Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

One of _the_ most effective meeting strategies that I've seen recently, is our Technical Project Director who leads our 30 minute scrum each morning, starts off with a structured five part agenda in the form of an Email (Strategic Issue of the week, planned critical Must hits of the week, P1 unplanned emergencies, Daily Sprint, and, if we have time, tasks to be accomplished that week (mostly the jira-tasks with due dates landing that week)) - and, as we _scream_ through the agenda (people rarely have more than 20 seconds to respond, provide updates) he rapidly types all updates and responses into the email.

When we get to 10:00 (Our scrum runs from 9:30 - 10:00 AM) he announces "It's 10:00, and this meeting is done." and hits the Send Button on the email.

I realize that this can be all done on a Wiki, or other mechanisms, but it's surprising how _reassuring_ it is to know that I have on my laptop/iPhone a detailed list of all the strategic/Commitments/P1s/Sprints/Tasks that the org is worried about today/this week. Also, it's a very efficient mechanisms for the person taking notes. Their job is complete before we leave the room at 10:01 AM.

And, additional bonus - when I have my Staff meeting on Mondays, at 11:00 AM, half of that meeting is simply going over the relevant parts of the email that was sent out at 10:00 AM.

Sounds like an awful way to start the day.

Like hamsters in a treadmill, just looking for the next two weeks, and never ahead enough. ( I know this by experience).

The scrum process is fine when dealing with bugs, or small incremental features, but it is very ineffective when dealing with completely new products or when trying to deal with innovative features.

Scrum throws all creativity out of the window. By creativity/innovation, I mean doing completely new things that are even a magnitude better, or just faster processes that what you have.

Creativity is a thing that just gets killed by planning. Often it happens when you are dealing with a problem. But the scrum process, puts blinders on developers, as you are supposed to work only on what you planned/committed to, and nothing else, like a good horse just watch the path you are told to by your manager/pm/team lead, and don't get distracted by anything else. Kills any instrict motivation, and sends a group towards a path of mediocrity as it delegates all decision making/creativity on the team lead (manager, or mp).

If your process is a straitjacket for the people involved, you have a problem with the people, not with the process.

We use variants of agile at work. Daily stand-ups, email notes, two-week iterations. My daily standups look a lot like the grandparent, except they're at 4:00 PM instead of 9:30 AM and last only about 10 minutes.

But everyone recognizes that the process is there to guide us and not to constrain us. If your report is "I did nothing for the project today", well, that's your report. I had one feature where my report for every single one of the first 4 days was "I tried this and it didn't work." Followed by 2 weeks of furious coding where I didn't check anything in, followed by dumping 2500 lines on my code reviewer. I didn't get any grief from my coworkers (got lots of encouragement, actually), because they recognized that it was a hard problem, there were a lot of constraints, and we didn't even know what the constraints were until could put something up on the screen and start testing it.

I think that it all depends on the PM. If your PM understands that it is OK to do nothing sometimes, it is completely different story than PM who expects some work every day.

It nails down my problem with most of the methodologies: they all do depend on people involved, yet there is very little talk about the right attitudes.

(FYI, according to Harvard Business Review and similar publications, the direct management is one of the main reasons why people decide to leave)

(BTW, why you downvoted him?)

The another problem with the hour is that -- I don't know how about other people -- but I'm the most productive in the early morning, or very late night. My mind is completely focused on work then.

If there's a meeting, or whatever, it means that my output will be seriously hurt. That's another problem with such methodologies' descriptions: it is very tempting to response me that I don't fit to the team or I should try to change my habits, even if, in the right environment, I'm always the most productive team member.

I agree with you about the hour. What I did on my last major consulting assignment is to get in at 0600 and get lots of stuff done before any meeting was threatening to happen.

Well, this is a "Manager's Scrum" where each of the organizational managers/directors/leads identify what needs to be done. The individual contributors mostly work out of Jira at their own pace.

Also, I work in an operational organization, so, a lot of our design patterns are pretty well laid out, and so most of the creativity comes from improving the patterns (which we do in design review or our bi-annual architecture refresh) more than creating anything particularly innovative during the week. We're mostly focused on execution and hitting commitments - and tracking them and writing them down at the beginning of each morning makes sure we know, and hit those commitments.

Very cool. I'd be interested in hearing more effective meeting strategies from others. There are tonnes I read about in books but as someone who learns best from examples, I really appreciate anecdotes like yours!

That is fascinating; I may have to try that.

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