Are agile scrums an outdated idea?
Here’s a video on YouTube making the case for why agile was an innovative methodology when it was first introduced 20 years ago.
However, he argues these days, daily scrums are a waste of time, and many organisations would be better off automating their reporting processes, giving teams more autonomy, and letting people get on with their work:
https://youtu.be/KJ5u_Kui1sU?si=M_VLET7v0wCP4gHq
A few of my thoughts.
First, it’s worth noting that many organisations that claim to be “agile” aren’t, and many that claim to use agile processes don’t.
Just as a refresher, here’s the key values and principles from the agile manifesto: http://agilemanifesto.org/
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
* Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
* Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
* Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
* Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
* Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
* The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
* Working software is the primary measure of progress.
* Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
* Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
* Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
* The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
* At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
Your workplace isn’t agile if your team is micromanaged from above; if you have a kanban board filled with planning, documentation, and reporting tasks; if your organisation is driven by processes and procedures; if you don’t have autonomous cross-functional teams.
Yet in many “agile” organisations, I’ve noticed that the basic principles of agile are ignored, and what you have is micromanagement through scrums and kanban boards.
And especially outside software development teams, agile tends to just be a hollow buzzword. (I once met a manager at a conference who talked up how agile his business was, and didn’t believe me when I said agile was originally a software development methodology — one he revealed he wasn’t following the principles of.)
Let’s say you have a team of 12 engineers, and each engineer makes $160,000 a year.
That’s $76.92 an hour.
Taking 12 people offline for a 1 hour meeting means that meeting is costing you $923.08. * 5 days a week = 4,615.38. * 52 weeks a year = $240,000.
You’re burning a quarter of a million every year just having meetings. Also likely, these aren’t the only meetings they’re in.
How much money are you spending preventing work from being done?
We used to have a daily stand up first thing in the morning before anyone had even had coffee for gods sake. “So what’s everyone working on?” Fuck if I know, I haven’t even read my email yet.
If your scrum is an hour long, you arent doing it right. They should be 10-12 minutes tops.
When I run mine… It’s story 1 - highlights
Story2 - highlights
Etc
In depth conversation can be had after standup… I’m in and out in under 10. Often under 6 minutes… lol
I’ll preface this to say I’ve only done real standup meetings on a project a long time ago, and maybe it wasn’t done the right way (No True Agile), but I didn’t really see the point.
In my opinion a 10 minute meeting with more than 3 people is probably worthless. What information is being exchanged in that time that shouldn’t just be an email? Are people not sure who can help with their issue or not going to bring up things that need more attention if not forced to speak? Does the entire team really need to hear these minute summaries of the small things people accomplished in the last 8 work-hours? And couldn’t this just be done with the team lead talking to each person and coordinating or calling meetings when members need to talk?
So these super short meetings succeed at not wasting a lot of money on process, but IMO it’s because they’re a short waste rather than because they’re an efficient use of time.
Exactly. Here’s roughly how ours go:
- 5 min starting the meeting - people joining, some company/team announcement, etc
- 5 min reporting plans for the day (really just “working on X, no assistance needed”)
- 5 min discussing any issues from step 2
That’s it, and we’re often done a couple min early.
We do two teams back to back, and since I’m a lead, I usually join both so I’m aware of what’s going on. So 30 min total for two teams, and I’ll sometimes sneak in some other syncs in the extra time between stand-ups to avoid yet another meeting (e.g. discuss a prod bug with QA or discuss a process change with the scrum master). We’re planning on adding a third team to our office soon, and I think we can do it in 10 min per team.
If your process looks significantly different from that, fix it.
An hour long scrum? Fucking shoot me. My team is usually about 15 minutes tops. Anything past that and we table it for parking lot.
You better believe it exists and it ain’t rare either, especially when half of the fucking team is in India and needs their hand held and the only time that can happen is 6am pst in the goddamn morning
We have that struggle, but they have their own scrum team so we don’t have to coordinate schedules and we required that one of their team members be on our time schedule (up to them if they want to relocate to Canada or something). We’ll schedule meetings as needed in their time zone to give direction, but they’re otherwise pretty independent.
