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FY24 Q2 Retro - Delivery:Orchestration

Congratulations on completing another stellar quarter 🎉 This retro issue is intended as a place for us to pause and reflect on our relationships, tools, and processes so that we can keep doing the good stuff, and start improving the not-so-good stuff.

We went into FY24 Q2 with one OKR and the following actions from our Q1 retro:

  1. We take care of our limited capacity and focus hard on reducing release manager workload. Where possible this should all be focused around a single epic so we collaborate. Everyone will share the responsibility of prioritizing and raising up tasks and interrupts to make this possible
  2. Focus on making some improvements to our knowledge sharing. Each team member to make one improvement to help explain, simplify, or update a key piece of documentation
  3. Everyone to support @swiskow by collaborating on issues or surfacing up relevant information so we can start to find some long-term improvements to release comms and processes

Retro summary

A summary of the responses and agreed actions is provided below:

How well do you feel we did against our planned actions (from the Q1 retro)?

Overall we all agreed that we had good focus this quarter. Our results agree 😄 We stayed focused on improving the security release for release managers and made some substantial progress there along with setting the stage for future automation of releases.

Documentation updating was a big success with many improvements shared.

We all felt that we had improved in supporting Sam and bringing him into our discussions but we still have room for improvement. The main theme from our responses is being more proactive about collaborating with Sam.

🌻 How was your Q2?

We had many highlights from Q2, including lots of mentions of the excellent momentum and collaboration in the team. We also had project-related highlights:

  1. Security release improvements were exciting to see and several of us mentioned the foundational aspect of this work. Seeing big ideas take shape and help us move to the future is really good to see. Lots of excitement for seeing this approach polished and applied to all releases was shared 💥
  2. The work to unify auto_deploy timers simplified processes and reduced MTTP ⭐
  3. The new patch release process was officially adopted 🎉

Knowledge-sharing in the team helped share our project management and DRI expectations, and we finally had metrics to measure our progress on improving release manager processes.

We've also started being more conscious when working on an issue or participating in a discussion in thinking about how we can build something that can be consumed and used by others rather than just ourselves (self-serve mindset).

🌇 Is there anything that with hindsight you would have changed to make things (even) better?

  1. Work harder on our emoji-game
  2. Try out some different epic investigation/planning techniques to help keep all the project pieces in place and moving along well
  3. Sharing recordings, or giving live demos in Delivery Weekly throughout the quarter to improve knowledge-sharing
  4. Prevent incidents
  5. Continue to improve documentation

What do you think we should do to improve in Q3?

  1. Improve communication between ~"team::Orchestration" and ~"team::System" so we all know what each other is working on
  2. Continue the end-of-quarter Delivery Group demos
  3. Continue our focus and collaboration to achieve our goals
  4. Continue reducing RM toil through our release improvements, but also by starting to think about how incidents would look without the need of a release manager

Actions

  1. Record (privately, or in a demo/Delivery weekly sync) and share at least one demo per epic. The goal is to become more proactive at knowledge-sharing content in an async-friendly format.
  2. Make time every week to watch the Grand Review and read the project statuses on Release Velocity (&170) - and ask clarifying questions on the epic/issue. The goal is to prioritize time each week to reviewing available Delivery Group information to stay informed.
  3. Proactively reach out to collaborate with @swiskow on a delivery project or improvement (this may be by helping Sam with one of his tasks or bringing him into OKR work. Or, if time allows, starting a new Delivery Group improvement). The goal is to continue building effective working practices with Sam. I'm leaving this one generic because time or project constraints may require different ways of working. Let's try some things and out see what works best.
Edited by Amy Phillips