Technology

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.

@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.

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

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.

@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.

I'm looking at this from the lens of my own org, which I think strikes a decent balance. As a brief intro, I work in an industry where a day of downtime can cost our customers millions, and a bug can also cost millions due to regulatory fines.

Estimates are bottom up, priorities are top down, and daily reports are largely opportunities for short form discussion about changes to requirements, delays, etc. We spend about 15 min/day, M-Th, on stand-up per team. We have six teams spread across Asia, NA, and Europe, so face to face communication is difficult.

With that out of the way, I have some comments, which I hope will lead to good conversation.

Build projects around motivated individuals

I disagree with this, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding. Projects should be built around customer needs, and individuals should be hired/assigned as needed to fill those needs. Individuals should be given leeway to work on projects they're interested in, but only within the priorities set based on customer needs.

The focus should remain on trusting your employees, but there needs to be frequent communication so problems can be caught and addressed early.

The most efficient and effective method... is face-to-face conversation

Again, I disagree, the most efficient is text, and the most effective depends on the information being conveyed. Stand-up works well face-to-face, but technical review can usually be handled through text, with face-to-face being an outlier.

My rule of thumb is if there's more than 3 back and forth messages, we probably need a face-to-face discussion. I can handle several text-based conversations simultaneously, while I can only handle one face-to-face convo at once, so most things should be text first with face-to-face being a fallback.

if your organization is driven by processes and procedures

This is a squishy concept since too much or too little process leads to problems. I think the amount of process should be directly linked to the risks associated to violating that process.

For example, here are some processes we have in place:

• deployments to production require approval from key stakeholders - product team, project manager, support team, OPs, and the relevant team lead
• larger projects require approval from architect, product team, and relevant team lead before work begins
• larger code changes (e.g. introduce new core tech, large scale refactor, etc) require informal consensus from other team leads, which includes a period for those teams to review the proposed changes

Each of those is based on risks directly tied to customer needs. A bad deployment can break customer use cases, cause support overhead, etc. Projects starting without approvals can miss requirements, overrun estimates, and delay other important projects. Large code changes without proper communication can delay other projects who have to manage conflicts with the new change.

So the focus should be on keeping processes that provide value and retiring those that don't. For example, building confidence in automated testing can help ease deployment anxiety and thus loosen deployment processes.

agile tends to just be a hollow buzzword

Agreed.

Also, agile itself isn't ideal for all projects. We find value, but we've made some changes to fit our customers expectations. We release about once/month, and more frequent releases are generally not wanted by our customers.

So we have each team release to prod every 2-3 months, usually combined with another team. Agile prefers more frequent releases (daily if possible), but we're not really interested in doing more than two in a month.

Anyway, great post! Hopefully people recognize the BS in their organization and push for change.

Yes. I don't do it. I also don't attend most meetings unless absolutely needed. I'm going to call my style Free Range Engineering.

I honestly believe that the people who complain about these aren't using them properly or work for people who don't know how to use them properly. People have been using some version of the huddle, standup, or SCRUM meeting for a very long time. Whether it's useful or wasteful is probably more a question about the people who are using them.

@ajsadauskas @technology as with so many things it depends on the people involved. we have a daily 15-min standup that's good for raising issues and blockers, asking questions, keeping the team across releases and significant production issues, ensuring that everyone has work for the day, etc. it helps that it's run very effectively. all of that can be and is done in other channels but it's a good way to get everyone on the same page together. does it cost money? all meetings cost money. but i would argue that good efficient meetings pay for themselves.

Spot.on. my business has adopted an agile mindset across the entire org, but it's still waterfall, because IT have so much governance in place and outsourcing contracts that prevent teams from actually working on things in a fluid and agile way. Every member of a squad is on multiple projects, plus our systems are so broad we cannot have a resource from each source system dedicated to a squad.

Secondly, no documentation? We moved from an on-prem Oracle DB to GCP so that we would have one central place for data and across all business units.. there was no documentation and we had to spend the next 4 years reverse engineering the data marts because all the IP left the business.. it took 4 years because of the previous point.

And because it's big corporate business, you have to make it work otherwise you lose your big bonus etc etc

And don't dare question the method

@ajsadauskas @technology I use them mostly to gauge whether folks understand what they are doing and if not to start a side bar after the fact to course correct, early in analysis if possible.

My direct teams do work that is partly exploratory into domains they don’t understand so a 15 min check in to see who needs guidance each day saves pain and money.

I would say other teams adjacent to ours have turned theirs into order giving status updates. I’m no longer welcome at those.

My company goes the opposite way and holds team standup and then a scrum of scrums after with everyone because my manager is fucking brain dead. Fortune 500 btw

Each org is different. There are organizations doing agile in a shit way, there are organization that are shit because they don't do agile and there are some that do OK because they take out of agile just what they need. In my first job they would write all the requirements up front, agree the price, sign a contract and then discover crucial functionality was missing. So they could either deliver useless product and piss off the client or do some extra work for free. It was shit. In my next company everything was nicely divided into sprints but the process was so overgrown working there was super boring and most project didn't even finish, they just got cancelled somewhere in the middle. My current company mostly lets teams organize themselves and is using agile to monitor progress and react if something gets delayed. It's mostly fine. Agile is not the problem and it's not a universal fix. You simply have to be smart about which or it to use and how.