At my previous employer I was leading a software development project that used daily meetings to report progress and issues. Our processes were based on Scrum, which is a fine foundation to build from. At the end of our first iteration we performed a retrospective to examine where we could improve, and one of my team raised view that the daily meetings were a waste of time. This view was based on the following reasons:
First of all, let me state that I disagree with these reasons; however I decided to dig a little deeper because I'm sure that there are other developers who feel the same way. Besides, I might learn something which may help in the future. To a certain extent the developer was right. The team was working on independent activities and there was very little cross over. This meant that the developers who weren't speaking were bored - hence the view that is was a waste of time.
The team decided that we would trial holding meetings every Tuesday and Thursday to see if this would help things. The principle being used was "If it's not helping, don't do it". When I reported this to our manager I was told that we had no choice but to hold daily meetings. In just about everything else we were encouraged to jetison process that was not delivering any value, but obviously the daily meetings weren't included in that.
Plan driven (ie: non-Agile) methods are described as being rigid and dogmaticly enforced. Agile methods were supposed to remove the dogmatism and rigidity, allowing us to deliver better software, faster. What happens when Agile methods become inflexible and dogmatic? We are no better off than under plan driven methods. Agility is about adapting your processes by learning from your mistakes. In our particular case we were attempting to trial a change for the better only to be instructed to continue with process that was not working well for us. That's not my understanding of Agile methods and adapting to change.
The funny thing out of all of this is that other teams had stopped having their daily standup meetings because they weren't getting any value from them. These teams hadn't bothered to tell our manager, so he didn't know that they weren't being held. The teams reinstated the daily meetings following my experience. I guess the moral of the story, at least within the confines of my former employer, is "Don't tell a supposedly Agile manager that you want to change the process - Just do it (TM)". It seems to me that some people get very rigid in their views of what Agile processes are. What a sad situation to be in.
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