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Just started a new contract. Daily scrum for the week and a half I have been here has been between 40min and 1.5hr. all at 09:00 as well. Way to screw up the flow of the day. Massive international company. How the **** do these places survive!
If it's on Teams and you have 2 monitors, who cares?
But if you want it to last less time then suggest doing it in person. People tend to take less time if they are actually standing.
Please don't change the typo in the thread title.
How would the "scum master" show his or her worth if they didn't have a massive annoying meeting at the start of every day, eh?
You are our prisoner, do not pull out early or there will be consequences.
You have been warmed. <<--notatypo 😆 🤣
It on Skype (for good reasons). I can't concentrate with all the talking. Been caught out before with things like this before and muting them! I just don't understand how anyone thinks this it is a good idea. Diversions running off into details about problems etc.
do not pull out early or there will be consequences
That's what she said.
Please don’t change the typo in the thread title.
How would the “scum master” show his or her worth if they didn’t have a massive annoying meeting at the start of every day, eh?
Lol! Very true, although in this case I think the scrum master should take control.
Our production meeting used to take over an hour, all stood up. Most of that was the plant manager micro managing every decision and plan, rearranging every decision and plan, and moaning about how long the meeting was taking.
New plant manager = less than 15 minutes and that feels too long.
It'll be a fine day indeed when the whole scum & sprint thing gets booted for a new flavour of the month.
Daily scrum
WTF! 🤣🤣🤣
They're meant to be short.
Been caught out before with things like this before and muting them!
Being able to tune into the meeting when you hear your name and respond as if you have been paying close attention for the past hour is definitely a skill that takes practice 🙂
Something very wrong if you're spending an hour every day in a scrum meeting...
I hope they have supplied some virtual biscuits 😉 😜
It’ll be a fine day indeed when the whole scum & sprint thing gets booted for a new flavour of the month.
If done correctly and people don't become a slave to the process / allow flexibility / customisation to the particular project they can work well.
And I bet that 45 minutes over what a scrum should be is not factored into sprint planning...
I am so glad I work for a large, very successful and profitable company who manages without absolutely none of this bollocks.
Something very wrong if you’re spending an hour every day in a scrum meeting…
Project looks to be a "Set up to fail" one. 🤦
There appears to be lots of IT workers on here so this thread seems like a great opportunity to ask. What is it with IT and taking business bullshit bingo to a whole new level? Scrums, journeys, stand ups, product owners blah blah blah. What happened to just getting shit done?
Appear to spend more time talking about doing stuff than actually doing stuff. Then inventing ever more weird and elaborate ways of talking about stuff, then wondering why every project is a thousand years behind schedule. I can hazard a guess as to why 😀
Damn it! @SSS beat me to it! thats what i get for opening a ton of threads and working my way through them!
@funkmasterp You should try working in oil & gas everyone else are amateurs.
in this case I think the scrum master should take control.
To answer seriously, is nobody else saying "hold on a sec, this is getting silly"?
Have you sounded out any colleagues? Get a few on side and take it to them as a group.
What happened to just getting shit done?
Believe it or not, there are a lot of different ways of getting shit done when it comes to IT. The jargon was developed to increase people's vocabulary so they could properly articulate just how wrongly things are being done in the current project.
Then disagreements started about how to express that things were being done the wrong way so an industry was born where people enable others to complain that the way they are complaining about things being done the wrong way is wrong.
I don't think it is bullshit. Traditional waterfall projects were taking too long to deliver business benefit.
Hence new agile methods were developed to deliver incremental business benefits faster.
Scrums, journeys, stand ups, product owners blah blah blah. What happened to just getting shit done?
Think of the actual work that has to be done - its easy to see why individually and collectively people will be receptive to any opportunity to not actually spend time doing it.
If it was my job to repeatedly slam my fingers in a filing cabinet door I think I and my colleagues would find numerous opportunities to spend time to devise and discuss more effective ways of doing that job so long as that time was spent not actually having to doing it for a while. 🙂
Never thought of it like that 🤣
I don’t think it is bullshit. Traditional waterfall projects were taking too long to deliver business benefit.
