Just started a new contract. Daily scrum for the week and a half I have been here has been between 40min and 1.5hr. all at 09:00 as well. Way to screw up the flow of the day. Massive international company. How the **** do these places survive!
If it's on Teams and you have 2 monitors, who cares?
But if you want it to last less time then suggest doing it in person. People tend to take less time if they are actually standing.
Please don't change the typo in the thread title.
How would the "scum master" show his or her worth if they didn't have a massive annoying meeting at the start of every day, eh?
You are our prisoner, do not pull out early or there will be consequences.
You have been warmed. <<--notatypo 😆 🤣
It on Skype (for good reasons). I can't concentrate with all the talking. Been caught out before with things like this before and muting them! I just don't understand how anyone thinks this it is a good idea. Diversions running off into details about problems etc.
do not pull out early or there will be consequences
That's what she said.
Please don’t change the typo in the thread title.
How would the “scum master” show his or her worth if they didn’t have a massive annoying meeting at the start of every day, eh?
Lol! Very true, although in this case I think the scrum master should take control.
Our production meeting used to take over an hour, all stood up. Most of that was the plant manager micro managing every decision and plan, rearranging every decision and plan, and moaning about how long the meeting was taking.
New plant manager = less than 15 minutes and that feels too long.
It'll be a fine day indeed when the whole scum & sprint thing gets booted for a new flavour of the month.
Daily scrum
WTF! 🤣🤣🤣
They're meant to be short.
Been caught out before with things like this before and muting them!
Being able to tune into the meeting when you hear your name and respond as if you have been paying close attention for the past hour is definitely a skill that takes practice 🙂
Something very wrong if you're spending an hour every day in a scrum meeting...
I hope they have supplied some virtual biscuits 😉 😜
It’ll be a fine day indeed when the whole scum & sprint thing gets booted for a new flavour of the month.
If done correctly and people don't become a slave to the process / allow flexibility / customisation to the particular project they can work well.
And I bet that 45 minutes over what a scrum should be is not factored into sprint planning...
I am so glad I work for a large, very successful and profitable company who manages without absolutely none of this bollocks.
Something very wrong if you’re spending an hour every day in a scrum meeting…
Project looks to be a "Set up to fail" one. 🤦
There appears to be lots of IT workers on here so this thread seems like a great opportunity to ask. What is it with IT and taking business bullshit bingo to a whole new level? Scrums, journeys, stand ups, product owners blah blah blah. What happened to just getting shit done?
Appear to spend more time talking about doing stuff than actually doing stuff. Then inventing ever more weird and elaborate ways of talking about stuff, then wondering why every project is a thousand years behind schedule. I can hazard a guess as to why 😀
Damn it! @SSS beat me to it! thats what i get for opening a ton of threads and working my way through them!
@funkmasterp You should try working in oil & gas everyone else are amateurs.
in this case I think the scrum master should take control.
To answer seriously, is nobody else saying "hold on a sec, this is getting silly"?
Have you sounded out any colleagues? Get a few on side and take it to them as a group.
What happened to just getting shit done?
Believe it or not, there are a lot of different ways of getting shit done when it comes to IT. The jargon was developed to increase people's vocabulary so they could properly articulate just how wrongly things are being done in the current project.
Then disagreements started about how to express that things were being done the wrong way so an industry was born where people enable others to complain that the way they are complaining about things being done the wrong way is wrong.
I don't think it is bullshit. Traditional waterfall projects were taking too long to deliver business benefit.
Hence new agile methods were developed to deliver incremental business benefits faster.
Scrums, journeys, stand ups, product owners blah blah blah. What happened to just getting shit done?
Think of the actual work that has to be done - its easy to see why individually and collectively people will be receptive to any opportunity to not actually spend time doing it.
If it was my job to repeatedly slam my fingers in a filing cabinet door I think I and my colleagues would find numerous opportunities to spend time to devise and discuss more effective ways of doing that job so long as that time was spent not actually having to doing it for a while. 🙂
Never thought of it like that 🤣
I don’t think it is bullshit. Traditional waterfall projects were taking too long to deliver business benefit.
Hence new agile methods were developed to deliver incremental business benefits faster.
genuinely can’t tell if this is a piss take or not. Well done sir
Agile - a way of getting a bit of what you wanted, usually a bit later than when you wanted it. Then the dev team disbands leaving you to sort out workarounds for the bits you didn't get.
Waterfall - a way of getting all of what you (thought you) wanted, usually a lot later than when you wanted it. Then the project stops and you have to sort out workarounds for the things that have changed since the olden days when you started the project.
PRINCE - a way of creating many many many documents about something that never quite happened. You end up doing more or less what you did before the project, but the prime contractor has made a few million quid along the way.
Ouch...sounds like a serious chat is needing to be had to get people to focus on the 3 things they should be reporting - what wasn't achieved yesterday, what is aimed to be achieved today and what blockers are stopping this being achieved. At a guess, this might be happening but then sparking a whole discussion in the meeting. Scrum Master should be picking these issues up and then contacting individuals after the call to see what they can do to help remove the blockers - are they trying to do that on the call?
It is an incredibly mind-numbing meeting for everyone...best of luck getting things improved!
I used to take part in scrum meetings as the content person. We generally kept them to 10 mins or so.
How, you ask?
We had a rule where you had to plank while saying your bit. That tended to keep people focused and succinct.
🙂
I've worked at a company where the "standup" lasted at least an hour every day, was a small company and the CEO was very micro-managey. Total waste of time, would have to sit through discussions about projects I had nothing to do with.
