Agile practice: more crazy half-day meetings than daily meetings!

Starting from "weekly meeting"

Daily project meetings are too frequent and may be a waste of time. Once a month, it seems that the time is too long, so we often "weekly meetings ".
One time I attended a weekly meeting of a project on Friday. One of the project members responded to a problem.
I asked: When did I find the problem.
Answer: Monday.
I asked: why not ask this question on Monday?
......
This is a real case. If you have any questions, why don't you give feedback immediately? Do you have nothing to say at the regular meeting?

If your company implements annual performance appraisal, your leaders will talk to you in December to conduct performance appraisal. Your leaders will say, "Small X, what did you do in January, then, from March to march, you will make similar mistakes every month! Your leadership never told you about this before, but did not tell you about it until performance appraisal. What is your reaction? If your performance score is poor, and you cannot get the year-end bonus, will you be impulsive to kill your leadership?

The performance appraisal case is fictitious (although it is fictitious, there are actually many similar real cases), but the truth is similar to the "weekly meeting". What is the purpose of the meeting? In fact, I am very disgusted with the "example" of the "regular meeting". Once this word is entered, it is easy to think that this is a routine task. This will easily lead us to take the form, I forgot why I had a meeting?
However, the "weekly meeting" case mentioned above is not very bad. the weekly meeting of some projects says: What did you do this week and what to do next week. Changed to a work report meeting! If you have such a meeting, I will scold you directly: What is your project manager doing? What do you do? What are you going to do next week? Do you have no plans in advance?

In order to avoid taking the form, I will not use the word "Regular Meeting" at the beginning. To make your meeting more efficient, we recommend that you do not use the word "regular meeting, you can even change the meeting room name to "War Room "! Every meeting is a battle and a problem needs to be solved! A colleague once described the feeling that the meeting gave her. There were only four words: A knife, a sword, and a shadow! All participants will participate in the conference to express their own opinions and strive for the success of the project. That's all we need!

 

Author:

Zhang chuanbo

Www.umlonline.org

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Is the daily meeting held like this?

Extreme Programming has daily standing meetings and scrum has daily morning meetings. Is it agile?
Some people mentioned that they also practice daily meetings, but they have no effect.
I asked: Do you want to talk about what you did in the last day during a meeting every day? What are you going to do in the next day?
Answer: drop ......
Naturally, there will be no effect. This will turn into a work report meeting, and the more serious problem is: Agile development is a task planned for tomorrow today. Can you see it step by step?
The release of minor versions in extreme programming and the sprint in scrum are actually an iteration. The work in a certain iteration should be planned in advance, and it is definitely not a step by step. There is no need for daily meetings to talk about things that everyone knows. Speaking Nonsense is not the original intention of agile.

How should I start a daily meeting?

The daily meeting should focus on the following valuable content:
1. What problems, difficulties, and risks may affect your current work, so you cannot proceed as planned.
2. What problems, difficulties, and risks will affect the success of the current iteration?
3. What problems, difficulties, and risks will affect the project's success?
4. Is the current plan already or may be out of date and needs to be updated or improved immediately?
5. What measures or suggestions can be made to make the project more successful?
To put it simply, the daily meeting is mainly used to ask you questions, difficulties, and risks.

Daily meetings can hide problems for no more than 24 hours, and allow your work to be supported by other members in a timely manner! This is what an idiot understands: exposing and solving problems earlier will save a lot of cost. Unfortunately, we often want to save the meeting cost, and the day will become weekly or even monthly meetings. It seems that we have saved a lot of meeting time, but the problems of the Project will grow and spread with your support, it may end up killing the project! There will be a lot of problems in any project. If there is no problem in your project, you should be vigilant. No problem is the biggest problem! It's not that your project has no problems, but that you have no ability to discover problems! Quality requires investment, and daily meetings are an investment.

Agile development is definitely not planned for tomorrow today. To ensure that each iteration is successful, the work must be implemented on every day. The daily meeting is an important means to ensure the effective implementation of the plan. The project situation is presented visually to all project members every day, so that we can make the project well in a day.

Let all members of the project team understand why daily meetings and how daily meetings are required, which makes daily meetings very effective. Daily meetings, whether standing or sitting? Is it in the morning or before work? Should I use a whiteboard or projection? And so on. Keep a written record if necessary.

Daily meeting advanced

In my projects, I often have meetings every day, and even more abnormal, I will have meetings every half day!
Why do I have to hold a meeting half a day in this abnormal way?
1. Although the daily meeting can make the problem not be exposed more than one day, I still feel that the one day is too long and I can't stand it. I will find it at most for half a day!
2. Most of the Technical Talents in China's education system are hard-pressed and willing to solve problems by themselves. I cannot change the education system in China, but I have to change the work habits of team members, so half-day meetings will be more effective than daily meetings.
3. The work of the project is race against time. The work time in my project is accurate to the hour or even half an hour. If the problem can exist for one day, it is likely that at least two to three hours of work will be wasted in a day, and rework will be required in the future, the rework time will be reduced to 1 hour.