Hence new agile methods were developed to deliver incremental business benefits faster.
genuinely can’t tell if this is a piss take or not. Well done sir
Agile - a way of getting a bit of what you wanted, usually a bit later than when you wanted it. Then the dev team disbands leaving you to sort out workarounds for the bits you didn't get.
Waterfall - a way of getting all of what you (thought you) wanted, usually a lot later than when you wanted it. Then the project stops and you have to sort out workarounds for the things that have changed since the olden days when you started the project.
PRINCE - a way of creating many many many documents about something that never quite happened. You end up doing more or less what you did before the project, but the prime contractor has made a few million quid along the way.
Ouch...sounds like a serious chat is needing to be had to get people to focus on the 3 things they should be reporting - what wasn't achieved yesterday, what is aimed to be achieved today and what blockers are stopping this being achieved. At a guess, this might be happening but then sparking a whole discussion in the meeting. Scrum Master should be picking these issues up and then contacting individuals after the call to see what they can do to help remove the blockers - are they trying to do that on the call?
It is an incredibly mind-numbing meeting for everyone...best of luck getting things improved!
I used to take part in scrum meetings as the content person. We generally kept them to 10 mins or so.
How, you ask?
We had a rule where you had to plank while saying your bit. That tended to keep people focused and succinct.
🙂
I've worked at a company where the "standup" lasted at least an hour every day, was a small company and the CEO was very micro-managey. Total waste of time, would have to sit through discussions about projects I had nothing to do with.
Our team daily standup is fully async. Just drop a short message in slack about what we're up to and any blockers. Team does cross several time zones though...
To answer seriously, is nobody else saying “hold on a sec, this is getting silly”?
Have you sounded out any colleagues? Get a few on side and take it to them as a group.
Spoken to another guy about it also new isha and he is also amazed.
Opening up to the pain.
My job title: Scrum master.
I work with 4 teams of 5-7 people a team. We meet each morning to talk over any noteworthy achievements from the day before, anything blocking current work, or any support needed. None of these takes more than 15 minutes (as they run back to back), none of them are about or for me, tey are for the team. Anyone doing criticising Agile/Scrum should read the half-arsed manifesto as that's clearly what you are actually using. Doing it properly isn't a perfect methodology, but it's better thn a lot of others, doing it wrong gives those of us who know what we are doing a bad name.
As for the buiness bull bingo, it's a short meeting where people should 'stand-up' - it's hardly convoluted.
We have a daily meeting, rarely takes more than 15 minutes. It's quite useful as it's the perfect time to quickly mention things that will affect the rest of the team, ask for help when you're stuck on something, check your interpretation of a requirement is correct, etc. If something needs more than a minute to explain we usually arrange a call (or just stay connected to the daily) with just the people needed.
But you do need discipline to avoid either going into too much detail, and to avoid the meeting just being team members listing what they did yesterday, and what they're going to do today.
They’re meant to be short.
Yep. Daily standups, so called because in the days when we were in the office, you 'stood up' when talking about any blockers/issues etc on the work you're doing. Ours, even with 20+ people are 20 minutes long.
There appears to be lots of IT workers on here so this thread seems like a great opportunity to ask. What is it with IT and taking business bullshit bingo to a whole new level? Scrums, journeys, stand ups, product owners blah blah blah. What happened to just getting shit done?
This is a good question.
The problem with IT is that nothing is really very well defined - there are thousands of ways to do any particular job, some work, some don't, some look like they'll work but eventually cause more problems later. There are far too many options for everyone and far too many unknowns. This is why the waterfall method (design everything, build everything, test everything) ends up with massive delays basically every time.
Agile was created as a way to just get shit done, as you say. You start by doing something, and then adapting your design and plans to how that went. The problem is that just like with the technology, few people really understand how Agile is meant to go, so you end up having massive meetings every day which wastes time. If the OP is spending an hour in a standup talking, it means that a) people don't know what standups are for and no-one's aware that its damaging or is able to do anything about it or b) there's too much to talk about, which means there are too many problems going un-solved.
