I've yet to participate in a useful meeting.
Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them
31–40 of 46 posts
Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because you have a widely experienced team and you don't know who might have the answer.
Even with that, a email would suffice. The scheduled, mandatory standups interrupt everyone the same as any other meeting.
Email interrupts too, and probably worse because it happens ALL THE DAMNED TIME. Slicker systems like Campfire can be better, but you're still dealing with asynchronous versus synchronous communication. Synchronous is almost always more efficient.
The whole problem with the OP's premise is that his root cause analysis is flawed. He sees that most meetings are inefficient, and therefore assumes inefficiency is caused by meetings. But meetings also provide other efficiencies. As long as the added efficiency outweighs the cost, meetings are a net win.
Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them
#33Ok, I'll take the bait. I need to make a web page about standups and just start posting links to it. It's the same question time after time, and I keep thinking I'm going to forget part of the answer. Standups are not meetings, at least not like I know them. Some teams have "standups" while doing a morning walk. Some meet at the coffee shop. Some have stopwatches and pigs and chickens and all sorts of other things. S…
Unfortunately these daily meetings hardly ever work out that way - In Scrum, for example, a daily project team meeting occurs. It’s called a daily scrum, or stand-up. The stand-up has guidelines, including limiting the meeting length to 15 minutes. My experience is that this never occurs – stand-ups usually run on for at least half an hour, during which I’m subjected to anecdotes, show-offs, excuses and, if I’m reall…
You make an excellent point. Meetings are basically "team work breaks", where everyone gets to stop working but must remain together. Usually, team members discuss work, as that's always something these people have in common.
I'm contrasting this with the typical work break, where the team breaks into individuals for 10-15 minutes and everyone goes to a different location (water cooler, phone, bathroom, outdoors to smoke or stretch or walk).
Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even with that, a email would suffice. The scheduled, mandatory standups interrupt everyone the same as any other meeting.
Email interrupts too, and probably worse because it happens ALL THE DAMNED TIME. Slicker systems like Campfire can be better, but you're still dealing with asynchronous versus synchronous communication. Synchronous is almost always more efficient. The whole problem with the OP's premise is that his root cause analysis is flawed. He sees that most meetings are inefficient, and therefore assumes inefficiency is caused…
Interesting, how is synchronous communication ever more efficient than asynchronous communication? It might be more efficient for the person asking, but rarely for the people being asked.
Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even with that, a email would suffice. The scheduled, mandatory standups interrupt everyone the same as any other meeting.
Email interrupts too, and probably worse because it happens ALL THE DAMNED TIME. Slicker systems like Campfire can be better, but you're still dealing with asynchronous versus synchronous communication. Synchronous is almost always more efficient. The whole problem with the OP's premise is that his root cause analysis is flawed. He sees that most meetings are inefficient, and therefore assumes inefficiency is caused…
> Synchronous is almost always more efficient.
Synchronous is almost always more efficient when there is very close to zero processing time necessary between receipt of communication and response to it.
As you get away from zero processing time, the efficiency of synchronous communication drops very, very quickly.
Also, that's assuming 1-on-1 communication. Even when a synchronous exchange is between two parties is efficient, every unnecessary party whose work is blocked because they are a party to the meeting drops the overall efficiency considerably.
Which is why meetings tend, in practice, to be very inefficient if they aren't well planned: while synchronous communication can be efficient for certain communications and a properly chosen set of participants, meetings often involve lots of people unnecessarily bound up waiting for other people to complete synchronous exchanges, and often involve subject matter where asynchronous exchanges would have been more efficient even for 1-on-1 communication.
Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them
#36Ok, I'll take the bait. I need to make a web page about standups and just start posting links to it. It's the same question time after time, and I keep thinking I'm going to forget part of the answer. Standups are not meetings, at least not like I know them. Some teams have "standups" while doing a morning walk. Some meet at the coffee shop. Some have stopwatches and pigs and chickens and all sorts of other things. S…
Unfortunately these daily meetings hardly ever work out that way - In Scrum, for example, a daily project team meeting occurs. It’s called a daily scrum, or stand-up. The stand-up has guidelines, including limiting the meeting length to 15 minutes. My experience is that this never occurs – stand-ups usually run on for at least half an hour, during which I’m subjected to anecdotes, show-offs, excuses and, if I’m reall…
That just means you're not doing a good job running the meeting. If it's not working for you, change the things that aren't working so they are.
