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I mean, whoever is facilitating the standup should be telling people to take it outside of the standup. THat's where poo poo breaks down during a standup and make it turn into the most useless meeting. Our offshore teams used to have 1:1 standups that lasted for 2 hours. I tried talking/coaching the PM who was doing this but they said it was just their culture to be very personal with their devs.
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Dec 9, 2015 01:08
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My organisation has been 'doing' agile for a while. We're p deece at it (my team is, at least), and we only take the bits that work for us. We don't follow a methodology step by step. Cut to this year when some management changed. Now we have a new head of delivery and an agile coach that is the single most useless person I have ever met. The head of delivery has decided to hire Vanguard to bring their method in. They've formed a 'secret' team that you have to be inducted into, and I'm watching several co-workers slowly sipping down the Vanguard koolaid. I've even had the Vanguardians accuse me of 'not caring deeply enough about our customers', and that if I did, I should stop working on my current project and move my desk to a corner of the office, delivering customer-focused features. Capital 'A' Agile is the loving worst.
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Dec 9, 2015 09:06
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WE'RE AN AGILE COMPANY AND THAT MEANS WE FOLLOW AGILE CEREMONIES >has a daily stand up of 16 people, only one of whom is a developer. 13 are managers.
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Feb 21, 2016 20:26
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how long are standups supposed to go for? they go for like half an hour and we have maybe 10 devs on call?
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Feb 21, 2016 20:59
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Suspicious Dish posted:how long are standups supposed to go for? they go for like half an hour and we have maybe 10 devs on call? Daily standups for my team last maybe ten minutes. Except for a couple of QA/testing people, we are all developers. Each person gives a quick summary of what he or she is doing, the team leads tell us what they are doing, our manager asks if we have any roadblocks, then everyone goes back to work.
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Feb 21, 2016 21:34
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Suspicious Dish posted:how long are standups supposed to go for? they go for like half an hour and we have maybe 10 devs on call? I'm in a mixed team of developers and business analysts (who also QA), and there's 6 of us total. Our stand ups go for like 5 minutes, sometimes less.
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Feb 21, 2016 21:58
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Suspicious Dish posted:how long are standups supposed to go for? they go for like half an hour and we have maybe 10 devs on call? If they're going significantly over five minutes then you have too many people involved or are doing far too much in the meeting. There should not be any actual conversations occurring.
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Feb 21, 2016 23:34
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Suspicious Dish posted:how long are standups supposed to go for? they go for like half an hour and we have maybe 10 devs on call? Ours are conducted on IRC (since when we did it in person we got managers wandering in because they were curious as to how the project was going, then felt the need to participate leading to grumpy engineers stood up for half an hour) with people posting GTD-like notes, which then get aggregated onto a wiki (mostly from a management reaction that all meetings should have minutes of some form, but it's been useful for managers to see how long a problem has been a blocker, and for engineers when they need to refer back to lessons learned). Since people are pasting pre-prepared notes that they are using for their own internal work tracking, when everything's fine on a small team it takes a minute, is anyone has a point to raise that takes more than a minute of discussion a separate discussion with those relevant is scheduled. We tend to rotate the responsibility of host, unless it's a small team. One of our engineers wrote it up a while back and one of our marketing people put it on the company blog. We haven't mentioned that we've had a couple of times where the host got bored, he decided to run an RPG, by posing a question when checking-in attendance, and announcing the result of their actions during the call for "any other business".
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Feb 21, 2016 23:54
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Plorkyeran posted:If they're going significantly over five minutes then you have too many people involved or are doing far too much in the meeting. There should not be any actual conversations occurring. usually it's like "ok, i'm having issues with this" and then we spend 10 minutes on a one-on-one to figure out how to tackle something and everybody gets bored. i need to bring this up.
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Feb 22, 2016 01:09
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As a comparison, despite the agile suggested recognition that pointless wastes of time are pointless, we continue to do standup for approximately 15 minutes each day where the only thing anyone pays any attention to is whether its their turn to spout some words.