Badly run projects are badly run regardless of the methodology they try to use.
Yep. Daily standups, so called because in the days when we were in the office, you ‘stood up’ when talking about any blockers/issues etc on the work you’re doing. Ours, even with 20+ people are 20 minutes long.
It should be: Paul do you have any issues? Yes? Ok I'll get Fred to come and talk to you. Molgrips, any issues? etc. Not an extended meeting about the problem itself.
It should be: Paul do you have any issues? Yes? Ok I’ll get Fred to come and talk to you. Molgrips, any issues? etc. Not an extended meeting about the problem itself.
Yep, it's exactly that. We go through our incidents, dev ops board for stuff assigned to us, and change requests. Exactly that wording too! 😁
Our meetings were running over the 20 min mark a while back but now they're down to 15 mins normally.
Hell, our sprint planning and retrospective session isn't even 2hrs!
Teams has been a right blessing in disguise in our organisation. Gone are weekly 4 hour management meetings x 2 (that's a whole day gone), replaced with a weekly 1 hour meeting (cancelled if nothing coming up) and one two hour meeting every two weeks.
Same with other meetings, all now run to time, even if 'in person'.
What happened to just getting shit done?
People realised the wrong shit was taking too long to get done.
All that bullshit you refer to, when done correctly, means the customer gets a working product sooner and further opportunity to shape what they actually need as the delivery progresses.
The issue comes from orgnaisations, often large multinationals, who proclaim 'we are working agile now'. They do this without spending the time up front to ensure their business is operating in a manner which supports this methodology. The end result often combines the worst parts of agile with a waterfall delivery approach. When that happens you get
- Daily scrums which last way to long and end up as management status updates where employees scrabble to justify their existance (rather than identify blockers that the scrum master helps resolve)
- Software releases that don't actually deliver features, just an incremental step of the codebased until...
- A waterfall delivery of the 'Minimum viable product' being rolled out. Just with no documentation, building on old code, and not meeting the customer requirements
Any many more issues. I call it 'Badgile' because frankly that is what it is.
Working in a company that gets it much more right is quite refreshing. Scrum masters actually actively working to unblock things that hold software developers up. Developer getting on with developing features and not having to spend 1/3 of their time distracted by environment or other issues which someone else is employed to resolve. Feature deployments after one sprint, which are then verified by the client and either signed off, or looped back around with amendments.
It works. A lot more shit gets done and more importatly it is not actually shit, it is what the client wants and needs.
When I'm sat in my office alone and bored - just me and the dog - I remind myself I don't have to deal with this sort of shit! 🙂
Just drop a short message in slack about what we’re up to and any blockers
This is what I don't understand. Why isn't this the standard way of doing things?
Getting everyone together for a meeting seems like a total waste of time when everyone could just update a Slack/Teams channel at the end of their day with the three questions and then read everyone else's updates first thing in the morning.
People realised the wrong shit was taking too long to get done.
so bad management then? The rest of your post has a lot of the word salad I was talking about. Waterfalls, agile, scrum. Just no need for it. Trying to make something really ****ing boring sound exciting! Marketing for the workplace 😀
Whilst co-locating isn't mandatory for Scrum it was always recommended when I was trained. Hence short physical alignments made sense as everyone was together on a site. It was also easier to read the body language of the team and what wasn't being said out loud.
I think this practice has been carried over into todays more frequent situations where there are more virtual teams not physically together.
so bad management then? The rest of your post has a lot of the word salad I was talking about. Waterfalls, agile, scrum. Just no need for it. Trying to make something really **** boring sound exciting! Marketing for the workplace 😀
You would make a refreshing manager. Just walking round the office all day yelling, 'Just do some shit!' at all the developers.
