On the opposite extreme, our teams use Jira, kind of structure it like Scrum, but don’t do any of the actual planning. It’s complete chaos and we have a similar level of meetings, maybe more, with everyone trying to figure out what’s going on and when things will be done. The go-to is a 30-60 minute daily meeting with each individual project manager for each project. Sometimes there are 3 project managers working on different aspects of the same project, so we have 3 hours of meetings (spread throughout the day) to give the same updates 3 times. Of course, there is no update, because all we do is attend meetings to provide updates.

Occasionally our Scrum Master will put an actual scrum meeting on the calendar, but then talks about whatever he wants, and it never moves the ball forward from an organizational point of view. A retrospective would go a long way; we’ve never had one of those. I bring that up often, as the 1 meeting we should have, if we only have 1 meeting.

I tracked my time meticulously for several years, and when I used it to point out how horrible the current environment is, I was told I was doing too much and should be much my lazy about the tracking, to the point where it becomes meaningless.