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Feb 22, 2016 02:11
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Suspicious Dish posted:usually it's like "ok, i'm having issues with this" and then we spend 10 minutes on a one-on-one to figure out how to tackle something and everybody gets bored. i need to bring this up. The way I've nipped this in the bud is to suggest (or ask if I'm the one having issues) to stick around after the stand-up to discuss them with whomever they need help from. It's worked really well to get some decisions made about technical approaches when you don't feel like bothering someone during the day directly. Now if only the teams that have their stand ups directly behind my desk could do the same thing instead of slogging on and on in their awkward ceremonies 
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Feb 22, 2016 03:27
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Cuntpunch posted:As a comparison, despite the agile suggested recognition that pointless wastes of time are pointless, we continue to do standup for approximately 15 minutes each day where the only thing anyone pays any attention to is whether its their turn to spout some words. This is my life but with derails often. I gave up trying to right the ship and just sinking with the rest of the crew. Last week our 15 minute stand up turned into 2 people talking for 30 minutes. I know this from another team member because I disconnected after 5 minutes of derail.
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Feb 22, 2016 03:32
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spacebard posted:The way I've nipped this in the bud is to suggest (or ask if I'm the one having issues) to stick around after the stand-up to discuss them with whomever they need help from. It's worked really well to get some decisions made about technical approaches when you don't feel like bothering someone during the day directly. I've seen success with "can we discuss this after standup?" a lot. Though what tended to happen was we'd go through standup, everyone would say "We have a topic for post-standup discussion" and then after the 5 minute stand up, we'd all sit down in our chairs and talk for an hour about all our different issues 
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Feb 22, 2016 03:46
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Virigoth posted:This is my life but with derails often. I gave up trying to right the ship and just sinking with the rest of the crew. We don't even get that, I guess I can best describe it in contrast to THE SCRUM PRESCRIBED STANDUP. In theory, of course, the team is largely supposed to be self-organizing and "ok lets get stuff done!" So standup is a way to go "ok here's where stuff is at I'm making progress, could use a hand on, etc". But what we end up having occur is more: 1. *Most* of the team just blathers words because it's the ritual: "Yesterday I don't remember what I did. Today I'm going to be responsive to anything that comes up from QA. No roadblocks." is pretty much status quo. 2. Our Product Owner sits on the meetings and will tend to, maybe one day a week, toss random thoughts at us at the end of standup. It's the most pointless 15 minutes of my days, and probably incurs at least an hour of productivity loss for me on average(15 minutes for meeting, 15 minutes in either direction of 'don't get too involved with anything because standup soon' & 'ok that's over let's make some more tea and get settled in', and some additional time for follow-up meetings from standup, or just plain lose-my-concentration-gotta-get-back-into-it).
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Feb 22, 2016 05:04
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I feel that pain so much. I basically lose my mornings every day until our 9:45 standup is over. I get in around 7:30 when the rest of the team shows up around 9 to 9:30 so I spend most of the morning in our public team chat rooms answering questions or fighting the first fires of the day. I've found if I don't log on to our chat until after stand up I'm much better off. This only works probably until a hand grenade is left brewing in a chat room early morning and nobody sees it. Yay DevOps that is being treated like an Operations team right now. Maybe I should start coming in to work later...
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Feb 22, 2016 05:12
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Cuntpunch posted:As a comparison, despite the agile suggested recognition that pointless wastes of time are pointless, we continue to do standup for approximately 15 minutes each day where the only thing anyone pays any attention to is whether its their turn to spout some words. If no one pays any attention the problem might be that -- some/most of the people aren't really doing anything of value to the greater team -- the lead is letting people drone on too long -- your team is too goddamn big and needs to be broken down. I've seen all of them, but a well-run standup with 8-12 people is really really valuable and will fetter out issues (even if it's as simple as "hey you're working on the same thing as I am") that otherwise would have languished. My last project's "stand-up" was literally 50 people on a conference call listening to the project manager and/or product owner say things. No one actually gave statuses. Don't think the PM understood what a "stand-up" is. Project only got that big because of typical "man-month" planning though. Sure, let's double our team size via contract hires, and not only expect them to hit the ground running, but also to do so without draining months of the existing team's time training them. Oh, and once the project's money quickly ran out (surprise!) all of the time and effort spent training them went back out the door. Yay.
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Feb 22, 2016 18:47
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Lord Of Texas posted:If no one pays any attention the problem might be that I hate noting it every time Agile enters the conversation, but there's a fundamentally greater problem at work: the majority of the team are either burnt out or mediocre. So the project runs less in an ideal "folks just dive in to get work done!" sense and more into "wait to be assigned something and then just keep using standup as a means to ensure folks know you are working on the thing you said you would work on and never ever step on people's toes." Oddly enough, this may actually be ideal, given the situation. Every time two developers work side-by-side on something that requires some coordination/integration of efforts, we inevitably end up in a room, for an hour or two, debating the practical merits of writing code like it's 2001, or accepting that a web project with modern web technologies should probably be written in modern fashion. Project Management: Ritualizing your attempts to solve personnel issues.
