ES Retrospective Notes 2021-11-02

Owned by Natalia Berdnikov (Deactivated)
Last updated: Nov 02, 2021 by Feanil Patel (Deactivated)
2 min read

Participants

@Natalia Berdnikov (Deactivated) @Feanil Patel (Deactivated) , @lcicchese (Deactivated) , @Jeremy Ristau @Waheed Ahmed (Deactivated) @Simon Chen

We think these are the things we should

Start Doing

  • (P1) Project Kickoff Communication

    • Involving product managers more from the start. Not just engineers.

    • Official start - why we are doing this, a little bit of intro, how important it was. Ensure there is right motivation to help team plan better. Have more context to introduce feeling of owning it rather than doing a duty.

  • Pre-establish a communication process

    • A dynamic Jira board reflecting current status.

    • Slack status update once a week where everyone types up their updates. Looks into Stand up Alice

      • Provide status on when work will start.

      • Acknowledge work that is ongoing.

    • Having a clear way to communicate with all interested parties

      • An owner for ensuring that all providers of communication actually communicate would reduce work.

        • eg. One time an update was not given in a timely manner.

          • When the update was given, it was not sufficiently informative.

          • Who does the follow up to get more info?

  • Ensuring there are clearly defined review criteria, and contingency/rollback/roll forward plan

  • Break review and implementation into two tickets on project tracking grid - this was done for Elasticsearch, but for Mongo it was missing for Edge and Prod.

  • Ensuring there is documentation that is up to date (Discovery IDA was missing from previous exercise). CS_Comments configuration was in a different repo and we needed help tracking that down.

  • Configure some automated alerting of when syncing completes

  • More fluid daily standup

  • Quarterly status update by SRE on technology that needs to be updated in the coming quarter.

  • Build out meta project documentation to help non project managers lead a large upgrade project.

    • “How to manage a centrally-lead cross-team project”

 

Stop Doing

  • Communicating really late in the process.(Make sure people are informed of upcoming projects well ahead of time.)

  • Relying so heavily on a single project manager to coordinate everything.

 

Continue Doing

  • Project tracking grid/table was a good visual representation

    • Question : Can we create a more dynamic status board?

  • Creating team specific tickets to accomplish the work.

  • Natalia to continue annoying teams

  • Project specific Slack channel

  • Learning as we go.

  • Being a constructive pain in the butt when progress is needed.

  •