Had a manager who tried to do this for us, let us work while he take notes at the meetings and email us the details unless it was a meeting we were needed for on the technical level. After about 2 months, he got called into his bosses boss' office and called out for us not being in enough meetings. Productivity didn't matter, goals met didn't matter, our department "looked bad compared to other departments because the headcounts for meetings were off". So now everyone goes to every meeting, productivity is down, morale is down, our boss caves to everything upper management says, but hey, our headcounts are immaculate.
@@Londubh sadly that is corporate live. Doing the work doesn't matter as much anymore. All that counts is statistics. In my work groups that have low quality of work but are 1 buck cheaper are more highly in favour than groups that deliver the highest standard of quality and spend a buck more for it...
Those companies should be more thoughtful with the meetings they’re holding from the sound of it - speaking from experience At a certain point everyone’s brain bandwidth dissipates
Once in a daily I told the scrum master I wouldn't be working anything on that day because I would be attending to urgent matters in other team, the next day I was asked to communicate my advance from prior day... They're useless.
100% Once to twice a week for "what's everyone working on, and ad hoc as requested by a worker who is having trouble. Ideally immediately before lunch, or with a target end time about 15-30 min before quitting time (so that it won't break up useful work time, yet still provides time to coordinate following among those who need do so)
As a SM, I concur. I ask my team when they want to meet and I don’t meet more often than that unless they ask for it. It’s whatever works for the team. Blah blah meetings are awful.
There's a concept called the "Manager Schedule vs the Maker Schedule" Managers make decisions and set the strategy. Makers are the ones who build things. A manager can easily take a 15 minute meeting because meetings *are* their workflow. A maker can't, because the meeting *ends* their workflow.
This is the thing that people forget about the real role of a CEO. 95% of CEOs are stuck in one meeting or another, constantly dealing with literally all the shit. From other companies, investors, managers. Everything. Everyone looks at the glam of being a CEO, but you end up having zero life.
@@idn ahh. I was just thinking of having to stand up for 10-15 minutes before every shift and be given a debuff as a result. But your correct. Not the same as a Scrum.
@kairon156 dont know why these guys are being weird, in this context scrum just refers to morning meetings and shit. Its the exact same as what youre talking about
As a PM, I try to explain this exact concept to my boss, but he forces us to continue having these meetings. PLEASE. JUST STOP. It completely interrupts MY day too!
PM isn't even in the Scrum Guide. If you're being forced to be with Dailies by the manager, that's three red flags the Scrum Master should deal with (but isnt). You have now learned the value of a proper full time Scrum Master and not a double-role. Our Daily is 5 minutes, it's just the devs talking about how they're gonna achieve the goal. It's wonderful. PMs and stakeholders wanted to join. I said "nah". Manager told me he thinks stakeholders and PM should be there. I asked why. He said "they should be in the loop for how it's going". "Why?" "Because it's important they know if it's done yet" "so.. our bi-weekly review isn't fast enough? How about we let the stakeholders see the solution as soon as it's done?" "Oh yeah that works too"
@@Flamecrestification your experience comes from a different field and a different size of company. That doesn't really apply to where I work. (Hence why I'm leaving).
@@Flamecrestification I would like to see how you can speak about "dev's speaking about gonna achieve goal" within 5 minutes. I am in a small team and more of operational level, so for myself response is more like "everythign is fine", but developers can speak like 2-3 minutes each and we have 3 of them. I would really like to know how it is achieved.
OMG this takes me back!?.. I had a corporate meeting and my direct boss is sitting under the conference table. He tugging my leg for snacks. I was young and confused with this situation? I wonder why he can do this and can't I join him. Not fair, get me out..., done my 8hrs and I'm tired. Why don't they just give us memos? 😮💨
@@maksymisaiev1828 they have the Sprint Backlog in front of them and they run through the stories. They give it like a percentage of done-ness and if they're running into issues they need help with. Very efficient, every story gets talked about for like 10-30 secs (30 if someone's got questions or concerns)
I’m a team lead and I changed our daily standups to be at the end of each day. We have a flexible schedule but most of us wrap up our days by 5:00. So I set standup at 4:45 with a hard stop at 5. My team loves it because it’s less time wasted trying to remember what was worked on, and there’s less temptation to have side convos in standup that drag it out another 20 mins
I think I'd put it with a target end time of 4:45, but nominal end time of 5:00. The nominal end time of quitting time allows for leaving immediately after, but the target time allows for quick followup among those who need
"Gather around everyone! We'll discuss the 12 reasons why this won't get anything done and what we're incapable of doing." ....the most incompetent get elected in by bogus reasons....
Most people don't realize that a good manager is not someone who sits above their workers looking down on them and passing decrees like a king. A good manager works FOR their employees making sure that they can be as productive as possible and hopefully, happy while they are being productive.
Its wild that this gets lost in translation. The daily Scrum is only for the developers. The product owner has no say in the daily scrum. The scrum master only has to make sure that the developers have the meeting and that it stays under 15 minutes. No one tells the developers how do do their work. The sprint backlog is a plan by and for the developers.
@@user-yh8ce7tg8l haha! Well if you think of a game company that releases a game with a gazillion bugs and performance issues(redfall), that causes the game to fail(aka group wipe)! I could see the healer playing the QA role lol, but it does make sense they're aggroing the bugs as well. If they aggro too many bugs, that will also wipe the group/kill the game due to inhibiting progress.
The analogy goes even further if you include logistics and IT. Both are basically healers. Keeping everyone else up and able to do their jobs while being vulnerable and likely to get blamed for shit out of our control. (I work in receiving/warehouse.)
I hate retrospective meetings. What's the point when you are a multinational team which can't have anything improved from anyone's observations from an outside coworker who haven't lived and won't live the same experience?
User story refinement and spring planning are the worst, 20 hours in a week each to tell everyone what they're going to do which could have been done in a single message via chat or email.
@@cagtbd That's not the purpose of restrospectives nor is it applicable to multinational teams. A scrum team is a small team consisting of members that are multidisciplinary that can replace each other. If the members are spread over several countries and can't even relate to each other's experiences sufficiently you shouldn't be in a scrum team at all.
It depends on the person. I personally would like that but at the same time, since I'm quite new to some things I kinda want supervision... It really depends on the person
I ran an indie dev company in 2010-2012. We had a meeting on Monday morning followed by an early/extended lunch/pizza party. We discussed that weeks goal for each staff member. On Friday afternoon we did the same. We discussed what targets were hit, what targets were missed and what we can do better next week. I don't know if I did right or not, but I like to think I created a good work environment. I never had to discipline anyone, let alone fire anyone. So I like to think I did.
If the team's feedback is positive, it is right. The whole point of Scrum is to have a framework that can be evolved by the team to make the team efficient and effective.
@@toolittletoolate Counter-point: self-improvement is good. If I get corrected, it's an opportunity to improve, and an opportunity for someone else who didn't know to improve too, and it hurts no one. If you can't stand harmless correction, that's on you and your fragile ego, not on the "pedantic". People, don't be worried to be called names for correcting others. Be polite about it, just like you would any conversation with strangers you just met. Stupidity and ignorance aren't the same, at least ignorance is fixable. You are not a bad person for giving someone else a chance to improve, no matter how small the improvement.
A stand-up meeting is supposed to be important things that are happening today and relevant safety review, and then asking if anyone has any questions for the team. Most days, it should be: "Nothing important today. Any questions for the team? Alright, get on with your work."
if most days is "nothing happend" than dont have the meetings in the first place thats the point thor makes here any amount of meeting time gets you out of your workflow so plan a meeting in advance when you need it but stop pointless meetings and if anyone has a question there should already be channels to ask them
This so hard - empower the team to bring up anything relevant then get back to fkn work. No status updates, no stakeholder updates. For the grunt worker only - gtfo everyone else
That’s a different kind of standup. The kind Thor is describing is an Agile development process where each person provides updates on the work they did and the work they plan on doing.
Honestly, hospitals do this so well. We have patient handover every morning and evening. Who do we have on the ward, how are they tracking, any significant changes, anything that needs doing by the next shift, anything of note that was done by the prior shift, who's on point for patient care? Generally takes a couple minutes per patient and there's rarely too many patients on a single ward for it to be done in more than about 20 minutes. Very straight-forward. If you have a lot of small moving pieces, handover should be a case of "who is currently working on what, do they need backup, if no then carry on, if yes then who can help out". Done.
@@hyronharrison8127stand ups are for grunts only. The point is to find out if anyone is stuck on their tickets and needs help or if there are any blockers for their tickets.
Companies in Denmark are doing 4 day weeks now. In the four working days everyone has focus periods in the office -signaled by a red light at their workstation. That means nobody can disturb them unless its a real life emergency. Then at allotted time after lunch there is mingling time, when everyone can do discussion, before you go back to focus hours. Productivity increased by a lot more than the day that they are taking off - which is paid too. Work 30 hour weeks, get paid for 40,hours, and do more work in total than before. Focus working MATTERS.
And the crazy thing is, companies still won't employ these strategies. They all banter back and forth about efficiency and getting work done but it's never been about that. It's always been about pointless bureaucracy and making sure you bend the knee. At least there's a couple sane countries that actually want their people to be happy lol
I have one of the most "cushy" jobs in the world, at least physically. Because the 10% of the time I have to show up physically is also extremely sensitive on a cognitive level, "brass" have long since figured out that the down time is more than completely necessary. It's when "new brass" comes in and tries to shake things up, like a villain shooting at your feet telling you to dance, that my job really becomes the hardest in the world. I worked 2 years in the Mental Health housing unit at a prison, and it was the best two years of my career because we almost always had every officer (including brass) and therapist and nurse on the same page.
@@ssun9074there also is a all around The world stupid thing which is pretending to Be busy. I mean, if you did finish everything you can prematurely, and have to wait for another briefing (or else, New data to work with, for example) - you cant Just chill, you HAVE TO pretend you do something. Cause if u dont, you Will get your ass handed to yourself. By another Very Effective Manager, who thinks "more work = more effective".
@@wahbl997 Exactly. The number of stories I've heard about people being actively punished for getting work done quickly and efficiently. There's no other answer for it than its intentional mind games made to wear people down and punish good, intelligent workers for actually using their brains rather than tapping away at a keyboard like a sheep for 8 hours a day
@@ssun9074I mean it's the same reason so many CEO's are trying to force people into the office instead of letting remote workers just do their thing. It's only ever been about power-games and control, and stroking the CEO's ego.
Fair, but do you think any of us are paying attention at the meetings? Everyone has practiced staring at the speaker even though your eyes have glazed over since middle school.
As a fellow PM, I try to make everything I give my team extremely straightforward and only necessary to their jobs. They still miss things. Unfortunately, it seems to be human nature. @@Londubh
When I worked at a particular government agency, my department head was surprisingly really good at this. There were no department meetings, just the various department heads would meet. Before each meeting, they'd go to each respective section chief and have a sit down, talk with them for 5 minutes, and then relay that information at the meeting. Once the meeting concluded, we got an email giving us the meeting minutes.
I love how he acknowledges that it takes time to “get into a work flow” There’s SO MUCH evidence showing that people work best when they can just “get into a flow” AND that that “flow” dies down as the day goes on, and the best way to prevent that burnout, is by having multiple small breaks, instead of one “big break” If you take a “big break” then after a few minutes, your body switches into “relaxation mode” because it thinks you’re done with work. But if you just take a quick 2 minute break, you’ll have time to “catch your breath” or “reset your brain” but you’ll still be in “work mode” and be able to get right back to it
It used to be the opposite for me, I would have to work full shifts and break when I got home, now I get 15 min breaks sprinkled in the day and that breaks my flow immensely.
A mandated one hour lunch break kills my drive to do anything and everything. By the time I get back and if I do decide to eat I just wanna nap, not work.
I have literally 45 minutes of standup every morning, 3 separate 15 meetings. So fucking stupid, and my boss doesn’t have a spine to do anything about it either.
Daily Scrum should be 2 minute updates and 15 minutes total. Sounds like you have a very big team or a lot of discussion happening that could be happening elsewhere. Are you refining backlog items in the Standup?