When you find you're getting away from something that was working... just go back to it. If there are anecdotes and side stories, develop a system where you can stop them.
If they run long, that's when a timer can be useful. Whether it's a series of 2 minute timers or a 15 minute one.
Don't slam an entire system because "it 'inevitably' stops working," just go fix it.
Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them
#37What I dislike about this is how preoccupied people are with how the rules of daily meetings should be enforced. As if it is a given that a) there must be daily meetings, and b) they must be defined as rules. I would rather we focused on the goal instead: The dev team must be coordinated, and they must not deviate enormously from the schedule without the project manager at least knowing about it.
So here's our process for ensuring this:
Nothing.
It turns out that when you have skilled and motivated people working without process handcuffs, they are able, and actually eager to self-organize.
- How do we keep in touch? We set up a HipChat room where we discuss things both on and off topic asynchronously. Is our process "we will use a chat room for daily chitchat"? No. We use it because it makes sense, and when it stops making sense, we do something else instead.
- How do we catch one dev needing help? He says so. Then we can meet up and pair program or discuss the issue or whatever makes sense. Do we have "pair programming tuesdays" to enforce this? No. It just happens when it needs to.
- How do we make sure one dev doesn't drift off procastinating for two weeks? Turns out that's not really a relevant problem for us. We find that skilled devs given freedom and responsibility will live up to it. But on the off chance that it happened, we would notice the lack of work flowing from checkins and code review and work tasks.
- How do we make sure the project manager knows of any problems? We tell him. Simple as that. And usually on the way to luch, he asks "things going ok?" and we answer "yep" or "slightly behind it seems, we might delay task X till next week". Do we have a "pre lunch meetup" process to define this? No. It happens naturally because we all have a desire to cooperate.
- How do we make sure the devs don't shit in the sink while on the bathroom? We could have a process in place with a post-bowel-movement checkup rota. Or we could enforce pair toiletgoing with a senior architect. But we decided not to. It turns out the devs have a sense of hygiene, and therefore shit into the toilet bowl of their own accord.
Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them
#38I swear I see a variant of this article every week, and the discussion is always the same. TL;DR make sure your standup meetings are incredibly fast.
Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them
#39Ok, I'll take the bait. I need to make a web page about standups and just start posting links to it. It's the same question time after time, and I keep thinking I'm going to forget part of the answer. Standups are not meetings, at least not like I know them. Some teams have "standups" while doing a morning walk. Some meet at the coffee shop. Some have stopwatches and pigs and chickens and all sorts of other things. S…
Unfortunately these daily meetings hardly ever work out that way - In Scrum, for example, a daily project team meeting occurs. It’s called a daily scrum, or stand-up. The stand-up has guidelines, including limiting the meeting length to 15 minutes. My experience is that this never occurs – stand-ups usually run on for at least half an hour, during which I’m subjected to anecdotes, show-offs, excuses and, if I’m reall…
Well, a lot of places that are "doing Agile" (whatever that means) are really just doing waterfall with some different rituals and labels. E.g., the 30-minute standing status meeting, which has nothing in common with the Extreme Programming stand-up meeting except that people are standing. (Sometimes. I've seen places where they do the daily "stand-up" sitting down.)
If you're working in a place with a screwed-up culture, a daily stand-up will make a number of the dysfunctions obvious. Removing the meetings doesn't make things better, it just makes the problems subtler, and therefore harder to fix.
Anyhow, I also see plenty of places that make this work well.
Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them
#40Part 32904 in the continuing saga of "my stand-ups suck, so all stand-ups suck" . Sorry, not even going to bother with non-snark response. I did that the 32903 times before, and someone else already took the bait. But I'll bite on this though: > All meetings are terrible. Meetings can be awesome. I've been to meetings full of great new ideas. I've been in meetings that saved companies. I've been in meetings in which…
I think there's a No True Scotsman effect at work here: "meeting" is the general abstract superclass used to refer to "people talking at a table." However, "meeting" has some very useful subclasses--for example, debate and negotiation. Real things get done in debates and negotiations. But people don't think of those at "meetings", per se, so "meeting" gets stuck with all the negative connotations and none of the positive ones. (In est, a useful meeting is not a True Meeting; it's something else.)