[teampractices] Formulating team values

Thu Mar 5 20:26:15 UTC 2015

The Team Practices Group values
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Team_Practices_Group#Team_values> emerged
in part thanks to the values exercise during the first day of All Hands. If
I recall correctly, we first started talking about our individual values
and the values that we individually bring to our work. As we individually
shared, patterns started to emerge and through some facilitated
conversation, our values emerged. Chris it's cool to see you say "Tell a
story" because that was ultimately how we landed on the three values; they
emerged in narrative form.

On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 11:48 AM, Chris McMahon <cmcmahon at wikimedia.org>
wrote:

> Spinning off a thread here...
>
> On Tue, Mar 3, 2015 at 10:16 AM, Kristen Lans <klans at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> I'm thinking about working with a team on formulating their values in the
>> near future, so I'm curious to know if there was a particularly useful way
>> that you were able to come up with yours?
>>
>
> Expressing a team's values or an organization's values is trickier than it
> might seem.  You can think of it as marketing, if that's useful. You're
> taking knowledge that is mostly tacit [1] shared among insiders, and
> projecting a simplified version of that knowledge for outsiders to
> consider.  A great model is the Agile Manifesto [2].
>
> I don't think there is any one way to do this, but I do have a few
> guidelines to suggest.
>
> * Put people first. Don't talk about roles and interfaces and handoffs (at
> least at first). Talk about the actual people involved and what they
> actually do and when they actually do it, and (very important) why they do
> it. Much follows from this.
>
> * Tell a story, with a beginning and a middle and an end. You may frame
> that story as a sequence of events, or as a set of relationships, or a list
> of principles, but tell a story that makes sense to an audience.
>
> * Talk about your values within your team. The Health Check for the
> Release Engineering team was pretty good, and I think a big factor in that
> is that we do in fact talk about values in our team meetings on a fairly
> regular basis: stuff like "This change will help developers", "This will
> make deployments more reliable", "This is an improvement for Team X".
>
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge
> [2] http://www.agilemanifesto.org/
>
> PS A lot of people conflate Quality Assurance with software testing. In
> fact, many software testers object strongly to being labeled QA. But I've
> always embraced QA, which is process work and methodology work. The origin
> of the term comes from manufacturing (unfortunately) where Quality Control
> is testing, the business of measuring the output to check that it conforms
> to specifications, where Quality Assurance is designing processes that
> ensure that the product is of sufficiently high quality.
>
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>

-- 
Arthur Richards
Team Practices Manager
[[User:Awjrichards]]
IRC: awjr
+1-415-839-6885 x6687
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