Your daily standup should be to address blockers, not to give status updates. If you're on track, be like "I am on track, no blockers" next person. If each person has to monologue everything they did, its not efficient.
Is not only not efficient, but it really is 0 useful. The point of doing them early is to review if there's any problem for the day or any change of plans that needs to be made for the sprint... It is not a status report
This exactly lol i was rly confused by thors solution bc most of my standups either require 0 attention or save my ass bc we can cooperate on a problem
that's exactly it, it's a round session to identify blockers and determine how to react. The blocker could affect multiple stories so that's why the whole team is involved to get a quick action plan in place. Then the scrum master works the rest of the day on removing impediments while the teams codes. This is why the meetings early.
i've always said 'if you're doing scrum exactly you're doing scrum wrong'. Scrum only really works for a small handfull of groups. My company does a standup on monday morning and 'nothing to report' is the standard, so within 15 minutes we get everything done and the people who are running into issues or have announcements to make on some project or another get thier time without the meeting dragging on forever. the meeting is about an hour into the day, i dont know about other people but i dont struggle with that, but thats mostly because i'm also moonlighting as sysadmin so during that first hour i'm always doing my routine checks and reports.
Totally agree. Do what is best for the team. Evolve as needed. Daily Scrum is there to set the dev team up for success that day. Different teams need different things to succeed.
I start my workday with the standup meeting. I wake up literally 15 minutes before it starts to use the restroom and feed my pets. Over the course of the meeting, I finish becoming alert. For me, it works well.
Wait, you mean the PM's Job isn't to constantly ask you for estimates, turn those estimates into deadlines, and then constantly wonder why deadlines are getting missed. Oh and pinging you in slack all the time
That's a very lazy PM, as I have fulfilled a variety of projects I must say I barely ever did this for a specific reason There is a time where you arrive to the project and learn anything and everything from the ones involved not the stakeholders and guess what... You find your answer, avoiding to ask estimates to people...
And my personal favorite, changing requirements without telling you and then getting upset at you for having to redo the work because they pivoted priorities and said nothing. And yes I checked my inbox, there was no email about this.
There's a reason there's not a PM in the Scrum Guide. Product Owner deals with PMs. And a PROPER PO learns to say no more often than yes, and knows better than to give deadlines. You have a horrible relationship with Scrum and for that I'm sorry. I wish I could show you all how great it can be when you have a competent Scrum Master and a competent PO in a competent truly Agile environment..
Oh god, yes. I am living that life right now. I recently made the mistake of telling my PM that the thing I'm working on should be finished by the end of the week. Well, turns out some unforeseen issues came up, and I wasn't able to finish by the time I thought I'd have it finished. I even put in some time over the weekend to try to finish it up but wasn't able to. Monday of the next week, my PM basically chewed me out for not being done yet, despite telling him I was working unpaid overtime on it, and rather than take that I left mid-meeting.
@@jasons_encore Yeah, I agree. No need to ask for updates. I can often help remove blockers though, so I have my devs tell me any that they have incurred. I also give them any updates I have, like cancelled meetings or product requirements.
Instead of daily standups in the morning we do an async conclusion of our day EOD in Slack. Works great. It is basically 5 minutes of work at the EOD for each Team member when they feel they can spare the time.
My previous job was fucking addicted to scrum, Kanban, and “lean manufacturing”, what it meant was a mandatory meeting every morning where we talk about what we did to improve our productivity the day before. We had layoffs a week ago, I was cut. Can’t help but think of all the mfg time wasted over the year I worked there. Could’ve been the difference in me having a job or not.
How was 75 minutes of meetings at week hindering productivity? The entire point of the Daily Scrum is to ensure the team is on the same page for the daily.
@@idn well for one its soul sucking, and as the short said the meeting isn't first thing its set back a bit so no sense trying to get into the grove before that, now you hour meeting has wasted 2 hours of productivity. (Just an example) On top of that, losing an hour out of a 10 hour day is 10% of your productivity every day! Also asking every worker to constantly be "improving productivity" means they won't be focusing on just getting work done and will be frustrated because there isn't really anything the front line can do to "improve productivity" without approval from management who will probably just take credit.
The most functional scrum I've been a part of was at the company where the every dev started at 9 and the standup was at 9:05. Then there were no other meeting unless we needed to seriously plan or discuss something in a larger group.
This is how it's supposed to be and the daily meet up is supposed to be while you get some coffee or tea to start your day. It's literally "so what are you going to do to achieve this planning?" That's it.
It just doesn't help us to hear what X Y and Z are doing, really it's just to make sure we're all busy and not blocked... Behind the guise of 'productive meetings'
Fucking hell. I just came out of a shitty scrum meeting, literally lost exactly 30 minutes before that just like you described, now Ill need another hour to really get into my workflow and then its almost lunch. Dude, you narrated my day as it was happening. This is fucking brilliant! :D
If only there was something else you could do before the standup like.... Reviewing your board, checking your emails, taking care of your timecard from yesterday, or spending the time learning lol. Oooor you could talk with your team and have them move the standup to a time that works better? Or you could complain online 😊
@@zpa89How would moving the standup change this circumstance in any way? Also no one said that they do absolutely nothing before scrum, the point is that you can’t do serious, focused work in that time because you know you’re gonna be pulled away in 30 minutes.
@@Bruhbruhbruh-rn9qv well the entire point of this chain is that having the standup apparently ruined the entire morning, and means you don't start work until after lunch. So if you put it at the end of the day, or at the very start, maybe it works better? I have 6 teams and most of them have moved their stand-ups. Also, like I said, there is some work you need to do that isn't "serious, focused work." Why not do that before standup? Hell, a ton of people still work remote or hybrid. Just work through your standup and try to listen to the chatter idly. I have ADHD and sit in on a few stand-ups every day + participate in my own and I just work during them.
I'm a fellow game dev (Technical artist) and I've worked on projects with stand ups, they are a complete waste of time as you said. Now we do one 30 min meeting a week, right before lunch on a Monday and it's SO much better.
I work in a small bespoke engineering firm. We have recently decided to only do meetings when a significant milestone of a project is achieved. And honestly it works so well. Just do meeting when you actually have something to talk about & share with everyone
I'm with you on that. I work in a DevOps environment and we have daily standup meetings with out team. We talk about what we are doing for the day. I kinda get the point of it, so that we have the opportunity to announce what we are doing and can reach out and help others if we think we can contribute to their success. But as you said, our meetings happen at 10:30am every day and last at most about 30 minutes. That means little gets done before the meeting and after the meeting it's about an hour to lunch, so little gets done after the meeting until lunch. And after lunch people slowly transition into the 'go home soon' mode. I don't like it at all, but my manager loves it. Sometimes I'll skip just because it interrupts my work for the morning, but I'll use some other excuse.
Scrum has its benefits when applied correctly, but it's not easy to do. For instance, the stand-up meeting should be the very first thing in the day, and should last 10min or less, it's a good way to kick-off the day on good energy, reporting progress on the project. But for that to work, you need all your team to be on time, and a manager who can resist the urge to micro-manage and who can refrain from speaking at the meeting. When done correctly, scrum will push the team to work faster and stay motivated, but it's not intuitive. (It'll also favor speed over quality, and run the team to exhaustion, it has many downsides as well)
The reason they're called "stand-ups" is that you're supposed to stand up the whole time and be _physically uncomfortable_ throughout, to encourage you to keep things short. Not only is this ableist, but the pandemic and rise of distributed teams threw any merits of this concept out the window.
if that's the case, you're missing the point of standup. A lot of things you might be talking about during stand up can be done on 1x1s (not the boss to employee 1x1, like pair programming 1x1s). Your stand up per person should be very short - what did you do yesterday, what are you going to do today, and what things might be blocking you. Yesterday, today, blockers, or Y-T-B. Yes, I do scrum every day. Is it obvious?
The people responding to my comment are explaining this shit like I don't already know. 😂 Trust me, I know the purpose (and etymology) of stand-ups. They just aren't being done well where I'm currently employed. But they are serving a purpose, so I'm not going to champion changing them right now. Gotta pick my battles. 😅🤷♀️
The main problem I'm seeing is: the way the agile manifesto is written, it doesn't want or require you to have the full meeting every single time. It just wants you to have a fixed slot where _if needed_ you can ask for help, raise concerns or FYI people if things are not going as planned. And if _that_ takes more than 15 minutes, then you've got two problems: 1. you're really bad at timeboxing this and 2. your project is FUBAR. But all people (especially in management) hear is "more meetings = good".
The main problem with that last part is that management != scrum. The first principle is that management doesn't get a say over the team. The moment you violate that principle, scrum goes out the window.
@@drakesilmore3760 Fully agreed! It's sad to see, because on a theoretical level, I am 1000% onboard with what agile attempts to be. But in reality, you end up with situations like the one Thor describes in the short.
@@Nozdormu1985 I see it as a lack of commitment and trust from the people in charge of the company. Autonomy is only a risk if you don't trust your employees to be able to handle that freedom. Usually management wants all the benefits of agile without having to give away too much control, and it turns out they are too neurotic to commit to what scrum requires.
@@drakesilmore3760Yeah, scrum has been compromised by management. It's supposed to be a decentralized system but management turns it into an authoritarian nightmare.
I like how you gamified office work. The shop I work at runs 24/7, so we do a 15 minute(or less) briefing at the start of shift, going over what happened during the 2 shifts prior. It's a good way to start the day. I would lose my mind if I had to start work, then stop, just to try to start again.
The daily scrum is supposed to be this 15 min briefing. If the Paladin goes to it alone, nobody else but him will be there. The daily scrum is like the briefing the group has before entering the dungeon. If the DPS are not there, dungeon is dead already.
@@Grobloum Well put, you perfectly pointed out how it should be by picking up on the metaphor. The real issue with scrum is that almost nobody ever seems to do it right.
@@Grobloum I think he meant that the Paladin (manager) spends time with other managers in the other departments in the company, or whatever relations he must have with other companies or clients. When he spends time there, his own team doesn't have to tank all these meetings, as they should be working on their own assignments.
@@PassiveDestroyer the daily should be at the beginning of the day. But fortunately we don't usually have a hard schedule, but a flexible one. So you can't really put the daily very early or the people that start a bit later wouldn't be able to join without changing their prefered starting time. So if you want to be flexible, the daily ends up starting late. And some people mainly just read emails and chats before the daily, even if the daily is in one and a half hours. I see a lot of value in a short daily meeting with the team, but it's very tiring when there is too much detail or just rambling. If you need to talk about something in detail, prepare it and share the outcome in the team chat or schedule a different meeting, don't brainstorm in the daily.
My small department does a once a week Monday morning stand up. In that meeting, our boss gives us the major events for the week, and we all share any major events that we know are coming up, or any major milestones that have been accomplished, any VIP work outstanding that needs to be completed. Granted, we are a six-person team not counting our boss. So this model might not work for a 50-person team. But I can almost guarantee you can break those 50-person teams down into sections. And then each section just sends a rep. And oh look, we're back to paladins and DPS.
I'm on a data science team so a bit different than software. When our team first started (about 4-5 years ago) we tried the daily standups but realized they are not valuable. Instead we have ONE meeting every two weeks for general team updates. If we have blockers, we just reach out to whoever or our managers to get them resolved. This model has been working for us for about a half decade and I don't see it changing :b
Also a data scientist, I couldn't even imagine forced daily meetings. My boss will call me once every couple of days for an update on my work but that's about it. I suppose we aren't direct revenue generators so the pressure is less than devs
@@maninthebox1678 yeah, especially since our work is usually much slower paced (EDA, research, etc.) providing a daily update on that is a bit much lol
Daily meetings for developers can't really be compared to other fields I imagine. The knowledge is often spread around the whole team, so not only do you profit from what the other are saying, you also can seek or give help in those meetings. Also since developers work very closely together it's good to see if stuff you do overlaps for example. I can't really imagine any other job having the same prerequisites. It's like multiple surgeons working on the same patient at the same time. You need some coordination for this lol
The only stand up I think is valid is a 10 - 30 second, "Is anyone struggling with something? Who's free enough to help." Of course asking for help is always viable but sometimes you need to be reminded.
