We’ve all been there before, The Useless Meeting. They come in many shapes and forms but share one common element: the unproductive waste of time. Nothing can be more damaging to an agile team than being interrupted from their valuable work to attend one of these sucking voids.
Recently, our Scrum Team had an otherwise productive Sprint interrupted by just such a meeting. We were halfway through our Sprint when we received a Friday afternoon email about a mandatory all-hands offsite meeting of our entire group. Our V.P. had decided that the next Wednesday, we would all gather in Denver to discuss business strategy for the upcoming year. Yes…our development team was ecstatic to attend, knowing full well it was going to be chock-full of endless PowerPoints with lots of charts and numbers.
We decided to raise our voices a bit and protest. “It’s interrupting our Sprint” was the battle cry. No luck, that didn’t resonate. So I tried a different tack. “If you’re going to interrupt our work make it productive. If you’re not going to cancel the meeting, make it interesting.” Our V.P. perked up. He couldn’t fathom the fact that our development team wasn’t interested in charts, projections, revenues, etc. He immediately visited our office to find out why we were so upset. We gave a few reasons and suggested that the group offsite meeting should be about the great things his teams were doing. Make it a motivational meeting. Get the teams excited about their work. He left our office agreeing and made a change to the agenda. He even asked us to give a talk about the power of agile and our success with Scrum. We still didn’t want to interrupt our Sprint, but at least we thought this wouldn’t be a complete waste of time. We worked very hard for the next few days preparing a killer presentation about Scrum and how it could benefit the whole organization, not just our team.
We arrived in Denver at noon. We were sixth on the “revised” agenda. The offsite meeting started late. The first speaker was our HR rep. Not very inspirational, but she kept it short and sweet. Next up was our V.P. He talked for about an hour and a half about things that he thought were very important (he was slated for only 30 minutes on the agenda). Lots of charts, numbers, and broad, sweeping statements. Next up was one of our senior product managers. Lots more charts, lots of numbers and all completely meaningless. In fact (and I must share this classic Dilbert moment with you) at one point, someone asked where his numbers had come from. His answer was literally (and I quote) “Ummm…from a matrix…in my head”. After an hour of this babble (slated for 30 minutes on the agenda) he finally sat down. The R&D pitch was next. It was a little confusing as our R&D guy had started his job about 1 week prior to the meeting. He ran over time as well. At 3:50 PM in a meeting scheduled to end at 4:00, our CEO strolls in and delivers the most lackluster presentation of the day which ends promptly at 4:20. The meeting is called to an end and we never got to deliver our Scrum presentation. The team was incredibly disappointed and couldn’t believe we spent a whole day in a useless meeting.
When we sat down for our Sprint Retrospective, I asked how disruptive this offsite meeting was to the Team. Aside from the obvious waste of valuable time, the Team agreed that the meeting was indeed disruptive to their work. Some of our developers were deep into solving some complex problems and had to divert their attention to attend the offsite meeting. Our lead architect and I were also distracted as we had to entertain our V.P. for the entire time he visited our office, and we had to work on preparing our presentation (which of course we never got to give). The day following the offsite was difficult as well as most of the Team struggled to get back into the flow of their work. We were tight on time and some of the developers put in time on the weekend just to finish their coding for the Sprint. The morale of the office was down as well. Team members couldn’t believe that so much time was wasted with such flippancy. In the end, we ran out of time in our Sprint and weren’t able to adequately test what was developed. We had sacrificed quality for the sake of a useless meeting!
The takeaway message here is really for those who manage Scrum teams and it is very simple: Don’t disturb your Scrum Team mid-Sprint unless it is absolutely essential. The work of the Sprint is very important and it is providing value to your customers. If you are going to disturb your Scrum teams, you had better have a very good reason to do so. If at all possible, schedule your disruption well in advance so your Teams can plan their Sprint tasks around your activity. From the story above, it should be evident that unproductive interruptions can have a negative impact on performance, quality, and morale.
The message for ScrumMasters is equally important: If managers cannot justify the importance of these time-wasting activities, don’t interrupt your Scrum Team during a Sprint. This is easier said than done. Our managers can exert undue pressure on us to mandate participation in these activities. The best thing to do is to make them very aware of the consequences of their actions. In fact, if they insist on disturbing the Team, it is probably beneficial to demonstrate the impact of their actions post-Sprint with hard facts so they have tangible evidence of their impact on quality and performance. As a last resort, you may want to give them a gift-wrapped copy of Scott Adams’ excellent book Always Postpone Meetings with Time-Wasting Morons.