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Feb 22, 2016 21:17
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We rotate our "scrum master" every sprint; they conduct the stand-ups and the retrospectives and are responsible for their timing and any themes/approaches. Particularly in the retros. If its me or our QA we can get it down to sub-60 seconds by reminding people that most things are not relevant to the stand-up. Others can drag it up to 15 minutes which is painful, and have even dragged half the group to the developer whiteboard where they are drawing out the technical solution 
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Feb 22, 2016 23:10
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I have reduced my standup participation to one sentence most of the time, some boiler format of "I finished X now I'm working on Y." Then I put my phone on mute and sit the receiver down (we conf call the standup as we invariably have contractors, WFHers). Some people will start describing some technical problem they solved or are working against and it basically just shuts everyones brain off. I've found that basically anything but an ad-hoc meeting which actually has a specific purpose is worthless, or could get its worth via email which would avoid the inevitable 90 minute engineer sperg-off about little things that don't matter in context of a group. e: basically, Jumpingmanjim posted:- All project management methodologies are terrible. Infinotize fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Feb 23, 2016 |
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Feb 23, 2016 01:53
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I really like Melton and Ganatra's take on management. Two directors at Apple before and during the iPhone boom: https://www.acast.com/debug/76-melton-ganatra-episode-iv-management The short version of the story is a lot of belly laughs at how god damned awful it is to be a manager.
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Jul 19, 2016 00:55
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I'll usually just ask my teams to tell me their plan for the day. Any discussion outside of their plans for the day are relegated to huddling after (1:1 or whoever wants to participate basically). I try to keep the meeting to a minimum but there're times where the team itself really wants to keep discussing. We'll sometimes cheer if the team looks up for it but that's dependent on the team. I've seen long 2 hour standups with teams next to mine and everyone looks horrified. They end up getting stools, stand around their white board, and begin discussing the product merits of their solution. This was a team populated by 2 devs, 2 BAs, a product manager, designer, and a senior director. This was all run by a lean coach from a large agile consulting company who are "thought leaders" and whose name follows closely with that type of leader. It was the worst thing I have ever seen in terms of standups.
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Aug 17, 2016 23:02
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Shadowhand00 posted:I'll usually just ask my teams to tell me their plan for the day. Any discussion outside of their plans for the day are relegated to huddling after (1:1 or whoever wants to participate basically). I try to keep the meeting to a minimum but there're times where the team itself really wants to keep discussing. We'll sometimes cheer if the team looks up for it but that's dependent on the team. We have quite a number of these particular workers, and good goddamn are they the worst. I know meetings are important, but there is an upper limit on how many you can have in a day before your productivity suffers.
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Aug 18, 2016 03:29
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H2Eau posted:We have quite a number of these particular workers, and good goddamn are they the worst. I know meetings are important, but there is an upper limit on how many you can have in a day before your productivity suffers. Anything past a standup is loving worthless for 99% of devs.
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Aug 18, 2016 04:31
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Virigoth posted:Anything past a standup is loving worthless for 99% of devs. My entire company basically practices meetings-driven production, whereby 50℅+ of your day is meetings. Everyone in the company (finance/insurance) has some kinda gross LEAN management equivalent of standup, except they're an hour long and include a section where you track metrics and have to explain yourself if you didn't meet a goal (i.e. you're "red") the day before. I hate them and they recently got us doing it, but they know not to go over 10 minute for us devs. Otherwise, we'd mutiny.
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Aug 25, 2016 20:31
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My development team, sprint after sprint, continues to decide that *more* meetings is helpful. And every single one of them just devolves into bikeshedding and/or having to spend hours explaining the domain.
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Aug 26, 2016 11:47
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Shadowhand00 posted:I'll usually just ask my teams to tell me their plan for the day. Any discussion outside of their plans for the day are relegated to huddling after (1:1 or whoever wants to participate basically). I try to keep the meeting to a minimum but there're times where the team itself really wants to keep discussing. We'll sometimes cheer if the team looks up for it but that's dependent on the team. If you hadn't said "teams" I would have thought you were my boss.
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Aug 26, 2016 13:10
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I've been pretty good at forcing the team to keep standups sane, but the new meeting thing is designed to waste time, so  I will make this team agile come hell or high water, though.