The only way I've seen a version of Scrum work is where a manager walked into office, ask my team collectively when it would suit us to have a quick talk through, we say "right before lunch" and they come back 15 mins before lunch. Always check with your team if a communication strategy (scrum, stand ups, emails, anything) works for them! In this case, stand ups clearly weren't working for Thor&Co!
I don't mind *occasional* stand-ups. At my current studio we have a whole 1 stand-up per week and it's scheduled right before lunch so no one has to worry about "I need to figure out what to do between the stand-up and lunch." What stand-ups are good for is noticing "wait, why is Steve tasked with messing around in that part of the codebase, that's Alice's responsibility" and getting work reassigned or going "Jake is new to this area, so let's have Sam meet up with him after lunch so a 6 hour investigation turns into a 30 minute guided walkthrough."
As a Scrum Master, I'm completely fine with that if it serves the team well. Schedule meetings just for the sake of meetings is not what Scrum is about.
Scrum is good if done right. Ideally standup isn’t after 30 minutes of a work day starting. We actually do stand up as the very last thing of the day for our overseas devs and very first thing for our local devs so it doesn’t break workflow like that. The retros, sprint planning, etc can be annoying but that’s what the product owner is supposed to be for so I do everything I can to streamline it. Our sprint planning is usually “hey I already looked at all of our stories and brought them in, let me know if anything else needs to be added as you go” and our retros are “here’s what went well and what didn’t” and then I take it all and create action items that are brought up in the next stand up. There’s ways to streamline I also don’t worry about standups being short and cancel them a lot if it’s just “doing this, no blockers”. Im just like alright, then I’m not gonna add a blocker to your plate with this meeting haha
Problem with that is that "very first thing" in the morning might be different for different people if flexible working hours are allowed. Some people in my team starts at 6:30 and some at 9
@@knm080xg12r6j991jhgt You can argue that MOST companies can't do scrum right... But "agile" is awful? What you wanna go back to waterfall? please say sike.
Scrum meeting: Product Owner: shut up and listen if attending Scrum Master: shut up and listen, interject to keep on track Developers: discuss what will be achieved if everyone leaves them alone and brings them snacks and perhaps the things that won't be achieved even with snacks. Anything more than this is a full blown meeting. Post scrum meeting: Product owner and Scrum master have a conversation and do reports, and there should be enough information coming out of devs updated Jira, DevOps and so on to quantify for the management. Any developer who reported a particular blocker or issue can go to one side and have an ad hoc to try and isolate and quantify the issue. This then becomes something the PO qualifies with the PM. In simple terms: if your business is developing software, and your software developers are not developing because they are in meetings, then your business has become having meetings.
This is what I do as a design producer. It’s my job to jump in front of the train of requests from idiots that think designers are robots. I then make a decision whether this info needs to be a quick meeting or an email or a slack. Most of the time if the designer is capable of understanding what’s needed I just slack them. We also use a management ticket system basically the same story I assign a designer blah blah. I love being a producer tho. It’s fun sometimes
I can hardly remember the last time a scrum meeting actually took 15 minutes. We did an asynchronous standup via slack for a bit and it was wonderful. You get it in, you post what you would have said in the meeting and then when you have a natural break, you can scan the posts to see if anything was relevant to you or needs your input. Then leadership felt that we weren't "achieving the goals" of the meeting. So we went back to 20-30 minute stand-ups.
Finding out that I'm not the only one like this has lifted some weight off my shoulders. Like others, I'm struggling with impostor syndrom, and just assumed that I'm a lazy piece of shit, while everyone else is a demigod and they go right back to work after meetings. This video has definitely put a dent in that perception. I feel much better thanks to this video. Thank you, Thor!
They're not working they're just experienced at looking busy 😂 It's amazing how many places are mostly concerned with everyone looking busy, more than actual productivity
I feel exactly the same way (programmer also). The daily morning meetings just kill my energy and enthusiasm that I usually have at the start of the day, and where I work they usually drag on for 45 minutes, sometimes an hour. I don’t want to jump back into work afterwards; I want a break. It kills the momentum I had, and I usually don’t get it back until after lunch.
15 minute standups work great in my department. It is literally the first 15 of the day, you punch in and we start. It is a great way to get everyone on the same page and having it before we even sit down we don't waste time.
Same here. I'm the pm of 3 teams. Have 3 15 minutes dailies first thing in the morning. But indeed, my main job is making sure I invite as few people as needed to let work in peace
Yeah, gonna add to this. We have a standup 2 hours into the day. That's enough time for us to get our items in order before standup, open some files, start working on some stuff. Our team consists of 5 devs, so our standup usually lasts less than 5 mins on a productive day where everyone's got something to do. It's just hey, I'm workin on this ticket today. K, next. Works out well for us.
I've never had a standup last ONLY 15 minutes. They always last 30 minutes to an hour or more. This has happened at every company I've worked for. It's especially bad if the meeting is between multiple offices in different time zones. Then you end up having them at weird times during the day. I worked at one place where we wouldn't find out what we need to do for the day until the afternoon.
THANK YOU. My first job out of college was on a scrum team and it felt like every day was filled with 3-4 meetings. It was some of the most asinine shit. Then management was like “why isn’t anything getting done?”
Hi, I'm the guy that prompted this question. This is exactly what I meant with that you probably had a bad Scrum Master. The Scrum Master should have noticed that this isn't working for you as a team and facilitated a different solution. I.e. end of the day Daily, a just-before-lunch Daily. Nowhere in the Scrum Guide does it say it HAS to be at 9:30 or whatever. I consider myself a proper Scrum Master - my teams are happy, understand why we're doing what we're doing, and unlike the PM/producer I can take a few sick days or a few weeks of vacation without the team falling apart. I facilitate this kinda shit. Not making shit like Dailies easy on the team is a sign of a struggling (if not downright bad) Scrum Master. Either that, or your team doesn't want to accept new ideas and experiment (in which case it's, surprise surprise, also the SM's job to facilitate this).
On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of SW devs have (in my opinion) terrible people skills. Meaning if you give them too much leniency, they will NOT talk to other teams, NOT give any thought about what other teams could potentially need from them and wonder in the end why everyone hates them.
Exactly. This is one of the takes PirateSoftware I don't agree with. A good SM/PM shouldn't do more than 1 meeting a day if there's no emergency. And those should be super quick as well. And if devs don't read/communicate then how the heck do they expect to get any work done properly when everyone's in their own little world thinking the other departments are at fault or kept in a vacuum without knowing the context of tickets outside of technical descriptions/requirements? Because I agree that a lot of devs, artists, and designers are full of themselves. Not because they're bad people, but because they're human and without communication people assume the worst by default. I feel Scrum gets a lot of flak from "real workers" and are taken for granted but then when they find themselves without a competent SM/PM then the workflow suddenly implodes.
A good Team Lead can do the communicating of vital information without daily scrum. No need to call the whole team when most day and most people just repeat what they said yesterday or have to listen to irrelevant information. Once a week seem about right to me.
I work in Cybersecurity. We meet up once every two weeks for progress updates with managers like CISO, director etc and its a 30 minute meeting. Our higher ups like CISO, director handle any updates exec wing may need by asking the team lead for each team. Team lead usually knows what is going on with his group so he just asks us to fill in any blanks for him and handles the rest. We may get 1 or 2 extra meetings during the week if something critical pops up or we need to meet with another team on collaboration help with a server or deployment. Let your workers put in DPS and management do the boring mangement stuff. We already are handling the workload of getting something deployed we dont need to be giving a heads up every single day or week when it could be an email.
You should have a coffee talk with your Scrum Master. Raise your concerns. The Scrum Master should facilitate a discussion about this to help you (and the team) feel like it's less of a burden.
@@Flamecrestification you’re absolutely right brother. However, I am in the middle of getting certs and tryin to make a jump to cyber security… so I’m going to take this free time at work to blast through certifications. A good employee would absolutely do what you said though ;)
@@kinggoooch2857 hey you do you man, I'm just trying to help everyone in this mess of a comment section because somehow I feel like I need to help haha. Good on you, and good luck in your career
I 100% agree. My role just changed at the company I work at. Which also means my manager changed as well as my team. The team I work for now has a ton of demoes, standups and just all round meetings. It drives me insane jumping from meeting to meeting without ever being able to build up any form of focus for more than an hour at a time.
This video makes my nostalgic for my days as a DPS character. These days I'm stuck doing support. "The DPS is dying, please spam heals!". "The tank needs backup, please also heal the tank!". I could just kill the boss myself, but you bail out a DPS party one time... Moral of the story is if you have a heal spell, don't put any points into it.
Ah, the fools who think the healer has to heal the tank. I learned this dichotomy for the Tank-DPS-Healer trio as such: The healer saves the DPS The DPS saves the Tank The Tank saves the Healer Any time the healer has to heal the tank, or the DPS have to protect the healer, or the Tank has to overextend for the DPS, the team dies.
@@XoIoRouge If you do it right, DPS should not be taking any damage because the Tank has all of the aggro. If DPS is taking damage, they are either standing in stupid, pulling threat or raid wide damage. Healer should be able to focus on tank while spot healing the DPS. Source: I play a healer fairly often when not DPSing.
I work in construction and this is exactly how it works. Nobody needs 4 electrical trainees and 3 sheet rockers in a meeting with the head engineer and building managers.
Typically scrum isn’t used in something like construction. You’ll read random articles online that say they do, but they’re often full of crap. Scrum is primarily for IT projects and software development.
Everyone works remotely so morning standups are the only time we get to see each other and chat before we record the actual standup meeting which itself takes less than 2 minutes per person.
Thor, I'm like maybe a year younger than you and while i don't work in the software/dev industry its so nice to hear good management techniques from someone who has been on both sides of the corporate hierarchy. Luv your posts even tho im not a gamer. Common sense isn't common... Most depressing thing to teach good young workers. Thanks
Amen. This is **sooooo** true. I have been pushing constantly to reduce the amount of meetings that we do and what do I get in return? An endless amount of meetings, a daily schedule that is *crammed* with standups, brownbag sessions, retros, backlog grooming, sprint planning, pairing sessions, weekly demos, knowledge sharing, wider group updates and showcases... Please stop for the love of god!
But one thing that annoys me about that criticism is that you do not need to run pure Scrum. People treat it more like a religion than a system to be implemented in the way it fits. You can easily make these meetings weekly, or even biweekly. A good project lead and / or manager works with the team they have, not the team they dream of. The methodology will not change the fact that most people implement systems without thinking about their team's needs.
I feel like scrum cut down on our meetings. If you do it right there shouldn’t be many meetings outside of sprint reviews and planning. Planning shouldn’t take long if the PO did their job during the sprint.
Going to the Agile Manifesto People and Interactions over processes and tools. My job as a SM is to protect the team from noise and finding what works for team to deliver. Every team is a little bit different.
@@teebob21yeah I have no clue what people who say "meetings all day every day" are doing. Standup every day, backlog refinement middle of sprint, sprint retro and planning at the end.
In this situation we have a support. I took that role when I was still in university and working for an architectural place. I was updating and reprogramming project logs to help managers, setting up monthly lunches in the break room for the warehouse workers and drafters, and checking out cheaper/better ISPs and IT providers for the Boss.
Oh my GOD, the web design company I used to work for did these god-damned stand-ups DAILY. I didn't think anyone else felt the same "nothing gets done before lunch" attitude that I used to feel! This is so accurate!
Had to do mock scrum style for a group project in college. Every meeting boiled down to “Alright, nobody did shit, let’s cram tonight so we’re ready to present tomorrow.”
Something about hedgehogs having "big picture ideas" and foxes being about nuance. Basically what I'm hearing is I'm happy I'm a fox, because I'm clever enough to know what the big picture is but the hedgehogs don't realise it. Meanwhile, they're useless for everything but talking to clients, and even that's debatable because they're too happy to bend over backwards to add new features while we're still working on the last set of features.
