Comments on: Meeting Madness? Don’t Do it!

By: Leonard

Leonard — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 21:44:52 +0000

While I’m getting my second helping of popcorn, so, how long did the madness continued? I see a linear trend, so I get the point, more meetings, less meetings, weekend meetings, the defects/bugs where fixed at a constant rate. I predict about 10 weeks later the last 200 defects were fixed. Still wondering.. did they see the light?

By: Bruce Benson

Bruce Benson — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:29:10 +0000

Kendra,

Every situation, of course, must be assessed on its own merits and needs.

Only interacting when a specific issue comes up has some limitations. I’ve seen cases where everyone thinks things are going fine, until they get together and talk about what they are doing. Then they realize someone is going down the wrong path or someone is duplicating what another is doing, etc.. So periodically getting together as a team is necessary.

Quick stand-up meetings where everyone gathers — stands — and the meeting only runs 10-15 minutes can be useful for keeping teams focused on common goals (and for team identity and building).

Generally, I find many meetings are just “fixes” for other things are are not going well: goals constantly changing, schedule constantly changing, scope constantly changing, no other way of getting information is available, etc.. So when suddenly more meetings are needed, there is often an underlying cause that needs to be fixed. Once that is done, the need for so many meetings can go away.

Bruce

By: Kendra

Kendra — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:11:59 +0000

Do you really feel that daily meetings are helpful? We are a small team of 2 developers, 2 designers, and 2 PMs. I feel these daily meetings are not effective for us because we are all working on different projects; if we run into issues, we are a small enough team that we talk about those issues in the moment.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 21:51:49 +0000

Mark,

What I liked about Scrum (Agile management method) was the “burn down” metric. It is central to Scrum management. As you know, metrics are all too often “tweaked” and start to lose their usefulness as a management tool. My fear is in organization that likes to “fix” measurements that in their hands Scrum and other Agile techniques will suffer the same fate.

Our old common company is trying to use Scrum. This should be a perfect laboratory to see how the two worlds collide. So far, based upon quarterly financial releases, I don’t yet see much change.

Thanks

Bruce

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 17:12:11 +0000

Bruce;

Spot on article. Definitely brings back memories (some even good!). I’ve been looking at Agile Methods and am convinced there is some good potential. For example take a look at the daily scrum meetings and I think you’ll find it tries to provide a framework that builds on some of the better aspects of the information exchange while leaving some of the artificial “this is how we drive the team” methodology out. It will be interesting to see if there is real world feedback on how the agile and traditional pm methods get integrated over time.

-mgk