Is every corporation in America as Meeting-Happy as mine?
Recently, my we implemented a new methodology: Agile. We’d already been using it, here and there, but this was an across the board mandate, so that we were “all on the same page.” To be honest, I wasn’t a fan, since after 20 years in IT it was perfectly obvious that this was nothing new; we’d been “agile” back in the 90s and all these guys did was change the jargon. One thing I do like about it, though, is its enforced honesty about how you spend your time.
I just calculated the hours I’d have available for this next 3-week “sprint” (see what I mean about the jargon?). Out of 84 possible productive hours (14 days @ 6 hrs a day), once I take away all the meetings I have scheduled, I have a grand total of 37 hours to apply to actual work. Reduce that by the number of hours I expect to spend handling on-call issues (15) and I have 22 hours of work, or 26%.
Best case scenario, that means I’m spending over half my time in meetings. Planning meetings, “Backlog Grooming” sessions, demos, “retrospectives,” reviews, etc., etc.
No wonder IT has a rep for never getting anything done (or done well). After spending all that time in meetings, we don’t have time to do quality work! We slam it all together in the remaining 25% of our time and hope for the best.
Agile has some good points, but its enforced egalitarianism, born of today’s “Everyone’s a winner!” mentality, is stupendously inefficient. Divide the work, and you get more done faster. If everyone has to be present for every activity, we just get bogged down.
k
Unraveling Time
Desert Wind
Ploughman's Son
Ploughman King
The Year the Cloud Fell
The Spirit of Thunder
Shadow of the Storm
The Cry of the Wind
Beneath a Wounded Sky
Cryptogenesis: A Memoir
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 
Yes that is true… Check out my posts “Scrum as the New Command and Control”, the New New Agile Manifesto, and Howto Create your own Methodology, among others
The interchangable cogs stuff is the worst and most damaging to IT.
If it’s something you were doing 20 years ago, it’s ‘agile’. Agile is chaff, the fact that they stole some wheat doesn’t negate that. Don’t give them any credit for stealing a few things and making a for profit church out of it…
Jordan
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it’s not agile rather
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I’m glad you are point this out. Many more bloggers need to question the inanity of this stuff.
Noone talks about the waste of hours in meetings or the opportunity cost of it all, they just assume you are going to spend the time.
I have lots of postings on my blog debunking the agile nonsense
Jordan
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Hi, Jordan,
Thanks for the comment!
I’m not completely anti-Agile; it does have some good elements, but mostly those are elements we were using 20 years ago and that were crushed by the “strict waterfall” and the “we’re all interchangeable cogs in a great machine” mentalities that came in between.
Mostly, though, I see Agile as a way for management to push the actual duty of managing staff down to the staff level.
And it’s the new “shiny” thing, which management loves.
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Follow up: I spent 3 hours in a “team” planning meeting, of which I was only a necessary participant for 15 minutes. This “Everyone gets a trophy” mentality is going to drive me batty.
k
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