I know people are mostly talking about his advice here but for someone like me who has little understanding of these systems, his usage of videogame terms was great and really made this easier to understand
@@RaptorJesusthe problem here is however that PM needs the information from the team also to do his job correctly. Imagine PM coordindates 1-3 DPS to do one thing, 4-6 dps to do another thing. Now lets say 1-3 starting to struggle a lot. If PM is not able to adjust the situation adhoc - lets say by adding dps 4-6- the project will go a dangerous route. By all means SCRUM is not perfect but looking at previous non-agile projects it's the best we have at the moment.
Thanks someone brought this on. I hate interruptions you get nothing done with that sometimes it’s so bad that I have one whole day wasted with unproductive meetings. But you have the same workload with out them and some finger pointing
I think this is excellent proof you could fire most of the employees in a lot of these office settings and still deliver the same level of productivity than if you leave things the way they are now.
That's not what this is saying in any shape or form. Not sure how you managed to draw that conclusion, probably because you want it to be the truth for some reason.
Weird assumption. I worked in both and your second example is just unamanged chaos. Great for devs to some degree but at the end of the day company also wants to see results.
We do a thing in Australia called a toolbox talk at the start of each work day. Work starts at 6am. The talk covering the mandatory stuff for the day goes from 6am to 6:10am. Work starts at 6:15am. Everyone gets the message, works for 3 to 4 hours, has a meal break, works for another 3 to 4 hours. That's your day.
@@lck0ut348But there was no discussion of what info is in these emails, you are just assuming it. All the original commenter said is that people tend to not read meeting emails in general.
@@frosthammer917 Will agree that people don't read emails, short or long. or just selectively interprets them however they want. Then again meetings are equally worthless(not all). I lost so much time during mandatory meetings until my manager simply stepped in. Have only had a handful or less of "meetings" now in a half year. Got sooo much things done..
My specialization is in projects and this is what I want to be honest. I haven't been in the games or media industry but producers or production coordinators should be doing this it gives them real meaning and it gets everything done.
Preach man. We didn’t do Scrums, but at my old job we had a staff meeting every Monday at 9:30, and then I had a second because I was a dual employee at 10:30. They were always useless. Basically, you can’t really get anything done during the meeting, and I couldn’t really get anything done between the meetings, and by the time I had actually become productive we’d break for lunch. Two half hour meetings basically wasted the entire morning.
We (foodservice staff) have a huddle right when the Full-Time evening shift comes in, but most of the cooks are able to continue working while our director gives us the updates before everyone gets back to their stations.
Absolutely valid point. As a PM my whole role is to facilitate my team doing their work as best as possible. They absolutely don't need to lose their whole morning to a managerial meeting.
people dont use it correctly. imo. daily standups should only be attended by those who need help, but instead everyone shows up or is asked to and 5 minute meeting lasts 30 minutes
I don't usually need help (my input is usually a two sentence status update). But if I and the other one or two most proficient team members usually stay away, who would they even ask? By the point where they ask for help it's usually already too complex for most of the team to solve (or solve quickly).
No, the whole team should show up so that the person who knows the solution to the problem is there to listen. It should not be more than 15 mins ever to figure out who knows a solution to what issue.
This is one reason I love the way my job handles it. Last job I had we had a million meetings for scrum, awful time. Stand up at a bad time (XX:45), planning meetings, review meetings, etc. all week Current job does OPTIONAL daily standup at XX:00 (meaning I start with it and don’t eat time before that). We have ONE planning meeting for the week, so work assignments are clear to everyone. That’s it, nothing else needed. So much more productive, we get so much shit done.
I met a Scrum master who talked about how they do meetings in their team. They basically do the daily meeting, with camera on, every person(that can ofc) goes on a Plank Position, they are allowed to talk as long as they can hold it. They have to say the most important parts of what they did/are doing/have issues with during that, if not, the talking torch gets passed and that's it. Not super productive in some cases, but it sounds like a fun way to diversify their day :D
I had to do scrum for a class once in college (that alone should let you know this was a stupid class) and my only thought every meeting was “what do I need to say to get this lady off my back as fast as possible”. Scrum is what I would expect from a teacher/boss who thinks you have a severe mental disability.
I have witnessed an incredibly efficient scrum at a few companies/projects. They work much like what you describe here. Async standup. Let PO/DM/TL know where you are at on things at the end of the day. They digest it, report it, and address anything that needs addressing. The following day, they update stakeholders. Weelky retros (not sprint retros) are held on Fridays as a happy hour. They talk about things, BS, and get a feel for where things are at. I did 15 years of consulting, 5 of FTE Dev, and 5 of engineering management. I have adopted this pattern and have done a lot to remove the pain points of scrum. My God it works wonders -- until upper management figures out a way to screw it up.
We follow agile in our project. Morning scrum is 1 hour where I have to speak for max to max 5 mins but need to be attentive in case a question comes up. Same for evening standup, then there are sprint planning calls, refinement calls and retrospective calls. Easily takes up 2 to sometimes 6 hours a day. Also the story point system. Where story points are assigned based on the priority by Business, but work is tracked based on hours. So a story can be literally 2 story points (out of 5) for business but might require 30 hours of development effort while a 5 sp story requires 2. But the higher ups expect the 2 sp one to be completed faster as it has less points. Also the fact that in most planning call, you get have a analysis task for the story that is being planned, but you have to provide the estimate there and then before the analysis. Today only I suffered as someone else estimated a story te be 2 story points. I was given 2 days to complete it. I had to literally spend entire night awake as the effort required was to change all major pieces of code, test them, document them, write a guide for other people in them. The work required over 1000 LOC and I was just put into this tech stack and application two weeks ago with no training or KT.
and then there's my company that just started introducing standups. The funny thing is that I didn't even realise I was doing the thing Thor talked about but looking back, I arrive at the office at 9, do literally nothing for 45 minutes and then after the 15 minute standup is over, I only then start preparing to work. The worst part is that our daily standups are completely useless. We reach out to others anyways if we have relevant issues and our teams are mixed and literally no one else knows or cares about what the others are working about because it's completely different from their own work. Worst is that no one ever has any "blockers" because if we say we do, that standup is now a 40 minute CBT session of how can we deal with it or who should we involve to help out.
As a developer scrum is awesome especially when the meetings are like 2hrs into the work day, and start an hour before you leave. After the meetings and refocus-ing there's only 4hrs left give or take
As a scrum master and agile coach. This is actually valuable. I'd also like to say, you're doing the dailys wrong if your product owner can do them in an email. And if they usually last 15 minutes, you're also doing it wrong.
The analogy at the end really connected some things in my brain! I worked at a company thats pitch was “use our software, cancel meetings”, and our culture followed. Got a new manager with a different “style”, and my job got much more frustrating. She refused to be that paladin, thinking it best that we all knew what was going on in the frontline lol
At my job, we started having a "crossover meeting" at the end of day shift/beginning of swing shift. The entire point of the meeting is to go over issues the previous shift and pass along projecrs that need to be finished. It also has a covert purpose of getting both day and night shift in the same room to reduce tensions that gradually build up. No one from day shift would ever show up. They would all leave anywhere from 1 to 3 hours before with the exception of their team lead. You can see how this created problems. Recently management has shut down it down.
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Had a manager who tried to do this for us, let us work while he take notes at the meetings and email us the details unless it was a meeting we were needed for on the technical level. After about 2 months, he got called into his bosses boss' office and called out for us not being in enough meetings. Productivity didn't matter, goals met didn't matter, our department "looked bad compared to other departments because the headcounts for meetings were off".
So now everyone goes to every meeting, productivity is down, morale is down, our boss caves to everything upper management says, but hey, our headcounts are immaculate.
And there is nothing anyone can do about it, unless they want to get terminated.
✨️corporatism✨️
I almost quit a job when I was told that reporting the work I did was more important than actually doing that work
@@Londubh sadly that is corporate live.
Doing the work doesn't matter as much anymore.
All that counts is statistics.
In my work groups that have low quality of work but are 1 buck cheaper are more highly in favour than groups that deliver the highest standard of quality and spend a buck more for it...
Those companies should be more thoughtful with the meetings they’re holding from the sound of it - speaking from experience
At a certain point everyone’s brain bandwidth dissipates
As a pm I mimic this to everyone. Even for us morning meetings could just be twice a week
Once in a daily I told the scrum master I wouldn't be working anything on that day because I would be attending to urgent matters in other team, the next day I was asked to communicate my advance from prior day... They're useless.
100%
Once to twice a week for "what's everyone working on, and ad hoc as requested by a worker who is having trouble. Ideally immediately before lunch, or with a target end time about 15-30 min before quitting time (so that it won't break up useful work time, yet still provides time to coordinate following among those who need do so)
Amen to that broski. As a PM it’s our job to cut through the noise and get to the point
As a SM, I concur. I ask my team when they want to meet and I don’t meet more often than that unless they ask for it. It’s whatever works for the team. Blah blah meetings are awful.
So nice to see the pms(paladin mains) speak out 🙏
There's a concept called the "Manager Schedule vs the Maker Schedule"
Managers make decisions and set the strategy. Makers are the ones who build things. A manager can easily take a 15 minute meeting because meetings *are* their workflow. A maker can't, because the meeting *ends* their workflow.
Great way to put it
This is the thing that people forget about the real role of a CEO. 95% of CEOs are stuck in one meeting or another, constantly dealing with literally all the shit. From other companies, investors, managers. Everything. Everyone looks at the glam of being a CEO, but you end up having zero life.
@@JJokerMoreauew a bootlicker.
@@JJokerMoreau That is pure BS
@@Rpgreat Lol. Okay bro.
I worked as a grocery clerk for about 2 years and every morning we would do a 15 minute meeting where most bosses would give de-motivational speeches.
This has nothing to do with Scrum :)
@@idn ahh. I was just thinking of having to stand up for 10-15 minutes before every shift and be given a debuff as a result.
But your correct. Not the same as a Scrum.
@kairon156 it's okay man, I considered your input valuable even though it was slightly off topic :-)
@@BigWinn haha. Thanks for your comment. :)
@kairon156 dont know why these guys are being weird, in this context scrum just refers to morning meetings and shit. Its the exact same as what youre talking about
As a PM, I try to explain this exact concept to my boss, but he forces us to continue having these meetings. PLEASE. JUST STOP. It completely interrupts MY day too!
PM isn't even in the Scrum Guide. If you're being forced to be with Dailies by the manager, that's three red flags the Scrum Master should deal with (but isnt).
You have now learned the value of a proper full time Scrum Master and not a double-role. Our Daily is 5 minutes, it's just the devs talking about how they're gonna achieve the goal. It's wonderful.
PMs and stakeholders wanted to join. I said "nah". Manager told me he thinks stakeholders and PM should be there. I asked why. He said "they should be in the loop for how it's going". "Why?" "Because it's important they know if it's done yet" "so.. our bi-weekly review isn't fast enough? How about we let the stakeholders see the solution as soon as it's done?" "Oh yeah that works too"
@@Flamecrestification your experience comes from a different field and a different size of company. That doesn't really apply to where I work. (Hence why I'm leaving).
@@Flamecrestification I would like to see how you can speak about "dev's speaking about gonna achieve goal" within 5 minutes. I am in a small team and more of operational level, so for myself response is more like "everythign is fine", but developers can speak like 2-3 minutes each and we have 3 of them.
I would really like to know how it is achieved.
