Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

Tag: meetings

  • Effective Standups around Kanban Board

    You can hear here and there that Kanban scales up pretty well. Actually one of Scrum issues, and I believe one that isn’t addressed neatly, is what to do in projects that take more people than a single Scrum team can accommodate. Definitely one thing which is surfaced pretty soon as Scrum team grows is standup meetings.

    As you go with three standard questions through growing team it naturally takes more and more time. Soon it can be a problem to fit into short time-box you have for such meetings.

    When team are adopting Kanban they usually leave standup unchanged. However it means that, at some point, they face the same issue as Scrum teams do – 15 minutes is not enough anymore.

    Recently Jorn Hunskaar shared such story on his blog. It prompted me to combine a bunch of ideas into a single answer that can be a guide how to improve standups organized around Kanban board. I left a lengthy comment on Jorn’s blog although I believe it is worth to share the idea here as well.

    Instead of running typical round-the-table with answers about what happened yesterday, what is going to happen today and what issues are there you may try to redesign the pattern you follow on standup.

    • First, go through all the blockers (if there are any). These are definitely your pain points at any given moment. It means that you definitely want to invest precious standup time on blockers. This is no-brainer.
    • Second, discuss expedite or emergency items (again, if there are any). This is top priority work from the perspective of the whole team. This is something you really need to get done even at cost of delaying other work. Again, something which is worth investing scarce resource into.
    • Third, go through items that hasn’t moved since last standup. These are items which may be risky. Maybe they weren’t supposed to move but in this case it would be a quickie – not much discussion needed. Otherwise it is worth to have a brief analysis what happened that prevented moving cards forward. By the way, it means that you should have some kind of mechanism to mark index cards which aren’t moving, which is usually tricky.
    • Fourth, go through everything else. One more guidance you can have is discussing items of one class of service after another in order of priorities. In other words you start with highest priority class of service (bugs, critical features or what have you) and discuss all items of this class of service. Then you move to another one. Well, at least this can work considering that you can tell which class of service is more important than other.

    One more rule would definitely be reasonable: within each of these groups you start from the right side of the board and go to the left. This shows that the closer an item is to being done the more you want to discuss it as you are closer to complete it, thus bring value to your users, clients and stakeholders.

    Now, up to this point there is little difference – you still go through every single work item which is on the board. There is different focus on issues and you may skip discussing obvious pieces of completed work but still, a lot of stuff to go through.

    However, given that you’ve just sorted topics to discuss by priority you can just use a simple trick and just finish discussion when the time of the meeting has elapsed, no matter if you were able to finish all the things. It likely means that you’ve covered all the items from first three groups, and definitely all of them from first two, and whatever leftovers you have are items which require least discussion or no discussion at all.

    It also means that on a good day you can cover all things, or more things than on worse day, but that’s perfectly OK. What you basically need is to ensure that most important stuff doesn’t go unmentioned.
    Going a step further means that you can skip a discussion over a specific groups or sub-groups of items, e.g. a specific class of service, when you see it doesn’t really add any value. If you aren’t sure try to cover it during standups and see what outcome you get. Then you can start experimenting with the plan of the meeting.

    Ideally, after some time, you will end up discussing only important stuff, say, blockers, expedited and stalled items and maybe others which are brought by any team member for an important reason and just skip regular work which needs no more attention than a silent confirmation that everything is perfectly fine.

  • No Meeting Culture

    Meetings are boring. Most meetings are irrelevant. There are too many meetings we have to attend.

    A confession: during past half of year I organized exactly two meetings with engineers in my team. Both were mostly about organizational issues regarding whole company, not just my team.

    How did I do that?

    Let’s start with why meetings are organized. Most of the time meetings happen to enable communication between people. Why don’t people just go to meet each other at their desks? Well, because they sit in different places, have different things to do and, often, have little free slots in their calendars. Sometimes they need to prepare themselves to say something reasonable and invitation to the meeting gives them time for that.

    Basically all these reasons become non-existent when whole team sits in one place.

    You don’t have to busily gather people from different places because, surprise, surprise, everyone is there.

    You don’t have to wander what people do at the moment since, well, you just see it in a glimpse. You can make your call whether it’s a good time to interrupt them at the moment or you should wait for a quarter.

    You don’t feel urge to finish in planned time slot even when the discussion is great and you’re solving problems like crazy. Neither do you feel this funny feeling when everything was said but no one hurries back to work and you just spend your time on chit chat because a meeting room is reserved for another half an hour.

    You can even allow starting talking with folks on subjects they aren’t prepared to. You can because whenever they need to prepare they’ll tell it and a discussion will be restarted later. This is like instantly starting a meeting instead of sending invitations. Odds are everyone is ready and you don’t waste time. If they are not it works similarly to invitation with agenda but better since you start meeting as soon as everyone’s ready.

    You should still think how improve transparency and communication flow but, believe me, once you start talking about almost everything in front of your team, even though you’re talking with a person next desk, people will know way more than they would otherwise. It would work that way even if you reported all your workweek on 4-hour long weekly summary with your team, which would be a candidate for the top dumb management practice of a year by the way.

    And the best thing. With this approach you magically clear everyone’s calendar. Finding slot when everyone is free becomes the easiest thing under the sun because everyone basically stopped attending meetings.

    A cherry on the cake: finding free conference room doesn’t bother you anymore.

    Downsides?

    It won’t work for 50 people. As far as teams aren’t bigger than 10 people it should do well. Vast majority of teams fall in to this category. Sometimes you need to focus and you don’t care about architecture discussion happening over your desk. You can take a break or try to isolate yourself with headphones. Either way it is a cost, but on average it’s significantly lower than it would be if you switched for old-school meeting approach.

    This applies only to team-related meetings. If your people have a lot of cross-team meetings and spend long hours on company-wide roundups filled with jabber this doesn’t have to be huge improvement. But then you’re doomed anyway. One of my engineers attended a few meetings on coding standards beyond these two I organized.

    The approach works best for engineers. Project managers and business people will meet other people more often that once per quarter but it should be still an order of magnitude meetings less than it used to be.

    I wouldn’t get this kind of crazy idea but it happened so my whole team is collocated and it’s the best organizational thing which could happen. If you think it’s drastic, you’re wrong. Meetingless environment comes naturally. Maybe it so because this way you possibly are all time at the meeting, but at the same time you “meet” people only when it’s really needed.

    Try it. And tell me what happens.