Content Development Github Workflow draft
• Work on the quarterly (annual team goals) with GitHub migration and rough draft of a Needs Analysis started.
• APAC meeting interaction with new contributors
• A lot more contributors stepped up to create and revise content
• 4 workshops were published thanks to @westnz and everyone that reviewed the workshops.
• Reading the ‘What could we improve’, I am extremely impressed with the team reps’ ability to keep all these initiatives straight. Well done.
• I did like last week how @Hauwa Abashiya changed up the sprint reporting structure to be a bit more direct touch by pinging responsible folks
• Transferring everything to Github
• I feel there has been more contributors getting involved.
• Making direct contact with contributors and keeping in contact as time progresses.
• New faces and contribution increases, thats an excellent thing
• Social Learning Spaces. @Nick Diego has done a wonderful job since joining.

What could we improve? 

• We’ve had a slow-down in content creation. Speaking for myself, global news + team administration have taken up most of my capacity.
• Content has been claimed but not turned in in a timely manner, preventing others from contributing with that topic
• Over committing to contribute.
• Personally in last month I overcommitted tasks and couldn’t find time to work upon.
• Finishing GitHub migration and automations will be really helpful
• We can improve our handbook guide for new contributor, those like to contribute on creating a lesson plan they could find it in easy way
• Team support on the Needs Analysis
• Would be nice to have more clarity on priorities and prioritization process
• Our check-ins, we need to directly ask people who have committed to working on content to provide an update on progress.
• Streamlining our processes, reducing the amount of manual intervention.
• Prioritising tasks for our Sprints.
• Fixed timeline to publish content
• Reaching out to get more contributors involved.

What will we do differently?

• We can manage Monthly sprint in Github
• Set a timeframe once a content topic is claimed until a draft is available, otherwise open it back up for others to claim. We used to do this as a team.
• Roadmap for upcoming release 6.0
• I will continue to try and work more in the open (and encourage people to pick up where I might leave off) if someone is like, “That’s cool, can I work on that too?”
• Love the idea of opening a topic back up for others to claim, that’s a great idea.
• YES PLEASE to that roadmap!  That is one way I can prioritize what’s first, second, third.
• Learn more about Github. I don’t know how it works yet  And I need to learn!
• I’m going to look into coffee hours, recaps and sprints for other teams to see what they do. 
• I will try to work more in the open in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. 
• Use the GitHub and features such as “milestone” to track actual progress.
• Recruit more editors and encourage people not to over commit.
• Provide better guidelines for content creation. Possibly:
  • 2 weeks to draft content – with weekly check-ins
  • 2 weeks for review and publish – with weekly check-ins
• Maybe shortening the list for sprints.
• We can chunk tasks in bunches, that way contributors can easily pick from their choices

#retro