OMG this takes me back!?.. I had a corporate meeting and my direct boss is sitting under the conference table. He tugging my leg for snacks. I was young and confused with this situation? I wonder why he can do this and can't I join him. Not fair, get me out..., done my 8hrs and I'm tired. Why don't they just give us memos? 😮💨
@@maksymisaiev1828 they have the Sprint Backlog in front of them and they run through the stories. They give it like a percentage of done-ness and if they're running into issues they need help with. Very efficient, every story gets talked about for like 10-30 secs (30 if someone's got questions or concerns)
I’m a team lead and I changed our daily standups to be at the end of each day. We have a flexible schedule but most of us wrap up our days by 5:00. So I set standup at 4:45 with a hard stop at 5. My team loves it because it’s less time wasted trying to remember what was worked on, and there’s less temptation to have side convos in standup that drag it out another 20 mins
Can I work for you? Does your company have any openings? I'd love to apply
I would hate it because it means I cannot leave early if I need 😅
I think I'd put it with a target end time of 4:45, but nominal end time of 5:00. The nominal end time of quitting time allows for leaving immediately after, but the target time allows for quick followup among those who need
Daily? Meh
Gosh I'll hate that even more than morning standups, I already wrapped up my work and I still need to wait for standup? Ugh. The worst.
"Ok we heard your feedback, we've scheduled a meeting to discuss this"
I had a physical flinch reaction just reading that 😅
Youre on point
you gave me ptsd
"Gather around everyone! We'll discuss the 12 reasons why this won't get anything done and what we're incapable of doing."
....the most incompetent get elected in by bogus reasons....
I mean hopefully this would be the last meeting.
Most people don't realize that a good manager is not someone who sits above their workers looking down on them and passing decrees like a king. A good manager works FOR their employees making sure that they can be as productive as possible and hopefully, happy while they are being productive.
Its wild that this gets lost in translation. The daily Scrum is only for the developers. The product owner has no say in the daily scrum. The scrum master only has to make sure that the developers have the meeting and that it stays under 15 minutes. No one tells the developers how do do their work. The sprint backlog is a plan by and for the developers.
Tank and DPS is such an underrated analogy
I was thinking the same thing.
And the QA are the healers, saving the developers when they make mistakes.
I was thinking more in line with the guy who brings the donuts. The QA team is like someone who runs through aggro'ing everything.
@@user-yh8ce7tg8l haha! Well if you think of a game company that releases a game with a gazillion bugs and performance issues(redfall), that causes the game to fail(aka group wipe)! I could see the healer playing the QA role lol, but it does make sense they're aggroing the bugs as well. If they aggro too many bugs, that will also wipe the group/kill the game due to inhibiting progress.
The analogy goes even further if you include logistics and IT. Both are basically healers. Keeping everyone else up and able to do their jobs while being vulnerable and likely to get blamed for shit out of our control. (I work in receiving/warehouse.)
100% true.
+ retrospective meeting
+ Sprint planning meeting
+ user story refinement meeting
I hate retrospective meetings. What's the point when you are a multinational team which can't have anything improved from anyone's observations from an outside coworker who haven't lived and won't live the same experience?
User story refinement and spring planning are the worst, 20 hours in a week each to tell everyone what they're going to do which could have been done in a single message via chat or email.
@@cagtbd retros are really good for small, local teams
@@cagtbd That's not the purpose of restrospectives nor is it applicable to multinational teams. A scrum team is a small team consisting of members that are multidisciplinary that can replace each other.
If the members are spread over several countries and can't even relate to each other's experiences sufficiently you shouldn't be in a scrum team at all.
@@mormacil you just confirmed my thoughts. Thanks.
I love my boss, he said “you all know what you’re doing. Tell me if you need help.”
That's a good boss.
this
It depends on the person. I personally would like that but at the same time, since I'm quite new to some things I kinda want supervision...
It really depends on the person
@@besseralsdu1372You have supervision. If you need help you go to your boss.
"If you need help, you're fired."
I ran an indie dev company in 2010-2012. We had a meeting on Monday morning followed by an early/extended lunch/pizza party. We discussed that weeks goal for each staff member. On Friday afternoon we did the same. We discussed what targets were hit, what targets were missed and what we can do better next week.
I don't know if I did right or not, but I like to think I created a good work environment. I never had to discipline anyone, let alone fire anyone. So I like to think I did.
If the team's feedback is positive, it is right. The whole point of Scrum is to have a framework that can be evolved by the team to make the team efficient and effective.
You did good! You let the team do their work. And I guarantee you that if they had a question they went to talk to the right person and solve it
What happened to company ?
@@qulteginCo founders of the studio stole it from under me. I woke up one morning, a week before launch and none of my logins worked.
@@qulteginit could’ve been just to make one game. Or they went bankrupt. I prefer the former
Noone appreciates a tank until they don't got one.
No one appreciates grammar until it's missing.
@@Noksus no one appreciates me
Only the pedantic with not a lot going on care @@Noksus
@@toolittletoolate Counter-point: self-improvement is good. If I get corrected, it's an opportunity to improve, and an opportunity for someone else who didn't know to improve too, and it hurts no one. If you can't stand harmless correction, that's on you and your fragile ego, not on the "pedantic".
People, don't be worried to be called names for correcting others. Be polite about it, just like you would any conversation with strangers you just met. Stupidity and ignorance aren't the same, at least ignorance is fixable. You are not a bad person for giving someone else a chance to improve, no matter how small the improvement.
@@ujiltromm7358good grammar in a youtube comment is not indicative of your intelligence lmao
A stand-up meeting is supposed to be important things that are happening today and relevant safety review, and then asking if anyone has any questions for the team. Most days, it should be: "Nothing important today. Any questions for the team? Alright, get on with your work."
if most days is "nothing happend" than dont have the meetings in the first place thats the point thor makes here any amount of meeting time gets you out of your workflow so plan a meeting in advance when you need it but stop pointless meetings and if anyone has a question there should already be channels to ask them
This so hard - empower the team to bring up anything relevant then get back to fkn work. No status updates, no stakeholder updates. For the grunt worker only - gtfo everyone else
That’s a different kind of standup. The kind Thor is describing is an Agile development process where each person provides updates on the work they did and the work they plan on doing.
Honestly, hospitals do this so well. We have patient handover every morning and evening. Who do we have on the ward, how are they tracking, any significant changes, anything that needs doing by the next shift, anything of note that was done by the prior shift, who's on point for patient care? Generally takes a couple minutes per patient and there's rarely too many patients on a single ward for it to be done in more than about 20 minutes. Very straight-forward.
If you have a lot of small moving pieces, handover should be a case of "who is currently working on what, do they need backup, if no then carry on, if yes then who can help out". Done.
@@hyronharrison8127stand ups are for grunts only. The point is to find out if anyone is stuck on their tickets and needs help or if there are any blockers for their tickets.
Companies in Denmark are doing 4 day weeks now. In the four working days everyone has focus periods in the office -signaled by a red light at their workstation. That means nobody can disturb them unless its a real life emergency. Then at allotted time after lunch there is mingling time, when everyone can do discussion, before you go back to focus hours. Productivity increased by a lot more than the day that they are taking off - which is paid too. Work 30 hour weeks, get paid for 40,hours, and do more work in total than before. Focus working MATTERS.
And the crazy thing is, companies still won't employ these strategies. They all banter back and forth about efficiency and getting work done but it's never been about that. It's always been about pointless bureaucracy and making sure you bend the knee.
At least there's a couple sane countries that actually want their people to be happy lol
I have one of the most "cushy" jobs in the world, at least physically.
Because the 10% of the time I have to show up physically is also extremely sensitive on a cognitive level, "brass" have long since figured out that the down time is more than completely necessary.
It's when "new brass" comes in and tries to shake things up, like a villain shooting at your feet telling you to dance, that my job really becomes the hardest in the world.
I worked 2 years in the Mental Health housing unit at a prison, and it was the best two years of my career because we almost always had every officer (including brass) and therapist and nurse on the same page.
@@ssun9074there also is a all around The world stupid thing which is pretending to Be busy. I mean, if you did finish everything you can prematurely, and have to wait for another briefing (or else, New data to work with, for example) - you cant Just chill, you HAVE TO pretend you do something. Cause if u dont, you Will get your ass handed to yourself. By another Very Effective Manager, who thinks "more work = more effective".
@@wahbl997 Exactly. The number of stories I've heard about people being actively punished for getting work done quickly and efficiently.
There's no other answer for it than its intentional mind games made to wear people down and punish good, intelligent workers for actually using their brains rather than tapping away at a keyboard like a sheep for 8 hours a day
@@ssun9074I mean it's the same reason so many CEO's are trying to force people into the office instead of letting remote workers just do their thing. It's only ever been about power-games and control, and stroking the CEO's ego.
"so basically nothing before lunch gets done", damn true.
As a PM the issue is getting anyone to read the PISSING emails.
Nah, keep finding excuses, you might find a good one one day
Fair, but do you think any of us are paying attention at the meetings? Everyone has practiced staring at the speaker even though your eyes have glazed over since middle school.
Well... do the emails actually add value to the work being done by people who are actually _doing work?_
If at first you don't succeed, find out _why_ you failed, and try again. Try different ways than emails and see how the team fares with it.
As a fellow PM, I try to make everything I give my team extremely straightforward and only necessary to their jobs. They still miss things. Unfortunately, it seems to be human nature. @@Londubh
When I worked at a particular government agency, my department head was surprisingly really good at this. There were no department meetings, just the various department heads would meet. Before each meeting, they'd go to each respective section chief and have a sit down, talk with them for 5 minutes, and then relay that information at the meeting. Once the meeting concluded, we got an email giving us the meeting minutes.
This sounds eerily, remarkably, Navy...
@@knillinkis it really that eerie?
that's how it's done!
I love how he acknowledges that it takes time to “get into a work flow”
There’s SO MUCH evidence showing that people work best when they can just “get into a flow”
AND that that “flow” dies down as the day goes on, and the best way to prevent that burnout, is by having multiple small breaks, instead of one “big break”
If you take a “big break” then after a few minutes, your body switches into “relaxation mode” because it thinks you’re done with work.
But if you just take a quick 2 minute break, you’ll have time to “catch your breath” or “reset your brain” but you’ll still be in “work mode” and be able to get right back to it
Good advice! I'm gonna try this.
It used to be the opposite for me, I would have to work full shifts and break when I got home, now I get 15 min breaks sprinkled in the day and that breaks my flow immensely.
Only works for certain ppl, i rather work in huge timeblocks and take a long break wear i do some powernapps
A mandated one hour lunch break kills my drive to do anything and everything. By the time I get back and if I do decide to eat I just wanna nap, not work.
Damn, I'll try this myself... once I have a position at a company that actually deserves me being at my best.
Agreed! I have a 30 minute stand up at 10am everyday, it does effect productivity before and after that time.
I have literally 45 minutes of standup every morning, 3 separate 15 meetings.
So fucking stupid, and my boss doesn’t have a spine to do anything about it either.
Daily Scrum should be 2 minute updates and 15 minutes total. Sounds like you have a very big team or a lot of discussion happening that could be happening elsewhere. Are you refining backlog items in the Standup?
Your daily standup should be to address blockers, not to give status updates. If you're on track, be like "I am on track, no blockers" next person. If each person has to monologue everything they did, its not efficient.
Is not only not efficient, but it really is 0 useful. The point of doing them early is to review if there's any problem for the day or any change of plans that needs to be made for the sprint... It is not a status report
This exactly lol i was rly confused by thors solution bc most of my standups either require 0 attention or save my ass bc we can cooperate on a problem
But the daily standup is almost always the worst blocker.
that's exactly it, it's a round session to identify blockers and determine how to react. The blocker could affect multiple stories so that's why the whole team is involved to get a quick action plan in place. Then the scrum master works the rest of the day on removing impediments while the teams codes. This is why the meetings early.
@@deathpyre42 if that's the case you are doing them wrong, your scrum master should help you make them useful
i've always said 'if you're doing scrum exactly you're doing scrum wrong'. Scrum only really works for a small handfull of groups. My company does a standup on monday morning and 'nothing to report' is the standard, so within 15 minutes we get everything done and the people who are running into issues or have announcements to make on some project or another get thier time without the meeting dragging on forever.
the meeting is about an hour into the day, i dont know about other people but i dont struggle with that, but thats mostly because i'm also moonlighting as sysadmin so during that first hour i'm always doing my routine checks and reports.
Totally agree. Do what is best for the team. Evolve as needed. Daily Scrum is there to set the dev team up for success that day. Different teams need different things to succeed.
