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I've read books about "Agile development" and I've read many, many articles about it, and I've read many conversations here on Hacker News on the subject, and I
by lkrubner 4y ago
I've read books about "Agile development" and I've read many, many articles about it, and I've read many conversations here on Hacker News on the subject, and I've engaged in many conversations with co-workers about "How to do Agile right" and yet out of all of that, the only rule I've found that easily transfers to every company, large or small, and which automatically improves team dynamics, is simply:
"Prefer small meetings over large meetings and prefer one-on-one meetings most of all."
Large meetings will inevitably include some people who don't need to be there, and who are therefore bored and disengaged.
By contrast, if you have meeting of just two people, both people are automatically essential to the meeting -- automatic because the meeting would not happen unless one of those people needed to say or ask something of the other person.
- blowski 4y agoSimilarly, one of my rules is "never set up a recurring meeting". The effort of recreating it every week forces you to consider whether you need it every week.
- ThePadawan 4y agoThis really depends on how busy the participants' schedules are. I've had to explicitly set up a recurring weekly meeting 4 weeks in advance to meet a higher-up at least once per week, because otherwise finding 30 minutes of their free time would take ~3 weeks.
- blowski 4y agoIn that case, I'd book it in 3 weeks in advance.
- ThePadawan 4y agoGlad that works for you! I can't imagine my manager would find it very amusing if I had to tell them that I had to delay a bugfix or feature by 3 weeks because I did not schedule my meetings with enough foresight.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- blowski 4y agoI wonder if those higher-ups have fully-booked out calendars because people keep booking meetings just in case they need them.
- ThePadawan 4y agoI can't tell you that - but I can tell you that I personally cancel calls 2 days in advance if there is nothing to discuss, or cut the call short 10 minutes in once it becomes clear there is nothing more to talk about. (I want to emphasize that I'm talking about this higher-up following a Manager's schedule, not a Maker's schedule [0]. At this point in my career, I was the [suffering] adapter between the two.) [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
- zogomoox 4y agoLet me tell you about SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework). If your company adapts this monstrosity you'll have two day long PI-planning meetings with many many people (90+ in my case) every quarter.