F23 Retro + Spring Next Steps

Some loose ends

• Waldron email

  • We can email them and CC the dean

    • Send the email probably early next semester

    • We can say “Dean supports this initiative”

• Ragini retro

  • Replacement for next semester

    • Consult/contact Jason

  • Notify the Planner team

• December All-Hands

  • Room: ECSW 1.355

  • December 07 @7PM

  • Longer project presentations, the leads would present

  • Time:

    • first 30 mins social

    • second 30 mins recap/project presentation

    • third 30 mins gingerbread building competition

• ACM Projects

  • Project that used the Nebula API won

• HoM

  • Find someone new

    • look at people internally

Retro - Overview

• Summer: introduction between leadership & setting up tools

  • Website

  • Jira

  • Onboarding Planner & Product

  • Product

  • Leadership stuff

  • 501c3

• Start of the semester

  • Project Member Recruiting

  • Onboarding

  • Marketing recruiting

  • Interest Form Stuff

• Middle of the semester

  • Funding

  • Divisions

  • ECS Student Council

  • All-hands'

  • Team velocity/engagement (Trends/Planner)

  • Planner leadership conflicts

  • Mid-semester onboarding

  • Member retention

  • Secretary

  • Collaborations

    • SWE

    • ProductBase

  • Events

    • Nebula Hack

  • Marketing efforts

  • Product team effectiveness

• End of the semester

  • Projects final state

  • Divisions final state

  • What did officer team do?

    • playing catch up for the past few semester

    • how do we show our contributions

      • naturally we would be from some admin tasks and have it “automated”

      •  

Retro - Bad

• Didn’t get everything set up and leads on boarded during summer

  • Tech slowed us down during semester, should have set it up during summer

  • New tech will do better for next semester

  • Figma, Jira, Confluence

  • Slow start to semester

• Very unorganized summer

  • Everyone was busy. We should onboard sooner.

• Leadership transfer

  • We can do better this year

  • Lots of DMing old leads

• Recruiting/onboarding did not translate to leadership team

  • Effective on our side, but didn’t accomplish goals

  • Method of onboarding was different from past semesters

    • the new method was confusing for old and new people

  • Better communication needed

  • Did not work with the project leads too much while recruiting and onboarding

• Divisions

  • has been hard for the heads to work with a large number of members

  • Engineering

• ECS Council

  • We got too much money

  • Need to document the process of requesting more money

• All-hands'

  • Let marketing take the lead

• Project velocity/engagement

  • some people ghosted half way into the semester

• Member retention

  • some people leave because it gets too complicated to deal with everything going on in projects

• Colabs

  • focus on undergraduate/ecs clubs

• Events

  • NebulaHack

    • don't plan on halloweekend

• Product team effectiveness

  • except for trends

  • not enough impact

• Project final state

  • Trends

  • Planner

Retro - Ugly

• Summer didn’t transfer into the semester at all

  • Work went unused

• 501c3 stuff didn’t progress

  • Too busy :(

  • Painful process, takes a while

  • Need a lot of undivided time, hard to do when context-switching

  • Lots of reading through legal stuff

    • Caleb is too acquainted with IRS website

• Division - Product

  • Product onboarding was not effective

  • communication massive barrier

  • progress has slowed down - nonexistent

• Team velocity/engagement

  • Trends

  • Planner

    • more delegation

• Planner lead

  • No one wanted to step up

• Planner

  • no progress

  • Engineering needs more tasks

• Product head

Retro - Good

• Onboarding process

  • Recruits liked it

  • Felt more involved, had more sway

• Marketing recruiting

  • chose the right candidates

  • should've done it earlier

• Division - Marketing

• Funding

  • The money we have for GCP will last us longer than a year

  • We fixed the reimbursement issue and now have a pipeline to go through

  • Better relationship with the cost center, ty Amrit

• Team velocity/engagement

  • Jupiter

    • best team

    • lots of progress

    • improvement on the meetings!

  • API/platform

• Marketing efforts

  • good work

  • recruiting went great

• Website - summer

• Project final state

  • API/Platform

  • Jupiter

• Leadership meeting over the summer

• Divisions

  • all had a good start

• All-hands

  • good turn out

• Event

  • SWE event went great

• Secretary & Treasurer

• Johnson school event

  • left a good impression

Next Semester Steps

• Org renewal

  • keep the roster the same

• delegate SOC and ECS meetings between officers

Solution Ideas

• Marketing visibility

  • Marketing announcements to membership

  • Marketing sessions?

• Recruiting for leads/heads

  • Look into what the team needs and wait for the right appointment

• Product

  • Scale back

    • Treat like marketing

• Summer initiatives

  • let leadership get to know each other over a few meetings and don't involve any new project