I start my workday with the standup meeting. I wake up literally 15 minutes before it starts to use the restroom and feed my pets. Over the course of the meeting, I finish becoming alert. For me, it works well.
Wait, you mean the PM's Job isn't to constantly ask you for estimates, turn those estimates into deadlines, and then constantly wonder why deadlines are getting missed. Oh and pinging you in slack all the time
That's a very lazy PM, as I have fulfilled a variety of projects I must say I barely ever did this for a specific reason
There is a time where you arrive to the project and learn anything and everything from the ones involved not the stakeholders and guess what...
You find your answer, avoiding to ask estimates to people...
And bothering you about 10 new features the customer suddenly wants done this week because "they're small and shouldn't take that much time"
And my personal favorite, changing requirements without telling you and then getting upset at you for having to redo the work because they pivoted priorities and said nothing. And yes I checked my inbox, there was no email about this.
There's a reason there's not a PM in the Scrum Guide. Product Owner deals with PMs. And a PROPER PO learns to say no more often than yes, and knows better than to give deadlines.
You have a horrible relationship with Scrum and for that I'm sorry. I wish I could show you all how great it can be when you have a competent Scrum Master and a competent PO in a competent truly Agile environment..
Oh god, yes. I am living that life right now. I recently made the mistake of telling my PM that the thing I'm working on should be finished by the end of the week. Well, turns out some unforeseen issues came up, and I wasn't able to finish by the time I thought I'd have it finished. I even put in some time over the weekend to try to finish it up but wasn't able to. Monday of the next week, my PM basically chewed me out for not being done yet, despite telling him I was working unpaid overtime on it, and rather than take that I left mid-meeting.
Scrum is amazing; he's the only pirate who agreed with Jack to stop fighting at the Fountain of Youth.
These meetings really could be a fist fight
it's the same with government
Well he did mention everything outside the house being a PvP environment so ....
This meeting could have been pistols at high noon
These fist fights could real be a duel at ten paces
@@FlashKillerX
This shootout could've been an orgy
I’ve never worked anywhere where the 15 minute daily standup was only 15 minutes.
I’m a PM and have never gone over 15 mins for the year that I’ve been a PM :)
I have, but it's still useless, I don't need to know what most of the people are working on when it doesn't have to deal directly with me
@@jasons_encore Yeah, I agree. No need to ask for updates. I can often help remove blockers though, so I have my devs tell me any that they have incurred. I also give them any updates I have, like cancelled meetings or product requirements.
I have, generally aiming for less.
Instead of daily standups in the morning we do an async conclusion of our day EOD in Slack. Works great. It is basically 5 minutes of work at the EOD for each Team member when they feel they can spare the time.
My previous job was fucking addicted to scrum, Kanban, and “lean manufacturing”, what it meant was a mandatory meeting every morning where we talk about what we did to improve our productivity the day before. We had layoffs a week ago, I was cut. Can’t help but think of all the mfg time wasted over the year I worked there. Could’ve been the difference in me having a job or not.
"Lean manufacturing" if I'm not mistaken that is code for "better hope today's supply delivery shows up or we can't work!"
At least at the extreme.
How was 75 minutes of meetings at week hindering productivity? The entire point of the Daily Scrum is to ensure the team is on the same page for the daily.
@@idn well for one its soul sucking, and as the short said the meeting isn't first thing its set back a bit so no sense trying to get into the grove before that, now you hour meeting has wasted 2 hours of productivity. (Just an example)
On top of that, losing an hour out of a 10 hour day is 10% of your productivity every day!
Also asking every worker to constantly be "improving productivity" means they won't be focusing on just getting work done and will be frustrated because there isn't really anything the front line can do to "improve productivity" without approval from management who will probably just take credit.
I wish I could learn enough to work for and learn from someone like you. The production of Games and AI have been a lifetime desire
The most functional scrum I've been a part of was at the company where the every dev started at 9 and the standup was at 9:05. Then there were no other meeting unless we needed to seriously plan or discuss something in a larger group.
This is how it's supposed to be and the daily meet up is supposed to be while you get some coffee or tea to start your day. It's literally "so what are you going to do to achieve this planning?" That's it.
You shouldnt need daily standups if communication is good
It just doesn't help us to hear what X Y and Z are doing, really it's just to make sure we're all busy and not blocked... Behind the guise of 'productive meetings'
This would interfere with my 9 am bowel movement.
@@gazpitchy The daily is supposed to be that good communication.
Fucking hell. I just came out of a shitty scrum meeting, literally lost exactly 30 minutes before that just like you described, now Ill need another hour to really get into my workflow and then its almost lunch.
Dude, you narrated my day as it was happening. This is fucking brilliant! :D
If only there was something else you could do before the standup like.... Reviewing your board, checking your emails, taking care of your timecard from yesterday, or spending the time learning lol.
Oooor you could talk with your team and have them move the standup to a time that works better? Or you could complain online 😊
@@zpa89we found that one loser that enjoys scrum lol
@@zpa89How would moving the standup change this circumstance in any way? Also no one said that they do absolutely nothing before scrum, the point is that you can’t do serious, focused work in that time because you know you’re gonna be pulled away in 30 minutes.
@@Bruhbruhbruh-rn9qv well the entire point of this chain is that having the standup apparently ruined the entire morning, and means you don't start work until after lunch. So if you put it at the end of the day, or at the very start, maybe it works better? I have 6 teams and most of them have moved their stand-ups.
Also, like I said, there is some work you need to do that isn't "serious, focused work." Why not do that before standup?
Hell, a ton of people still work remote or hybrid. Just work through your standup and try to listen to the chatter idly. I have ADHD and sit in on a few stand-ups every day + participate in my own and I just work during them.
@@zpa89 or you could move the standup to never and just not do them. Nothing in it that couldn't just be an email
I'm a fellow game dev (Technical artist) and I've worked on projects with stand ups, they are a complete waste of time as you said. Now we do one 30 min meeting a week, right before lunch on a Monday and it's SO much better.
I love how he vocalises all of my issues in ways I couldn't he's truly our Paladin in shining armour
I work in a small bespoke engineering firm. We have recently decided to only do meetings when a significant milestone of a project is achieved. And honestly it works so well.
Just do meeting when you actually have something to talk about & share with everyone
I'm with you on that. I work in a DevOps environment and we have daily standup meetings with out team. We talk about what we are doing for the day. I kinda get the point of it, so that we have the opportunity to announce what we are doing and can reach out and help others if we think we can contribute to their success.
But as you said, our meetings happen at 10:30am every day and last at most about 30 minutes. That means little gets done before the meeting and after the meeting it's about an hour to lunch, so little gets done after the meeting until lunch. And after lunch people slowly transition into the 'go home soon' mode.
I don't like it at all, but my manager loves it. Sometimes I'll skip just because it interrupts my work for the morning, but I'll use some other excuse.
Same for me.
30 minutes?? Let me guess, you guys don’t even standup for the meeting like you’re supposed to.
A 30 minute meeting isn't a standup meeting.
@@jasonschuler2256Explain how 30 minute meeting isn't a standup?
@@slandsharkstand ups should last at most 15 minutes
Mmhm, now lemme go to HR and ask for a class change. DPS sounds good.
No no no you are not allowed to change classes - HR Top Dickhead
Scrum has its benefits when applied correctly, but it's not easy to do.
For instance, the stand-up meeting should be the very first thing in the day, and should last 10min or less, it's a good way to kick-off the day on good energy, reporting progress on the project.
But for that to work, you need all your team to be on time, and a manager who can resist the urge to micro-manage and who can refrain from speaking at the meeting.
When done correctly, scrum will push the team to work faster and stay motivated, but it's not intuitive.
(It'll also favor speed over quality, and run the team to exhaustion, it has many downsides as well)
Scrum Master and Lord of Onions
E
Scrumptious!
Everyone that works in an office needs to collectively play this at full blast on loop
Now imagine the stand-up meetings are *scheduled* for 30 minutes and regularly go over. 😅
The reason they're called "stand-ups" is that you're supposed to stand up the whole time and be _physically uncomfortable_ throughout, to encourage you to keep things short.
Not only is this ableist, but the pandemic and rise of distributed teams threw any merits of this concept out the window.
You want to fix that? Make everyone stand (like a stand up). They'll get to their point much quicker.
if that's the case, you're missing the point of standup. A lot of things you might be talking about during stand up can be done on 1x1s (not the boss to employee 1x1, like pair programming 1x1s).
Your stand up per person should be very short - what did you do yesterday, what are you going to do today, and what things might be blocking you. Yesterday, today, blockers, or Y-T-B.
Yes, I do scrum every day. Is it obvious?
@@GSBarlev that's why I like plank -meetings
The people responding to my comment are explaining this shit like I don't already know. 😂 Trust me, I know the purpose (and etymology) of stand-ups. They just aren't being done well where I'm currently employed. But they are serving a purpose, so I'm not going to champion changing them right now. Gotta pick my battles. 😅🤷♀️
Last job I had, we had a meeting once a week after lunch. Made the day flow much easier.
The main problem I'm seeing is: the way the agile manifesto is written, it doesn't want or require you to have the full meeting every single time. It just wants you to have a fixed slot where _if needed_ you can ask for help, raise concerns or FYI people if things are not going as planned. And if _that_ takes more than 15 minutes, then you've got two problems: 1. you're really bad at timeboxing this and 2. your project is FUBAR.
But all people (especially in management) hear is "more meetings = good".
The main problem with that last part is that management != scrum. The first principle is that management doesn't get a say over the team. The moment you violate that principle, scrum goes out the window.
@@drakesilmore3760 Fully agreed! It's sad to see, because on a theoretical level, I am 1000% onboard with what agile attempts to be. But in reality, you end up with situations like the one Thor describes in the short.
@@Nozdormu1985 I see it as a lack of commitment and trust from the people in charge of the company. Autonomy is only a risk if you don't trust your employees to be able to handle that freedom. Usually management wants all the benefits of agile without having to give away too much control, and it turns out they are too neurotic to commit to what scrum requires.
Every message in this thread is so true and it hurts me so much not being able to do things correctly on my teams.
@@drakesilmore3760Yeah, scrum has been compromised by management. It's supposed to be a decentralized system but management turns it into an authoritarian nightmare.
I like how you gamified office work. The shop I work at runs 24/7, so we do a 15 minute(or less) briefing at the start of shift, going over what happened during the 2 shifts prior. It's a good way to start the day. I would lose my mind if I had to start work, then stop, just to try to start again.
The daily scrum is supposed to be this 15 min briefing. If the Paladin goes to it alone, nobody else but him will be there. The daily scrum is like the briefing the group has before entering the dungeon. If the DPS are not there, dungeon is dead already.
@@Grobloum Well put, you perfectly pointed out how it should be by picking up on the metaphor.
The real issue with scrum is that almost nobody ever seems to do it right.
@@Grobloum I think he meant that the Paladin (manager) spends time with other managers in the other departments in the company, or whatever relations he must have with other companies or clients. When he spends time there, his own team doesn't have to tank all these meetings, as they should be working on their own assignments.
@@PassiveDestroyer the daily should be at the beginning of the day. But fortunately we don't usually have a hard schedule, but a flexible one. So you can't really put the daily very early or the people that start a bit later wouldn't be able to join without changing their prefered starting time.
So if you want to be flexible, the daily ends up starting late. And some people mainly just read emails and chats before the daily, even if the daily is in one and a half hours.
I see a lot of value in a short daily meeting with the team, but it's very tiring when there is too much detail or just rambling. If you need to talk about something in detail, prepare it and share the outcome in the team chat or schedule a different meeting, don't brainstorm in the daily.
My small department does a once a week Monday morning stand up. In that meeting, our boss gives us the major events for the week, and we all share any major events that we know are coming up, or any major milestones that have been accomplished, any VIP work outstanding that needs to be completed. Granted, we are a six-person team not counting our boss. So this model might not work for a 50-person team. But I can almost guarantee you can break those 50-person teams down into sections. And then each section just sends a rep. And oh look, we're back to paladins and DPS.
