Re:If you multitask, so will your team
by colanderman on Friday January 26, 2018 @12:56PM
(#16241257)
Yep, "oh, we had a problem, but then we fixed it" accounts for about 50% of all the "content" in our daily standups. The solution is almost invariably (a) nontechnical, (b) wholly inapplicable outside some tiny domain, (c) trivial, or (d) so complicated as specific that the speaker rightly elides it from their report, making that 50% of time a total waste for everyone in the room.
The few cases when it's actually a common problem one could reasonably expect others to have, team-wide emails have already been sent and there's no need to cover it again.
Re:If you multitask, so will your team
by philipodonnell on Friday January 26, 2018 @09:48AM
(#16239533)
Is your employer a software consulting company with teams working for different clients? I could see how in that kind of meeting there would be very little overlap in situational awareness of what each client's requirements are. I was imaging a team working on different parts of the same large product, where it may not be feasible to identify everyone who might be able to provide constructive criticism ahead of time to get them into one of those ad-hoc meetings.
Although, "that's the idea but it doesn't work in practice" is a fine answer, too.
I was in 50-person all-hands meetings for a product at Google, and there wasn’t the time or the context for anyone to give feedback on anything. At the time I felt bad about my inability to pay attention — without my laptop out I would barely have been able to stay in the room due to boredom — but the meeting really was a poor format and a waste of people’s precious time, attention, and energy, even at an hour a week.
At least in my experience, 90% of the time there aren't any 'useful' challenges being presented. Mostly it's stuff like "Dave was sick last week so we're a bit behind", "ticket #447 was much trickier than we expected, but we've solved it now" or "We're still waiting for the client to send us the updated data files". The actual technical challenges are almost always hashed out in smaller ad hoc meetings among the relevant people. And even when a 'real' challenge does get aired it's often of such a specialized nature that only 2-3 people have anything useful to add and it's much better for them to have a separate meeting. So it's not that feedback is discouraged, it's that there is hardly anything at the meeting to give constructive feedback on, and any feedback I can give has already been given days ago in one those above mentioned ad hoc meetings.
And in the very very rare event that someone has a challenge that is big enough and generic enough that it's reasonable to assume that the whole team will have something productive to add then that is a unique enough event that it's worth scheduling a specific meeting just for that.