Our team daily standup is fully async. Just drop a short message in slack about what we're up to and any blockers. Team does cross several time zones though...
To answer seriously, is nobody else saying “hold on a sec, this is getting silly”?
Have you sounded out any colleagues? Get a few on side and take it to them as a group.
Spoken to another guy about it also new isha and he is also amazed.
Opening up to the pain.
My job title: Scrum master.
I work with 4 teams of 5-7 people a team. We meet each morning to talk over any noteworthy achievements from the day before, anything blocking current work, or any support needed. None of these takes more than 15 minutes (as they run back to back), none of them are about or for me, tey are for the team. Anyone doing criticising Agile/Scrum should read the half-arsed manifesto as that's clearly what you are actually using. Doing it properly isn't a perfect methodology, but it's better thn a lot of others, doing it wrong gives those of us who know what we are doing a bad name.
As for the buiness bull bingo, it's a short meeting where people should 'stand-up' - it's hardly convoluted.
We have a daily meeting, rarely takes more than 15 minutes. It's quite useful as it's the perfect time to quickly mention things that will affect the rest of the team, ask for help when you're stuck on something, check your interpretation of a requirement is correct, etc. If something needs more than a minute to explain we usually arrange a call (or just stay connected to the daily) with just the people needed.
But you do need discipline to avoid either going into too much detail, and to avoid the meeting just being team members listing what they did yesterday, and what they're going to do today.
They’re meant to be short.
Yep. Daily standups, so called because in the days when we were in the office, you 'stood up' when talking about any blockers/issues etc on the work you're doing. Ours, even with 20+ people are 20 minutes long.
There appears to be lots of IT workers on here so this thread seems like a great opportunity to ask. What is it with IT and taking business bullshit bingo to a whole new level? Scrums, journeys, stand ups, product owners blah blah blah. What happened to just getting shit done?
This is a good question.
The problem with IT is that nothing is really very well defined - there are thousands of ways to do any particular job, some work, some don't, some look like they'll work but eventually cause more problems later. There are far too many options for everyone and far too many unknowns. This is why the waterfall method (design everything, build everything, test everything) ends up with massive delays basically every time.
Agile was created as a way to just get shit done, as you say. You start by doing something, and then adapting your design and plans to how that went. The problem is that just like with the technology, few people really understand how Agile is meant to go, so you end up having massive meetings every day which wastes time. If the OP is spending an hour in a standup talking, it means that a) people don't know what standups are for and no-one's aware that its damaging or is able to do anything about it or b) there's too much to talk about, which means there are too many problems going un-solved.
Badly run projects are badly run regardless of the methodology they try to use.
Yep. Daily standups, so called because in the days when we were in the office, you ‘stood up’ when talking about any blockers/issues etc on the work you’re doing. Ours, even with 20+ people are 20 minutes long.
It should be: Paul do you have any issues? Yes? Ok I'll get Fred to come and talk to you. Molgrips, any issues? etc. Not an extended meeting about the problem itself.
It should be: Paul do you have any issues? Yes? Ok I’ll get Fred to come and talk to you. Molgrips, any issues? etc. Not an extended meeting about the problem itself.
Yep, it's exactly that. We go through our incidents, dev ops board for stuff assigned to us, and change requests. Exactly that wording too! 😁
Our meetings were running over the 20 min mark a while back but now they're down to 15 mins normally.
Hell, our sprint planning and retrospective session isn't even 2hrs!
Teams has been a right blessing in disguise in our organisation. Gone are weekly 4 hour management meetings x 2 (that's a whole day gone), replaced with a weekly 1 hour meeting (cancelled if nothing coming up) and one two hour meeting every two weeks.
Same with other meetings, all now run to time, even if 'in person'.
What happened to just getting shit done?
People realised the wrong shit was taking too long to get done.
All that bullshit you refer to, when done correctly, means the customer gets a working product sooner and further opportunity to shape what they actually need as the delivery progresses.
The issue comes from orgnaisations, often large multinationals, who proclaim 'we are working agile now'. They do this without spending the time up front to ensure their business is operating in a manner which supports this methodology. The end result often combines the worst parts of agile with a waterfall delivery approach. When that happens you get
- Daily scrums which last way to long and end up as management status updates where employees scrabble to justify their existance (rather than identify blockers that the scrum master helps resolve)
- Software releases that don't actually deliver features, just an incremental step of the codebased until...
- A waterfall delivery of the 'Minimum viable product' being rolled out. Just with no documentation, building on old code, and not meeting the customer requirements
Any many more issues. I call it 'Badgile' because frankly that is what it is.
Working in a company that gets it much more right is quite refreshing. Scrum masters actually actively working to unblock things that hold software developers up. Developer getting on with developing features and not having to spend 1/3 of their time distracted by environment or other issues which someone else is employed to resolve. Feature deployments after one sprint, which are then verified by the client and either signed off, or looped back around with amendments.
It works. A lot more shit gets done and more importatly it is not actually shit, it is what the client wants and needs.
When I'm sat in my office alone and bored - just me and the dog - I remind myself I don't have to deal with this sort of shit! 🙂
Just drop a short message in slack about what we’re up to and any blockers
This is what I don't understand. Why isn't this the standard way of doing things?
Getting everyone together for a meeting seems like a total waste of time when everyone could just update a Slack/Teams channel at the end of their day with the three questions and then read everyone else's updates first thing in the morning.