I really hate it if I'm half way through an article I like, just to find out it's an add.
Zoom Is Not the Problem – Our Meeting-Centric Workflow Is
31–40 of 53 posts
Re: Zoom Is Not the Problem – Our Meeting-Centric Workflow Is
#32The meeting I find the biggest time waster is the "what I did yesterday, what am I doing today" meetings. Nothing better than sitting on a 45 minutes call while 15 people try to justify their existence to the pm on the fly. I find a slack channel called #status-updates works wonders. It persists, it's much faster to consume, it's searchable, and you don't have to read it if you don't need to.
> 15 people seems like your standup team is too big.
Team size is picked for a variety of reasons and the least important of which seems optimal stand up size.
Re: Zoom Is Not the Problem – Our Meeting-Centric Workflow Is
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 15 people seems like your standup team is too big.
Team size is picked for a variety of reasons and the least important of which seems optimal stand up size.
The entire reason teams exist as a concept is to improve management and coordination logistics. A standup is a daily meeting that every team member has to attend, and in order for it to be productive it shouldn't just be robotic status updates; each member should actually be ingesting and thinking about everything that's brought up. Making sure it can be run smoothly should actually be considered an important factor, and if it's not it does call into question the objectives of the team lead or project manager. Of course, there are other factors as well, as you suggested, and there are indeed cases where a standup of 15+ people can make sense. Even in those cases, though, it is a result of pure incompetence to let the standup run for 45+ minutes even a single time outside of perhaps a major disaster.
As a supporting datapoint, in the entire company I work at, there isn't a single standup with that many people.
Re: Zoom Is Not the Problem – Our Meeting-Centric Workflow Is
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 15 people seems like your standup team is too big.
Team size is picked for a variety of reasons and the least important of which seems optimal stand up size.
but you don't need to have standups with all the team. That seems to be the problem. Thats why i said "standup team" not "team" in my original comment.
how many of those 15 ppl care about what you are doing on a regular basis. I am guessing not more than 5. I've never been in a standup with more than 5-6 people, 15 ppl standup sounds too ridiculous to me.
Re: Zoom Is Not the Problem – Our Meeting-Centric Workflow Is
#35The meeting I find the biggest time waster is the "what I did yesterday, what am I doing today" meetings. Nothing better than sitting on a 45 minutes call while 15 people try to justify their existence to the pm on the fly. I find a slack channel called #status-updates works wonders. It persists, it's much faster to consume, it's searchable, and you don't have to read it if you don't need to.
Two problems immediately stand out here: - 45 minutes: it should be 5-10 minutes, 15 on a bad day, and literally never 45. - 15 people: this is probably just too many people in a single standup. Based on my experience, it's quite likely this can be split up into 2-3 teams that can have more autonomy, and meetings like standups will become far easier to run and far more efficient.
Last ~15 person team I was made up of the following 7 devs, a tech lead, 3 qa(1 automation, 2 manual), a product champion, a pm, and a deployment expert(devops) is 14.
14 doesn't seem crazy to me. And splitting this team up runs into some issues as well.
Do you now have 3 tech leads who acting as pm reporting to the head pm? Do you try to split up the code base? How do you split up QA/Production Champion/Devops? All these decisions seems to have drawbacks.
Re: Zoom Is Not the Problem – Our Meeting-Centric Workflow Is
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two problems immediately stand out here: - 45 minutes: it should be 5-10 minutes, 15 on a bad day, and literally never 45. - 15 people: this is probably just too many people in a single standup. Based on my experience, it's quite likely this can be split up into 2-3 teams that can have more autonomy, and meetings like standups will become far easier to run and far more efficient.
Last ~15 person team I was made up of the following 7 devs, a tech lead, 3 qa(1 automation, 2 manual), a product champion, a pm, and a deployment expert(devops) is 14. 14 doesn't seem crazy to me. And splitting this team up runs into some issues as well. Do you now have 3 tech leads who acting as pm reporting to the head pm? Do you try to split up the code base? How do you split up QA/Production Champion/Devops? All…
It's impossible to say without knowing the product, technology, codebase, etc. In some cases, yes, absolutely -- you would have three separate teams with three separate leads. In other cases, there isn't a reasonable way to split it up. Either way, there's no reason for the standup to last 45 minutes.
Whether the codebase should also be split up is another question that is impossible to answer in general. I can speak from experience though and say it's easy to have two teams work on the same large codebase when they're focusing on different areas, different projects, different priorities, etc. I've seen 3-4 different web teams work on the same website with the same underlying codebase without any issues at all because it was clear in advance that their work wasn't going to directly conflict in any way. It would've been hugely counterproductive to force all those people into a single standup and a single team.
Re: Zoom Is Not the Problem – Our Meeting-Centric Workflow Is
#37The meeting I find the biggest time waster is the "what I did yesterday, what am I doing today" meetings. Nothing better than sitting on a 45 minutes call while 15 people try to justify their existence to the pm on the fly. I find a slack channel called #status-updates works wonders. It persists, it's much faster to consume, it's searchable, and you don't have to read it if you don't need to.
That starts off broken and abusing the Scrum process. It's supposed to be "what I completed yesterday" and you move your tasks to done. Then "what I'm working on today" is you move your tasks to in-progress. And you raise any blocking issues that you need help with.
But it always devolves into "what I did..blahblahblah" because both PM/Managers want an accounting and people feel like they need to justify themselves (as you mention).
Re: Zoom Is Not the Problem – Our Meeting-Centric Workflow Is
#38> Weekly status updates? Project kick-offs? Quarterly and monthly planning? Retrospectives? All are carried out asynchronously, in the form of structured write-ups in Nuclino. Another criticism of a controversial tech that is actually a pitch for a product. It's a Hacker News staple. Maybe I'm just getting too cynical.
"Meetings are not the problem, but our NUCLINO (tm)-centric workflow is" - People in 2029 after NUCLINO (tm) has raised $50 billion
Sounds like a huge SAP project I was involved in. Went from being "SAP is the solution" to "SAP is the problem" in less than 3 years.
Re: Zoom Is Not the Problem – Our Meeting-Centric Workflow Is
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Team size is picked for a variety of reasons and the least important of which seems optimal stand up size.
The entire reason teams exist as a concept is to improve management and coordination logistics. A standup is a daily meeting that every team member has to attend, and in order for it to be productive it shouldn't just be robotic status updates; each member should actually be ingesting and thinking about everything that's brought up. Making sure it can be run smoothly should actually be considered an important factor,…
Hmm, my first thought for running a 15 person project isn't to run it as three different five person teams.
A couple of questions Was the company you work at a software product company? Are your teams cross functional? Do people exist across multiple teams?
My fundamental issue with splitting a 15 person team into three 5 person teams it seems more difficult to satisfy two other attributes I think are valuable in teams. That they are cross functional and flat.
Re: Zoom Is Not the Problem – Our Meeting-Centric Workflow Is
#40The meeting I find the biggest time waster is the "what I did yesterday, what am I doing today" meetings. Nothing better than sitting on a 45 minutes call while 15 people try to justify their existence to the pm on the fly. I find a slack channel called #status-updates works wonders. It persists, it's much faster to consume, it's searchable, and you don't have to read it if you don't need to.
We do daily status meetings and they are often productive. The thing is, if it's a daily meeting, it should last no more than 5-15 minutes. Also, sounds like you have too many people on the call.
Even 10 minute meeting is disruptive. Usually they are in the morning when most people are at their most productive and it takes you out of the flow. Even a 5-10 minute meeting will destroy 30 minutes of productivity from context switching.