To be fair, I've had worse managers.
so bad management then? The rest of your post has a lot of the word salad I was talking about. Waterfalls, agile, scrum. Just no need for it. Trying to make something really **** boring sound exciting! Marketing for the workplace
'bad management' is an overly simplistic view of the issues that have been rife in software development for decades. it is also one that is incredibly hard to resolve. People have tried, and it turns out changing the entire way of working is one of the answers.
It's nothing to do with trying to make anything sound exciting, it really isn't. Why have you chosen to focussed on the specific words you don't really like rather than the whole message?
You say there is no need for a different working practice. I work in an environment that categorically proves you wrong. You are entitled to your opinion by all means, but the entire point of my post is such opinons come from experiencing poor attempts at working within the agile/scrum framework. One could argue the reason it doesn't work in many organisations is also bad management.
I’m taking the piss. I can tell you work in IT. No sense of humour either! 😉
I spent my entire working life in IT Project Management and don't miss the bullshit described above.
I still can't reconcile the desire to 'get shit done' (AKA Agile) with managements/clients/everybloodybodies insistence on pre defined/agreed timescales and delivery budgets.
Maybe it's just me and after 40 years of doing it, still don't really get how the two can coexist.
Oh and as for the 'you don't understand Agile because you've never see it done well' brigade. Yeah right, granny+eggs+suck sonny 🤣
I’m taking the piss. I can tell you work in IT. No sense of humour either!
Yea, good joke.
You've been around long enough to know that humour is rarely conveyed will when written down. If the joke didn't land, that's on you :-p
none of them are about or for me, they are for the team
👏🏼
Sounds like you’re a good scrum master. To be fair to others, it’s often managers that mistake scrum masters for project leaders, not the stand up participants. That’s where pressures that result in creep in the role tend to come from… “above”.
It's about comfort, avoiding responsibility, moving people away from decisions, and the illusion of control.
But at the same time, if you do nothing about it you are complicit in that.
Personally I would be screaming at them but I'm senior/established/confident in my position enough to do that.
I spent my entire working life in IT Project Management and don’t miss the bullshit described above.
I still can’t reconcile the desire to ‘get shit done’ (AKA Agile) with managements/clients/everybloodybodies insistence on pre defined/agreed timescales and delivery budgets.
Maybe it’s just me and after 40 years of doing it, still don’t really get how the two can coexist.
That's because it requires the whole organisation to be structured around doing it that way. It takes a number of years and significant investment to transition fully to the methodology. This is why most organisations fail to implement it properly and you get the worst parts of it becoming standard.
Oh and as for the ‘you don’t understand Agile because you’ve never see it done well’ brigade. Yeah right, granny+eggs+suck sonny 🤣
So you've never seen it done well then I take it? 🤣
Oh and as for the ‘you don’t understand Agile because you’ve never see it done well’ brigade.
I guess it might be true but it would be nice to see it done well to demonstrate that.
In my experience a good team will deliver whatever the alleged methodology is whilst a shit team will fail but just in a slightly different way.
An example is the "Scrum masters actually actively working to unblock things". That needs them to have a reasonable understanding of both the system architecture and also who really counts when getting stuff fixed. Whereas most of the time they really aint anything other than a meeting secretary.
Or the "which are then verified by the client and either signed off". Depends on what you are doing really. I have dealt with some horrendous screwups since the devs were building for that one sprint feature and so failed to think what the actual end goal was and so designed it in a way which failed to scale/handle the additional requirements everyone knew was going to be needed.
The Agile [Mod: removed] usually defend their patch with:
'You've never seen it done well so...' usually followed up with
'the whole organisation/world/client etc need to change...'
I served my time in Consultancy. Charging Clients multi £m for the privelage then telling them they didn't get it/we'd all failed because they were uneducated probably wasn't the best idea.
Agile can give the impression of progress which is great in a Consultancy setting where Clients want shiny things and we want stage paying. Spending years up front doing boring stuff like Requirements, Design etc isn't exciting but as they say, time spent planning is rarely wasted...