I'm on a data science team so a bit different than software. When our team first started (about 4-5 years ago) we tried the daily standups but realized they are not valuable. Instead we have ONE meeting every two weeks for general team updates. If we have blockers, we just reach out to whoever or our managers to get them resolved. This model has been working for us for about a half decade and I don't see it changing :b
Also a data scientist, I couldn't even imagine forced daily meetings. My boss will call me once every couple of days for an update on my work but that's about it. I suppose we aren't direct revenue generators so the pressure is less than devs
@@maninthebox1678 yeah, especially since our work is usually much slower paced (EDA, research, etc.) providing a daily update on that is a bit much lol
Daily meetings for developers can't really be compared to other fields I imagine.
The knowledge is often spread around the whole team, so not only do you profit from what the other are saying, you also can seek or give help in those meetings. Also since developers work very closely together it's good to see if stuff you do overlaps for example.
I can't really imagine any other job having the same prerequisites. It's like multiple surgeons working on the same patient at the same time. You need some coordination for this lol
The only stand up I think is valid is a 10 - 30 second, "Is anyone struggling with something? Who's free enough to help." Of course asking for help is always viable but sometimes you need to be reminded.
The only way I've seen a version of Scrum work is where a manager walked into office, ask my team collectively when it would suit us to have a quick talk through, we say "right before lunch" and they come back 15 mins before lunch. Always check with your team if a communication strategy (scrum, stand ups, emails, anything) works for them! In this case, stand ups clearly weren't working for Thor&Co!
I don't mind *occasional* stand-ups. At my current studio we have a whole 1 stand-up per week and it's scheduled right before lunch so no one has to worry about "I need to figure out what to do between the stand-up and lunch."
What stand-ups are good for is noticing "wait, why is Steve tasked with messing around in that part of the codebase, that's Alice's responsibility" and getting work reassigned or going "Jake is new to this area, so let's have Sam meet up with him after lunch so a 6 hour investigation turns into a 30 minute guided walkthrough."
yeah and "I was getting weird responses from this service yesterday" and then "oh sorry, that was me, let's coordinate after the daily"
I keep seeing that before lunch thing, what's the difference btw that and having it after lunch? (I have no exp in the workfield yet)
As a Scrum Master, I'm completely fine with that if it serves the team well. Schedule meetings just for the sake of meetings is not what Scrum is about.
Scrum is good if done right. Ideally standup isn’t after 30 minutes of a work day starting. We actually do stand up as the very last thing of the day for our overseas devs and very first thing for our local devs so it doesn’t break workflow like that. The retros, sprint planning, etc can be annoying but that’s what the product owner is supposed to be for so I do everything I can to streamline it. Our sprint planning is usually “hey I already looked at all of our stories and brought them in, let me know if anything else needs to be added as you go” and our retros are “here’s what went well and what didn’t” and then I take it all and create action items that are brought up in the next stand up. There’s ways to streamline
I also don’t worry about standups being short and cancel them a lot if it’s just “doing this, no blockers”. Im just like alright, then I’m not gonna add a blocker to your plate with this meeting haha
Problem with that is that "very first thing" in the morning might be different for different people if flexible working hours are allowed. Some people in my team starts at 6:30 and some at 9
The problem with doing scrum right, is that you can't do scrum right. Agile is awful, full stop.
"done right" which is literally impossible. every single one of these methodologies uses the exact same excuse
@@knm080xg12r6j991jhgt You can argue that MOST companies can't do scrum right... But "agile" is awful? What you wanna go back to waterfall? please say sike.
@@FcoEnriquePerez Fragile works in *some* cases, in all others its ****
Scrum meeting:
Product Owner: shut up and listen if attending
Scrum Master: shut up and listen, interject to keep on track
Developers: discuss what will be achieved if everyone leaves them alone and brings them snacks and perhaps the things that won't be achieved even with snacks.
Anything more than this is a full blown meeting.
Post scrum meeting: Product owner and Scrum master have a conversation and do reports, and there should be enough information coming out of devs updated Jira, DevOps and so on to quantify for the management. Any developer who reported a particular blocker or issue can go to one side and have an ad hoc to try and isolate and quantify the issue. This then becomes something the PO qualifies with the PM.
In simple terms: if your business is developing software, and your software developers are not developing because they are in meetings, then your business has become having meetings.
This is what I do as a design producer. It’s my job to jump in front of the train of requests from idiots that think designers are robots. I then make a decision whether this info needs to be a quick meeting or an email or a slack. Most of the time if the designer is capable of understanding what’s needed I just slack them. We also use a management ticket system basically the same story I assign a designer blah blah. I love being a producer tho. It’s fun sometimes
I can hardly remember the last time a scrum meeting actually took 15 minutes. We did an asynchronous standup via slack for a bit and it was wonderful. You get it in, you post what you would have said in the meeting and then when you have a natural break, you can scan the posts to see if anything was relevant to you or needs your input. Then leadership felt that we weren't "achieving the goals" of the meeting. So we went back to 20-30 minute stand-ups.
So your management refuses to do scrum. That's a shame
Finding out that I'm not the only one like this has lifted some weight off my shoulders. Like others, I'm struggling with impostor syndrom, and just assumed that I'm a lazy piece of shit, while everyone else is a demigod and they go right back to work after meetings. This video has definitely put a dent in that perception.
I feel much better thanks to this video. Thank you, Thor!
They're not working they're just experienced at looking busy 😂
It's amazing how many places are mostly concerned with everyone looking busy, more than actual productivity
Always remember the Pareto distribution and Price's Law.
I enjoy are end of day meetings because it's like having a break than you go home.
I feel exactly the same way (programmer also). The daily morning meetings just kill my energy and enthusiasm that I usually have at the start of the day, and where I work they usually drag on for 45 minutes, sometimes an hour. I don’t want to jump back into work afterwards; I want a break. It kills the momentum I had, and I usually don’t get it back until after lunch.
15 minute standups work great in my department. It is literally the first 15 of the day, you punch in and we start. It is a great way to get everyone on the same page and having it before we even sit down we don't waste time.
Ya'll on time?
Same here. I'm the pm of 3 teams. Have 3 15 minutes dailies first thing in the morning. But indeed, my main job is making sure I invite as few people as needed to let work in peace
Same here. I love standups. They work great.
Yeah, gonna add to this. We have a standup 2 hours into the day. That's enough time for us to get our items in order before standup, open some files, start working on some stuff. Our team consists of 5 devs, so our standup usually lasts less than 5 mins on a productive day where everyone's got something to do. It's just hey, I'm workin on this ticket today. K, next.
Works out well for us.
I've never had a standup last ONLY 15 minutes. They always last 30 minutes to an hour or more. This has happened at every company I've worked for. It's especially bad if the meeting is between multiple offices in different time zones. Then you end up having them at weird times during the day. I worked at one place where we wouldn't find out what we need to do for the day until the afternoon.
THANK YOU. My first job out of college was on a scrum team and it felt like every day was filled with 3-4 meetings. It was some of the most asinine shit. Then management was like “why isn’t anything getting done?”
In the same situation right now.
That’s not scrum, holy crap 😂 1 day should like 2 maximum if you’re doing planning and a review. 3-4??? 😂
New subscriber! This channel keeps popping up in my feed, and I absolutely love it! I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to subscribe
Hi, I'm the guy that prompted this question. This is exactly what I meant with that you probably had a bad Scrum Master. The Scrum Master should have noticed that this isn't working for you as a team and facilitated a different solution. I.e. end of the day Daily, a just-before-lunch Daily. Nowhere in the Scrum Guide does it say it HAS to be at 9:30 or whatever.
I consider myself a proper Scrum Master - my teams are happy, understand why we're doing what we're doing, and unlike the PM/producer I can take a few sick days or a few weeks of vacation without the team falling apart.
I facilitate this kinda shit. Not making shit like Dailies easy on the team is a sign of a struggling (if not downright bad) Scrum Master.
Either that, or your team doesn't want to accept new ideas and experiment (in which case it's, surprise surprise, also the SM's job to facilitate this).
On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of SW devs have (in my opinion) terrible people skills. Meaning if you give them too much leniency, they will NOT talk to other teams, NOT give any thought about what other teams could potentially need from them and wonder in the end why everyone hates them.
Exactly. This is one of the takes PirateSoftware I don't agree with. A good SM/PM shouldn't do more than 1 meeting a day if there's no emergency. And those should be super quick as well. And if devs don't read/communicate then how the heck do they expect to get any work done properly when everyone's in their own little world thinking the other departments are at fault or kept in a vacuum without knowing the context of tickets outside of technical descriptions/requirements? Because I agree that a lot of devs, artists, and designers are full of themselves. Not because they're bad people, but because they're human and without communication people assume the worst by default. I feel Scrum gets a lot of flak from "real workers" and are taken for granted but then when they find themselves without a competent SM/PM then the workflow suddenly implodes.
@@EvaaraGaezanleiI mean, a good pm won't be using scrum.
A good Team Lead can do the communicating of vital information without daily scrum. No need to call the whole team when most day and most people just repeat what they said yesterday or have to listen to irrelevant information. Once a week seem about right to me.
@@EvaaraGaezanleiI have worked on over 8 teams. Still haven’t had a good PM
I work in Cybersecurity. We meet up once every two weeks for progress updates with managers like CISO, director etc and its a 30 minute meeting. Our higher ups like CISO, director handle any updates exec wing may need by asking the team lead for each team. Team lead usually knows what is going on with his group so he just asks us to fill in any blanks for him and handles the rest. We may get 1 or 2 extra meetings during the week if something critical pops up or we need to meet with another team on collaboration help with a server or deployment. Let your workers put in DPS and management do the boring mangement stuff. We already are handling the workload of getting something deployed we dont need to be giving a heads up every single day or week when it could be an email.
scrum slows work down so much for me I’ve decided I’m just a scrum minion and no longer a Dev
You should have a coffee talk with your Scrum Master. Raise your concerns. The Scrum Master should facilitate a discussion about this to help you (and the team) feel like it's less of a burden.
@@Flamecrestification you’re absolutely right brother. However, I am in the middle of getting certs and tryin to make a jump to cyber security… so I’m going to take this free time at work to blast through certifications. A good employee would absolutely do what you said though ;)
@@kinggoooch2857 hey you do you man, I'm just trying to help everyone in this mess of a comment section because somehow I feel like I need to help haha. Good on you, and good luck in your career
@@Flamecrestification be their scrum papa you’re a good one :)
I 100% agree. My role just changed at the company I work at. Which also means my manager changed as well as my team. The team I work for now has a ton of demoes, standups and just all round meetings. It drives me insane jumping from meeting to meeting without ever being able to build up any form of focus for more than an hour at a time.
The word scrum makes me feel like someone's trying to push poop into my ears
You have been exposed to Dark Scrum!
Scrum works if everyone you deal with is on the same level as you generally. Another problem is never go to a meeting without an agenda.
If you do your daily scrum with an agenda, it's no longer daily scrum.
This video makes my nostalgic for my days as a DPS character. These days I'm stuck doing support. "The DPS is dying, please spam heals!". "The tank needs backup, please also heal the tank!". I could just kill the boss myself, but you bail out a DPS party one time... Moral of the story is if you have a heal spell, don't put any points into it.
What exactly is the heals in this case?
@@audiofox5104 QA
If nobody heals, nobody gets to play group contents.
Ah, the fools who think the healer has to heal the tank. I learned this dichotomy for the Tank-DPS-Healer trio as such:
The healer saves the DPS
The DPS saves the Tank
The Tank saves the Healer
Any time the healer has to heal the tank, or the DPS have to protect the healer, or the Tank has to overextend for the DPS, the team dies.
@@XoIoRouge If you do it right, DPS should not be taking any damage because the Tank has all of the aggro.
If DPS is taking damage, they are either standing in stupid, pulling threat or raid wide damage.
Healer should be able to focus on tank while spot healing the DPS.
Source: I play a healer fairly often when not DPSing.
You’re analogy of PMs being paladins resonates so much with me
I work in construction and this is exactly how it works. Nobody needs 4 electrical trainees and 3 sheet rockers in a meeting with the head engineer and building managers.
