[teampractices] A tool for keeping action items accountable?

Wed Apr 27 07:55:42 UTC 2016

Could you provide examples of these "action items"? It will help
understanding the relevance of "non-dev/product" action items coming out of
(presumably dev/product) sprint retrospectives.

This sounds like a matter of threshold:

* If an action item is purely personal, then sure, use the purely personal
tool to deal with it.
* If an action item has an impact on the team, then use the team tool to
deal with it, no matter how simple, small, "non-dev/product".

Is it fair to assume that most actions coming out of a sprint retrospective
will have impact on the team?

This is where the fear to i.e. bringing back Trello doesn't sound any
visceral to me, but well justified. Someone starts creating strictly
personal actions in Trello (Asana, etc), they continue adding other small
actions because 'since we are using this tool anyway and I'm writing the
actions quickly after the meeting'... Three months down the road that
parallel board has got a life on its own, they start having tasks
duplicating with the team's tasks in Phabricator, some things fall between
the cracks...

Yes, I know this would not happen to *you* or *your* team (whoever *you*
are), but looking at our history we have solid reasons to think that this
will certainly happen to *someone*, and then that will be taken as a
reference by * someone else* not reading this thread today, and then...

On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 1:49 AM, Max Binder <mbinder at wikimedia.org> wrote:

>
>    - The first thought was to use existing Phabricator boards, but the
>    team agreed that Phab was a lot of overhead for reminding folks to follow
>    up on non-dev/product tasks.
>
> Why overhead? Creating a minimally acceptable Phabricator task takes one
title and one project to associate it with. Even a description is optional.
If that project is #Team-X-Internal-Stuff, then the rest can't be bothered.

If the "overhead" concern also (or actually) encompases a concern about
lack of privacy (i.e. "John to get a headset that actually works in
hangouts") then you can always request a private space for your team in
Phabricator.

The public / private aspect is sometimes tangential, sometimes orthogonal
in these discussions. The test is the following: those suggesting Trello,
would like to have a public or a private board for this? If privacy is
relevant, ask for a private space in Phabricator, where all tasks will be
integrated to personal backlogs and teams workboards, and where privacy
settings of tasks can be modified, being all of them available in the same
tool.

-- 
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
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