I'm (was) happy with either Waterfall or Agile but suggesting one is always the best (only) way over the other is a bit blinkered and slavishly following processes in a zealot like manner, doesn't solve the fundamental issue. Rarely are we allowed enough time/£'s to properly define time/cost/scope as management get all twitchy over extracting the business benefit (which is often tenuous to say the least) and therefore justifying their very expensive decisions.
TL:DR One is simple prototyping the other design/planning etc up front. Both have their merits and part to play.
Scrum Master
welcome to 2023, your language is no longer appropriate.
Ultimately, back in the context of the OP, I am relaying my experience.
I've spent a lot of time in an environment that, based purely on history, used a waterfall delivery method. It worked really well. They attempted a move to agile, it went really badly and is the basis of my experience on 'Badgile'
I worked for another organisation that claimed to be agile. They were not, the used it to remove some of the best elemnts of a traditional waterfall delivery approach without any benefit other than saving costs. They were also terrible for misusing the scrum.
Until I worked in an environment that was shaped almost from the ground up to deliver using agile principles and scrum framework I simply didn't understand how it could be a good thing. We still don't get it all right, but for the software we are delivering Agile is the right choice. It starts to show cracks for time critical deliverables against industry standards, and it is then that the haivng experienced project managers can bridge the differences.
Both have their merits and part to play.
I agree with this completely. There is no right answer, its all situation dependant.
For balance, I've worked on and seen traditional (Waterfall) and Agile projects fail, a poorly run project/product can fail either way. The rest of our organisation work in a Waterfall approach as there's a lot of manufacturing going on, we build the software to go along with it. I like the phrase the head of department used the other day, 'Agile isn't perfect, but it's better for us than the alternatives'.
I prefer Agile coach, but technically it's not the title my 'inclusive' company offer, I should resign in protest for you soob?
And going the other direction, projects fail through use of inappropriate processes eg Prince 2 being slavishly followed on your £50k of dev because that's what Local Authority xyz mandates... The admin overhead would probably cost £50k...
It's all about what's appropriate to the work in hand and suggesting one single approach is either defective or a panacea is plain wrong.
I work as a Programme Director for a large multinational, the Digital team fall under my remit (since the end of November).
I struggle with the lack of accountability that lies within Agile. The fact that the end picture is not known from the end of a design and planning stage means it’s difficult to predict cost, time and the required resources. The more complex a project is the more this is compounded.
There are significant advantages with Agile, bringing to market products faster is obviously hugely beneficial to the end client, but it does again bring in other challenges to ensure on large Programmes that there is a cohesive workforce and not a fragmented one.
And from a quick read of one of my books…..as there is no clear vision of what the final product will look like can result in a project having no finite end date.
On a personal level, my digital team who I only recently inherited have cost the business millions on a product that is now past any roi. Agile isn’t just down to the Dev’s, the business, product owners, TPM’s, testers etc, have to all play along nicely. When this doesn’t occur then you end up a project that just keeps continuing to make the same mistakes, month after month.
I keep out of scrums, but I have had to assign an old school project manager to my failing digital project. We had to bring in additional controls, specifically around cost/time planning.
I completely understand from the Software Dev’s perspective that Agile is fundamentally a better working practice than waterfall, and I genuinely agree with the sentiment. But that doesn’t mean I agree with the lack of accountability (and governance and controls)…..but I am old school and from an infrastructure background.
Dev’s flame away!!
Our team daily standup is fully async. Just drop a short message in slack about what we’re up to
Skiving tbh
and any blockers
People keep asking me to do boring stuff
I have no idea what this thread is about, thank god I do a job without all this shit 😳
Christ work is such an awful waste of your life isn't it?
But that doesn’t mean I agree with the lack of accountability (and governance and controls)…..but I am old school
Can't say I consider there to be any more or less accountability in agile Vs waterfall.
Christ work is such an awful waste of your life isn’t it?
I am rapidly coming to that conclusion, I was dreaming of moving to a hillside somewhere warm and growing my own food while enduring a meeting this morning.
Chaos = cash......