If we took 1 hour to get into a work flow we would get fired
Typically scrum isn’t used in something like construction. You’ll read random articles online that say they do, but they’re often full of crap. Scrum is primarily for IT projects and software development.
Everyone works remotely so morning standups are the only time we get to see each other and chat before we record the actual standup meeting which itself takes less than 2 minutes per person.
2 minutes per person every single day is too much for standup. Even on an 8 person team, you’re over the fifteen minute limit, which is a maximum.
It is one of the better ways of having better team cohesion, you're right.
The raid team analogy is so spot on I can't believe I didn't think of it before 💯
Thor, I'm like maybe a year younger than you and while i don't work in the software/dev industry its so nice to hear good management techniques from someone who has been on both sides of the corporate hierarchy. Luv your posts even tho im not a gamer. Common sense isn't common... Most depressing thing to teach good young workers. Thanks
Amen. This is **sooooo** true. I have been pushing constantly to reduce the amount of meetings that we do and what do I get in return? An endless amount of meetings, a daily schedule that is *crammed* with standups, brownbag sessions, retros, backlog grooming, sprint planning, pairing sessions, weekly demos, knowledge sharing, wider group updates and showcases... Please stop for the love of god!
Damn. I honestly would rather die.
Scrum and sprint meetings feel like they were made by somebody who can't help but feel anxious when they don't have everything at their fingertips
No, that’s waterfall lol
I prefer agile software development in general, but I agree. SCRUM feels like meetings all day every day.
But one thing that annoys me about that criticism is that you do not need to run pure Scrum. People treat it more like a religion than a system to be implemented in the way it fits.
You can easily make these meetings weekly, or even biweekly. A good project lead and / or manager works with the team they have, not the team they dream of. The methodology will not change the fact that most people implement systems without thinking about their team's needs.
I feel like scrum cut down on our meetings. If you do it right there shouldn’t be many meetings outside of sprint reviews and planning. Planning shouldn’t take long if the PO did their job during the sprint.
Going to the Agile Manifesto People and Interactions over processes and tools. My job as a SM is to protect the team from noise and finding what works for team to deliver. Every team is a little bit different.
Scrum done right should have one meeting a day (or less) and one or two at the end of the sprint.
@@teebob21yeah I have no clue what people who say "meetings all day every day" are doing. Standup every day, backlog refinement middle of sprint, sprint retro and planning at the end.
In this situation we have a support. I took that role when I was still in university and working for an architectural place. I was updating and reprogramming project logs to help managers, setting up monthly lunches in the break room for the warehouse workers and drafters, and checking out cheaper/better ISPs and IT providers for the Boss.
Oh my GOD, the web design company I used to work for did these god-damned stand-ups DAILY. I didn't think anyone else felt the same "nothing gets done before lunch" attitude that I used to feel! This is so accurate!
Stand-ups are meant to be daily. Idk why you're surprised by that. Lol
Piratesoftware at a restaurant:
Waiter: hi sir what can i get for you?
Piratesoftware: hang on lemme pull out my black board and explain it to you.
Had to do mock scrum style for a group project in college. Every meeting boiled down to “Alright, nobody did shit, let’s cram tonight so we’re ready to present tomorrow.”
> wakes up at lunch > rolls outta bed to standup > "no updates here" > start work at 1pm
This is SO accurate. I almost never get much done before lunch because of standup
There is no way a 15 minute meeting should disrupt your entire morning. What else are you doing?
@@idn have you considered watching the short before commenting?
Thank you.
As a side note: My boss just declared all people hedgehogs or foxes. Do you have any thought on that hot mess?
Hedgehog defend, fox attack?
Sounds like a closet sonic the hedgehog fan
That or he just watched sonic 2 for the first time 😂
Something about hedgehogs having "big picture ideas" and foxes being about nuance.
Basically what I'm hearing is I'm happy I'm a fox, because I'm clever enough to know what the big picture is but the hedgehogs don't realise it. Meanwhile, they're useless for everything but talking to clients, and even that's debatable because they're too happy to bend over backwards to add new features while we're still working on the last set of features.
I know people are mostly talking about his advice here but for someone like me who has little understanding of these systems, his usage of videogame terms was great and really made this easier to understand
Not gonna lie, most of it was going over my head too. Then he broke out the RPG terms and suddenly I had total understanding. Wild shit.
@@RaptorJesusthe problem here is however that PM needs the information from the team also to do his job correctly. Imagine PM coordindates 1-3 DPS to do one thing, 4-6 dps to do another thing. Now lets say 1-3 starting to struggle a lot. If PM is not able to adjust the situation adhoc - lets say by adding dps 4-6- the project will go a dangerous route. By all means SCRUM is not perfect but looking at previous non-agile projects it's the best we have at the moment.
Thanks someone brought this on. I hate interruptions you get nothing done with that sometimes it’s so bad that I have one whole day wasted with unproductive meetings. But you have the same workload with out them and some finger pointing
I think this is excellent proof you could fire most of the employees in a lot of these office settings and still deliver the same level of productivity than if you leave things the way they are now.
That's not what this is saying in any shape or form. Not sure how you managed to draw that conclusion, probably because you want it to be the truth for some reason.
Weird assumption. I worked in both and your second example is just unamanged chaos. Great for devs to some degree but at the end of the day company also wants to see results.
We do a thing in Australia called a toolbox talk at the start of each work day. Work starts at 6am. The talk covering the mandatory stuff for the day goes from 6am to 6:10am. Work starts at 6:15am. Everyone gets the message, works for 3 to 4 hours, has a meal break, works for another 3 to 4 hours. That's your day.
As a project manager I will tell you, people don't read the notes / emails
Good, take the hint and stop spamming.
@@TeddyBearItsMeBut then no info gets to the people who need to get that info to keep the overarching project on track.
@@frosthammer917 maybe only communicate vital info, rather than spamming their inboxes with useless nonsense.
@@lck0ut348But there was no discussion of what info is in these emails, you are just assuming it. All the original commenter said is that people tend to not read meeting emails in general.
@@frosthammer917 Will agree that people don't read emails, short or long. or just selectively interprets them however they want. Then again meetings are equally worthless(not all). I lost so much time during mandatory meetings until my manager simply stepped in. Have only had a handful or less of "meetings" now in a half year. Got sooo much things done..
My specialization is in projects and this is what I want to be honest. I haven't been in the games or media industry but producers or production coordinators should be doing this it gives them real meaning and it gets everything done.
Real question. How do I change class into a healer?
Isn't that QA?
That's called customer support and sys admin xD
Become a bartender?
Become a Team Manager
And what rogue would be in this context? Corporate spy?
Preach man.
We didn’t do Scrums, but at my old job we had a staff meeting every Monday at 9:30, and then I had a second because I was a dual employee at 10:30. They were always useless.
Basically, you can’t really get anything done during the meeting, and I couldn’t really get anything done between the meetings, and by the time I had actually become productive we’d break for lunch.
Two half hour meetings basically wasted the entire morning.
We (foodservice staff) have a huddle right when the Full-Time evening shift comes in, but most of the cooks are able to continue working while our director gives us the updates before everyone gets back to their stations.
Absolutely valid point. As a PM my whole role is to facilitate my team doing their work as best as possible. They absolutely don't need to lose their whole morning to a managerial meeting.
people dont use it correctly. imo. daily standups should only be attended by those who need help, but instead everyone shows up or is asked to and 5 minute meeting lasts 30 minutes
I don't usually need help (my input is usually a two sentence status update). But if I and the other one or two most proficient team members usually stay away, who would they even ask? By the point where they ask for help it's usually already too complex for most of the team to solve (or solve quickly).
If only the people who need help show up, who is going to help them? lol
No, the whole team should show up so that the person who knows the solution to the problem is there to listen. It should not be more than 15 mins ever to figure out who knows a solution to what issue.
This is one reason I love the way my job handles it.
Last job I had we had a million meetings for scrum, awful time. Stand up at a bad time (XX:45), planning meetings, review meetings, etc. all week
Current job does OPTIONAL daily standup at XX:00 (meaning I start with it and don’t eat time before that). We have ONE planning meeting for the week, so work assignments are clear to everyone. That’s it, nothing else needed.
So much more productive, we get so much shit done.
I met a Scrum master who talked about how they do meetings in their team. They basically do the daily meeting, with camera on, every person(that can ofc) goes on a Plank Position, they are allowed to talk as long as they can hold it. They have to say the most important parts of what they did/are doing/have issues with during that, if not, the talking torch gets passed and that's it.
Not super productive in some cases, but it sounds like a fun way to diversify their day :D
I had to do scrum for a class once in college (that alone should let you know this was a stupid class) and my only thought every meeting was “what do I need to say to get this lady off my back as fast as possible”. Scrum is what I would expect from a teacher/boss who thinks you have a severe mental disability.
I have witnessed an incredibly efficient scrum at a few companies/projects. They work much like what you describe here. Async standup. Let PO/DM/TL know where you are at on things at the end of the day.
They digest it, report it, and address anything that needs addressing. The following day, they update stakeholders. Weelky retros (not sprint retros) are held on Fridays as a happy hour. They talk about things, BS, and get a feel for where things are at.
I did 15 years of consulting, 5 of FTE Dev, and 5 of engineering management. I have adopted this pattern and have done a lot to remove the pain points of scrum. My God it works wonders -- until upper management figures out a way to screw it up.
We follow agile in our project. Morning scrum is 1 hour where I have to speak for max to max 5 mins but need to be attentive in case a question comes up. Same for evening standup, then there are sprint planning calls, refinement calls and retrospective calls. Easily takes up 2 to sometimes 6 hours a day.
Also the story point system. Where story points are assigned based on the priority by Business, but work is tracked based on hours. So a story can be literally 2 story points (out of 5) for business but might require 30 hours of development effort while a 5 sp story requires 2. But the higher ups expect the 2 sp one to be completed faster as it has less points.
Also the fact that in most planning call, you get have a analysis task for the story that is being planned, but you have to provide the estimate there and then before the analysis.
Today only I suffered as someone else estimated a story te be 2 story points. I was given 2 days to complete it. I had to literally spend entire night awake as the effort required was to change all major pieces of code, test them, document them, write a guide for other people in them. The work required over 1000 LOC and I was just put into this tech stack and application two weeks ago with no training or KT.
and then there's my company that just started introducing standups. The funny thing is that I didn't even realise I was doing the thing Thor talked about but looking back, I arrive at the office at 9, do literally nothing for 45 minutes and then after the 15 minute standup is over, I only then start preparing to work. The worst part is that our daily standups are completely useless. We reach out to others anyways if we have relevant issues and our teams are mixed and literally no one else knows or cares about what the others are working about because it's completely different from their own work. Worst is that no one ever has any "blockers" because if we say we do, that standup is now a 40 minute CBT session of how can we deal with it or who should we involve to help out.
As a developer scrum is awesome especially when the meetings are like 2hrs into the work day, and start an hour before you leave. After the meetings and refocus-ing there's only 4hrs left give or take
As a scrum master and agile coach. This is actually valuable.
I'd also like to say, you're doing the dailys wrong if your product owner can do them in an email. And if they usually last 15 minutes, you're also doing it wrong.
As a certified PMP - this warms my heart. I hate the curriculum of my craft, it’s constant exercise of people getting in the way of progress.
The analogy at the end really connected some things in my brain!
I worked at a company thats pitch was “use our software, cancel meetings”, and our culture followed. Got a new manager with a different “style”, and my job got much more frustrating.
She refused to be that paladin, thinking it best that we all knew what was going on in the frontline lol
At my job, we started having a "crossover meeting" at the end of day shift/beginning of swing shift. The entire point of the meeting is to go over issues the previous shift and pass along projecrs that need to be finished. It also has a covert purpose of getting both day and night shift in the same room to reduce tensions that gradually build up.
No one from day shift would ever show up. They would all leave anywhere from 1 to 3 hours before with the exception of their team lead.
You can see how this created problems. Recently management has shut down it down.