That seems to work out pretty well for us. We also have teams in E. Europe, so we have teams in three very different time zones, each with their own scrum teams and whatnot.
I’m afraid that you lose far more than that just going to and from the bathroom, the coffee machine, or down the hall to your office from whichever door you had to walk into. This is not to say that your calculations are wrong, it’s more a question of whether that is a useful metric.
@ajsadauskas @technology Is also worth noting that the daily scrum should not be about reporting. It should be the team coming together to plan their day.
@BarneyDellar @technology You’re right, it should, in truly autonomous cross-functional teams that have a high degree of delegated decision-making.
But that’s not what tends to happen in many larger, hierarchical organisations.
In those organisations, what can tend to happen is the daily scrum becomes where managers get to micromanage details and staff are expected to report back their progress.
(I’m thinking about one past job in particular, where it was explained to me that: “The scrum is important because it allows our manager to keep track of our progress and set priorities.”)
@ajsadauskas @technology Oh yeah, seen that too! But if you’re daily status update isn’t working for you, maybe you should try having a daily scrum instead :)
And that’s why we don’t let our managers in to the standup. Here’s who we have involved from a leadership perspective:
- architect - usually doesn’t attend
- team lead - there to answer technical questions
- project manager - only if a release is pending
That’s it. We don’t let the director, product team, or VP join, they instead need to communicate through the scrum master and team lead instead. Most of the time, the above people aren’t expected to contribute to the meeting.
It sounds like you need to teach your manager to use your issue tracking solution. That’s where tracking progress happens, stand-up is for identifying issues, pivoting when requirements/priorities change (happens through scrum master), and arranging collaboration between individuals. It’s not for progress tracking.
The idea of agile is great, and easy to sell at a company in my experience. The problem is that the ideas in the manifesto can only be attained if the business stakeholders feet are in the fire as much as IT. That HAS to have top down support from leaders that understand software. But, in every agile company I’ve ever seen (I was a consultant for 15 years, so I saw a bunch), eventually a project goes south, and the business stakeholders throw tech under the bus by saying: “We’re not in IT. We didn’t know we should be thinking about what we want (and not just waiting until the end to demand more and more and more)!”, and they fucking get away with it. Boomers in senior leadership, who don’t know how to work their car stereo, say “Yea, that makes sense. IT, why do you suck!?”. And then “agile” is dead. Tech learns to cover their ass, and demand clear requirements up front and get signoff.
@ajsadauskas @technology we’ve customised our agile practice to fit the team. And it has evolved over the years. We usually start new projects using a very traditional approach and evolve it depending on the team, skills, and culture. I think the original principles still hold.
As always, it depends on what problem you need to solve. I still think these methodologies are sound as long as you ADHERE TO THE CORE PRINCIPLES.
It’s not about reporting or speed, but rather communication and quality delivered at a sustainable pace. It’s also about collaboration with the user/customer. Management often don’t understand this (or chooses not to).
A stable, mature team should be able to do every-other-daily, but scheduled check-ins are valuable.
@airwhale @technology The issue is that often the core principles of agile fly in the face of how many big companies and organisations work.
Big orgs are often built around hierarchical command-and-control. They’re built on monofunctional teams, processes, and procedures. They’re built on KPIs and reports. They’re built around getting stakeholder approvals ahead of waterfall projects.
So the bits of agile that tend to get picked up and implemented are the kanban boards and daily “scrum” meetings.
And the bits that tend to get left on the cutting room floor are the bits about products being the most important output, the autonomy, the cross-functional teams, the ongoing customer input, etc.
Yes, you are absolutely correct AJ. “Enterprise Agile” is its own beast, and where we usually need to start at higher management levels. Education is important for them to understand their new roles.
Without buy-in and active collaboration towards “real agile” from managers, we will not succeed in moving away from micromanaged waterfall.