When I’m sat in my office alone and bored – just me and the dog – I remind myself I don’t have to deal with this sort of shit! 🙂
+1
The fact that the end picture is not known from the end of a design and planning stage means it’s difficult to predict cost, time and the required resources. The more complex a project is the more this is compounded
Hallelujah. Not just me then. 👍
And coincidently 'they' still want to pin your balls to the wall re: time/cost/scope and hold you accountable for any variances...
We just drink coffee/tea at the start of the day, chat rubbish about what's happening and then get to work once the last mug is empty.
But we don't work in IT and the only waterfall we deal with is the water falling off a cliff type and that is delivering very well with the recent rain.
Aye. My highfalootin early morning decisions are limited to toast or cereal these days 😁
Totally different situation but when called to wasteful useless meetings at work I would tot up what they cost - this could be a possible way of getting senior management to focus? Often that meeting could be many hundreds of pounds - of folks time. The other thing I would do which is maybe less appropriate is refuse to go stating I had work to do 🙂
Or play buzzword bingo!
This thread started so well,a light playful thing with a box of smiles.
Now look at it 🙃🤣🤣
Luckily I moved out of development (or programming as it was known then) as SSADM was becoming the de-facto methodology, but have audited a number of projects/programmes since that use it and other waterfall approaches and then 'agile'.
Usual issue is crap implementation of the methodology and/or inadequate time/budget/resource - nothing changes, just the name of the methodology 🙂
.. there is no clear vision of what the final product will look like
Agreed, it cuts off when the thing you build does the job it needs to 'well enough'. You assign £xxx to the project and build till the cash runs out, or it's making you enough to continue.
the lack of accountability
Agile doesn't remove any of the RACI groups from old school project management, but who is accountable can depend on the organisation, we have a 'head of' who is accountable, task leads who act as technical product owners and are responsible, we have depedent teams in other areas of the business who are consulted and stakeholders who are informed.
I appreciate there's a lot of opinion and argument about this, but it's STW, it's what we do. I'm not 100% right about everything and I do not have all the answers, but I've been around enough to know what I think works (20+ years experience in Software).
Dev’s flame away!!
Shall I start with the errant apostrophe? 😁
I'm not a dev and haven't been for some time now, but my understanding of 'agile' is this:
Traditional development: I've built this, there you go. It's in support now, bye!
Agile development: I'm building this, what do you think so far? See you tomorrow!
It doesn't need an explosion in an Alphabetti Spaghetti factory, it's just checking back to confirm that you're on the right track. Or am I wildly off the mark?
Well given you're using plain English I'd say you probably are.
As for the buiness bull bingo, it’s a short meeting where people should ‘stand-up’ – it’s hardly convoluted.
And yet, it took another post to explain exactly what 'stand up' meant in this context.
Scrums, scrum masters, stand ups - why do they need stupid names? Morning/daily planning meeting/update works fine for everyone else who has a meeting chairperson.
I work in nuclear and even when the plant was running we didn't spend an hour on any morning meeting.
Nobody is criticising the way of working so much as the ridiculous 'reinventing the wheel' opaque language around it. If you have to spend so long actually explaining what are actually fairly pedestrian concepts then yes, you are snorkeling in a slurry pit of bullshit.
Being subjected to a 'marble run' soon 🤷 I have no idea of what will happen.... Or what one is.
And yet, it took another post to explain exactly what ‘stand up’ meant in this context
Well my intention was to point out that the clue was in the name. I take your point though, I think the Scrum framework wanted to differentiate itself from other styles of running work. It also makes a big deal out of stand-up not being an status update, so daily update really wouldn't work.
I work in nuclear and even when the plant was running we didn’t spend an hour on any morning meeting.
Glad to hear it, imagine spending an hour deciding what to do about the imminent meltdown!
you are snorkeling in a slurry pit of bullshit
I'll run it up the flagpole and see what flack it draws from the troops ... I've read Politics and the English language, I know we are all too often guilty of it and I apologise unreservedly for it.