[openstack-dev] [all] Onboarding rooms postmortem, what did you do, what worked, lessons learned

Thierry Carrez thierry at openstack.org
Thu Jun 1 08:32:42 UTC 2017


Jeremy Stanley wrote:
> On 2017-05-19 09:22:07 -0400 (-0400), Sean Dague wrote:
> [...]
>> the project,
> 
> I hosted the onboarding session for the Infrastructure team. For
> various logistical reasons discussed on the planning thread before
> the PTG, it was a shared session with many other "horizontal" teams
> (QA, Requirements, Stable, Release). We carved the 90-minute block
> up into individual subsessions for each team, though due to
> scheduling conflicts I was only able to attend the second half
> (Release and Infra). Attendance was also difficult to gauge; we had
> several other regulars from the Infra team present in the audience,
> people associated with other teams with which we shared the room,
> and an assortment of new faces but hard to tell which session(s)
> they were mainly there to see.

Doug and I ran the "Release management" segment of that shared slot.

>> what you did in the room,
> 
> I prepared a quick (5-10 minute) "help wanted" intro slide deck to
> set the stage, then transitioned to a less formal mix of Q&A and
> open discussion of some of the exciting things we're working on
> currently. I felt like we didn't really get as many solid questions
> as I was hoping, but the back-and-forth with other team members in
> the room about our priority efforts was definitely a good way to
> fill in the gaps between.

We had a quick slidedeck to introduce what the release team actually
does (not that much), what are the necessary skills (not really ninjas)
and a base intro on our process. The idea was to inspire others to join
the team by making it more approachable, and stating that new faces were
definitely needed.

>> what you think worked,
> 
> The format wasn't bad. Given the constraints we were under for this,
> sharing seems to have worked out pretty well for us and possibly
> seeded the audience with people who were interested in what those
> other teams had to say and stuck around to see me ramble.

I liked the room setup (classroom style) which is conducive to learning.

>> what you would have done differently
> [...]
> 
> The goal I had was to drum up some additional solid contributors to
> our team, though the upshot (not necessarily negative, just not what
> I expected) was that we seemed to get more interest from "adjacent
> technologies" representatives interested in what we were doing and
> how to replicate it in their ecosystems. If that ends up being a
> significant portion of the audience going forward, it's possible we
> could make some adjustments to our approach in an attempt to entice
> them to collaborate further on co-development of our tools and
> processes.

Attracting the right set of people in the room is definitely a
challenge. I don't know if regrouping several teams into the same slot
was a good idea in that respect. Maybe have shorter slots for smaller
teams, but still give them their own slot in the schedule ?

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)

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