My project usually does not work overtime much, thanks to daily meetings or even half-day meetings. In fact, every half-day meeting is nothing new. As long as you know what effect you want to achieve, you can practice more best practices! In the movie "24-hour anti-terrorism", when dealing with certain emergencies, the anti-terrorism department even has a meeting every hour!

Developers need to think independently for a long time. You may question: half-day meetings will interrupt developers' thinking and reduce efficiency? You may also question: does a project require a half-day meeting or a daily meeting?
This is a good question! Daily meetings or half-day meetings do not appear in my entire project cycle. I generally implement daily meetings or even half-day meetings in the following situations:
1. There are many clues at the beginning of the project, and there are many hidden problems.
2. The members of the project team cannot quickly enter the battle state without asking questions.
3. During the software release phase, bugs are constantly detected and fixed.

In addition to the half-day conference, I also have other "alternative" practices:

1. Sudden MEETING
I will immediately convene a project meeting when I realize that there is a crisis or hidden danger that needs to be handled immediately.

2. Anyone can call a meeting.
If any project team member encounters a problem and needs support from others, or has a hunch that there is a hidden danger or crisis and he does not need my consent, he can immediately call all or some members of the project team to convene a meeting, he became the leader of the meeting!

In fact, the principle is very simple: give full play to the strength of the team to discover and eliminate problems as soon as possible! Eliminate it in the bud, instead of waiting for the problem to sprout and grow to an unmanageable level. Instead of being an ostrich, I buried my head in the sand and turned a blind eye to the problem!

Back to Origin -- why do we have a meeting?

Some friends mentioned in the group that their project basically does not need a meeting because the problem is solved at ordinary times!
I think this is really cool! After all, a meeting is just a form. The question is, what is the purpose of the meeting? What should I do if I don't need a meeting to achieve the purpose of a meeting in a simpler and more effective way? Back to this origin, we will naturally deal with problems in many projects, making meetings more effective and even unnecessary!

Of course, some communication must be conducted through meetings. At present, we may not be able to avoid meeting at all, so necessary meetings are necessary! The meeting English words include "meeting" and "Conference". Do you know what the two English words mean differently?
Meeting: there are not many participants. Participants gather together to discuss issues. Each speaker has equal power.
Conference: a large number of participants and a minority of speakers, most of whom are audience members. For example, if you attend the annual meeting on process improvement, I will give a speech above. If you listen below, it will be called conference.

The meanings of the two words are different mainly in three aspects:
1. different purposes: Meeting seeks the opinions of each person to reach a consensus. Conference mainly refers to the opinions of some people.
2. The number of participants is different: the number of participants in meeting is small (I suggest not to exceed 7, and the maximum number of participants is five). The number of participants in a conference can be large.
3. Different participation methods: Meeting users have equal power to speak. in Conference, speakers are dominant while others are listeners.

According to the above definition, can you see whether the meeting in your project is meeting or conference?
If you want to build a self-organized team, you must assign the group members the power to make your meeting a meeting rather than a conference! In meeting, everyone is the main character!

What follows: daily meetings will not encourage laziness?

Some of my friends mentioned that they could not solve all the problems they could not solve. They did not think about it themselves. As a result, they made me feel very tired when I tried to solve the problem frequently.
Further digging into this problem, we found that these project members come from different departments, and the project managers basically have no right to manage them, and cannot influence the salaries, bonuses, and positions of the project team members.
That is to say, all the members of this project team are not on the same ship! The success or failure of a project is only related to PM, and has nothing to do with the members of the project team. Of course, the members of the project team can do less and then do less!

The purpose of raising questions during the meeting is to gather all the wisdom to deal with these problems. If the purpose of raising the questions is to be lazy, it is not the same! This team building or team culture is super problematic. On this basis, no agile practices can be implemented. At the 2011 Guangdong process improvement Annual Meeting, a friend asked me what needs to be improved first? My point is: first, we need to build a good team; otherwise, all others are virtual; if the team can do well, the team can consciously solve many problems, it is easy to implement various agile practices and even build your own best practices.

The practical experience of daily and half-day meetings in this article is based on the fact that the entire project team is on the same ship. If your project team is not on the same ship, refer to the umlonline website about team buildingArticle.
However, the project team must be relatively independent and have certain authority, and the project manager should have certain authority. As for the scrummaster mentioned in scrum, it is a bit of a project manager, but he has no administrative power and only acts as a coach. The problem is: this role may be used abroad, but if you do not have any authority in China and only rely on personal charm to drive the team, it depends on your Rp, check whether all the team members you lead are of high personality.

 

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