4 ms·

We're also "Agile" now, so we spend a ton of time in useless meetings. Might be lost in translation - but agile shouldn't require a ton of meeting time and sho

We're also "Agile" now, so we spend a ton of time in useless meetings. Might be lost in translation - but agile shouldn't require a ton of meeting time and should work fine remotely. And hey, one of the principles is that you give teams the environment they need to get the job done, not the environment management thinks they deserve. Unless you mean "Agile" as, say, UK government terms it, also known as waterfall. In which case, yes, you can expect to be required to be in meetings all day in a terrible office space. Feel my pain.

g051051 7y ago
I mean "Agile" as in, whatever stupid thing our current "leadership" wants it to be. regardless of what "agile" should stand for, it was immediately corrupted at our workplace to be "business as usual with a new name".
- cs02rm0 7y ago
  Wish I had a fix for that. I've started rotating agile manifesto principles in my email signature as a slightly passive aggressive way of trying to get the message across. It's not working.
  - slaymaker1907 7y ago
    Wow, I’m definitely doing that from now on, brilliant idea.
ilikehurdles 7y ago
Agile introduces and requires meeting time. If you were doing Just Shut Up And Get It Done before, Agile is definitely meeting-heavy. Agile is agile compared to Waterfall, but overall it’s a process of no one trusting the workers to take on work and hit deadlines if they’re not in meetings telling you about it. The only constant between every Agile organization I’ve been in is the forced meetings. Everything else was up to interpretation.
- umvi 7y ago
  > but overall it’s a process of no one trusting the workers to take on work and hit deadlines if they’re not in meetings telling you about it. I mean... sometimes you need to course-correct, no? And cross pollination is useful, isn't it? "Just Shut Up And Get It Done" workflow means that people might be spinning their wheels building the wrong thing (or duplicate things) in their silos. Come on, there's got to be a few meetings to synchronize vision, scope, etc. within a team.
  - g051051 7y ago
    Meetings? Sure. Rituals? No. We have meetings because we're supposed to have meetings, whether we need them or not.
    - squeaky-clean 7y ago
      It's practically impossible to get rid of that bit of the cargo-cult thinking. It's funny because it's not even really a part of "Agile", just Scrum. The best Scrum team I've ever worked with (and best team really, that's probably part of it) decided to drop daily meetings and it was great. We did keep the end/start of sprint stuff, because that was important to us. One thing mentioned in Sutherland's book on Scrum I rarely see repeated is the idea of also delivering happiness, and the sprint "kaizen" (or "improvement"). One person on our team suggested the daily standups were dumb, and we should try dropping them as next sprint's kaizen idea. Everyone else disagreed, but he felt really strongly against meetings, so we did it, it was only one sprint. And it turns out he was entirely right, at least for our team. We kept it that way until eventually that project was completed and the team was shifted around to other teams. We can't convince any of our new teams to try any of these things, but the same dynamic also isn't there to really encourage that.
      - g051051 7y ago
        We unfortunately have some Agile/Scrum cultists who bring everything to a grinding halt with their mindless adherence to their view of how it should be done. Completely paralyzes our team when they start bloviating.

g051051 7y ago

I mean "Agile" as in, whatever stupid thing our current "leadership" wants it to be. regardless of what "agile" should stand for, it was immediately corrupted at our workplace to be "business as usual with a new name".

cs02rm0 7y ago
Wish I had a fix for that. I've started rotating agile manifesto principles in my email signature as a slightly passive aggressive way of trying to get the message across. It's not working.
- slaymaker1907 7y ago
  Wow, I’m definitely doing that from now on, brilliant idea.

ilikehurdles 7y ago

Agile introduces and requires meeting time. If you were doing Just Shut Up And Get It Done before, Agile is definitely meeting-heavy. Agile is agile compared to Waterfall, but overall it’s a process of no one trusting the workers to take on work and hit deadlines if they’re not in meetings telling you about it. The only constant between every Agile organization I’ve been in is the forced meetings. Everything else was up to interpretation.

umvi 7y ago
> but overall it’s a process of no one trusting the workers to take on work and hit deadlines if they’re not in meetings telling you about it. I mean... sometimes you need to course-correct, no? And cross pollination is useful, isn't it? "Just Shut Up And Get It Done" workflow means that people might be spinning their wheels building the wrong thing (or duplicate things) in their silos. Come on, there's got to be a few meetings to synchronize vision, scope, etc. within a team.
- g051051 7y ago
  Meetings? Sure. Rituals? No. We have meetings because we're supposed to have meetings, whether we need them or not.
  - squeaky-clean 7y ago
    It's practically impossible to get rid of that bit of the cargo-cult thinking. It's funny because it's not even really a part of "Agile", just Scrum. The best Scrum team I've ever worked with (and best team really, that's probably part of it) decided to drop daily meetings and it was great. We did keep the end/start of sprint stuff, because that was important to us. One thing mentioned in Sutherland's book on Scrum I rarely see repeated is the idea of also delivering happiness, and the sprint "kaizen" (or "improvement"). One person on our team suggested the daily standups were dumb, and we should try dropping them as next sprint's kaizen idea. Everyone else disagreed, but he felt really strongly against meetings, so we did it, it was only one sprint. And it turns out he was entirely right, at least for our team. We kept it that way until eventually that project was completed and the team was shifted around to other teams. We can't convince any of our new teams to try any of these things, but the same dynamic also isn't there to really encourage that.
    - g051051 7y ago
      We unfortunately have some Agile/Scrum cultists who bring everything to a grinding halt with their mindless adherence to their view of how it should be done. Completely paralyzes our team when they start bloviating.