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Aug 28, 2016 18:24
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Pollyanna posted:I've been pretty good at forcing the team to keep standups sane, but the new meeting thing is designed to waste time, so Switch to a company that doesn't suck as much. Trying to change company culture like that is more trouble than it's worth.
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Aug 29, 2016 03:50
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akadajet posted:Switch to a company that doesn't suck as much. Trying to change company culture like that is more trouble than it's worth. Oh, there's no way in hell I'm gonna be able to change that part of the company culture. It's a design-by-committee half-contracted half-homegroan management system meant to manage 5000+ employees. It doesn't do it particularly well but it at least looks like it's working. As much as I like living near work, management being relatively lax about work-life balance (I get to work home every Tuesday and Thursday, or at least do so anyway), and getting decent pay for a Software Engineer (actually, below-average pay), there's many other things about the job that annoy the poo poo out of me. Especially as someone coming from modern engineering practices. I joined the company for a chance to really drive the development and design of an application, and the biggest thing I've learned from doing that is that there's no way in hell I can do that on my own. You need a culture built around it, and that's not something I can replace or do without. The next place I work, I'll be going back to something with actual decent development and management practices. I just don't know what to do next, after this job.
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Aug 29, 2016 13:43
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OWLS! posted:If you hadn't said "teams" I would have thought you were my boss. I'm wondering - is this a good thing or bad thing since I try to be a minimalist in terms of meetings?
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Aug 29, 2016 18:38
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Shadowhand00 posted:I'm wondering - is this a good thing or bad thing since I try to be a minimalist in terms of meetings? From an employee perspective, it's an amazing thing. Short, dense meetings with "go offline for the detailed tech stuff after we're done here" is pretty much my gold standard at this point.
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Aug 31, 2016 16:16
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Many thanks to anyone initiating a meeting who can actually be bothered to write a simple agenda
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Aug 31, 2016 17:05
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spacebard posted:The way I've nipped this in the bud is to suggest (or ask if I'm the one having issues) to stick around after the stand-up to discuss them with whomever they need help from. It's worked really well to get some decisions made about technical approaches when you don't feel like bothering someone during the day directly. This is what we had to do. The trick is to do it in such a way that doesn't offend anyone - some people don't like having their conversations interrupted and told to wait. It makes them feel like children getting caught by the teacher. But it's absolutely the right way to handle things. We just pushed all the authority onto the Scrummaster, who was able to "table" discussions, make a note, and ensure the conversation continued with the necessary participants after the standup.
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Aug 31, 2016 19:28
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OWLS! posted:From an employee perspective, it's an amazing thing. Short, dense meetings with "go offline for the detailed tech stuff after we're done here" is pretty much my gold standard at this point. The meetings we have we do this, but then the people needing to talk never do.
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Sep 4, 2016 13:03
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TheresaJayne posted:The meetings we have we do this, but then the people needing to talk never do. That's really up to the person running the meeting to make sure they do talk. If they don't, they hear about it the next day (or after lunch). We generally try to have these followups right after the standup for the people who need them.
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Sep 13, 2016 23:52
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(I don't know if I should be resurrecting this but...) I love Agile, and I'm fine with traditionally trained PMPs, but whenever you mix the two it's like seeing a kid in a candy store. Except instead of candy it's meetings. I don't know why PMP people love meetings so much, but every time one of them discovers standups it results in the same two-step story. 1) The standup is rescheduled for one hour because all real meetings are one hour long. 2) An invite is sent to the #Project_Foo_Management list because meetings are for managers.
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Dec 3, 2016 20:41
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I love me some hour long standups.
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Dec 3, 2016 21:24
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I find that standups don't work unless you have four or fewer people, or you have an rear end in a top hat with a stopwatch who will interrupt and shut you up if you go over one minute. IMO: Standups are for broadcasting just enough information to route further direct communication. Details are for after. If organizational communication is so poor you legitimately have something everyone needs to hear, then reserve time afterwards and talk to everyone.
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Dec 4, 2016 00:08
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I saw a company where the standup had slowly devolved over a several year period to the point where it was an hour long and everyone stood up the entire time.
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Dec 4, 2016 01:15
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I think we found the right cadence to stand up recently. We have a physical agile board and someone points at the cards. "What's up with this?" "Ok this one?" When we've gone through the in progress or in test cards it's "Anything else not card related?" "Ok we done" Since frequently 2-3 people are on a card most people never even have to speak up.
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Dec 4, 2016 02:15
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