22
No, don't even think about taking someone's phone. If they're looking at their Facebook account or personal Twitter account during a meeting, then you have a bigger problem, and the solution most likely would involve possibly trying to recruit and hire the right kind of people; ideally, those who are capable of acting like adults.
However, one thing ...
21
I think Retrospective is more appropriate name in this case
Imho, project is dead when it has been aborted (or abandoned), if it has been successfully deployed then the project is very much alive (the code is there and it works!).
18
that's a very pertinent question! I'd rephrase it in a slightly different way:
Why people don't pay enough attention to meetings?
The usage of mobiles (or any other gadgets) just for distraction (at least in the meetings I've been to) is mainly because people don't believe the meeting is useful.
So, instead of trying to solve the consequence, I'd suggest ...
16
None of what you described is Scrum
Scrum doesn't have the roles you described.
You don't seem to have the two essential roles for Scrum - the Product Owner and the Scrum Master.
In Scrum everything cannot be top priority. The Product Owner creates an ordered list. The Development Team works on them in that order.
In Scrum there are no status meetings. The ...
15
What the Stand-Up Meeting is For
The Stand-Up Meeting (a.k.a. the daily scrum) is designed to accomplish two main things:
Coordinate task dependencies within the team.
Identify process or resource issues (blockers) that need to be addressed outside the stand-up meeting.
Various scrum practices support these objectives. The individual practices are ...
15
TL;DR
What is the best part of the day to have the Daily Scrum meetings, in the morning or afternoon?
There cannot be a single, canonical answer to this question that will be true for all teams and all projects. However, there are certainly some common practices—but keep in mind that "common" doesn't necessarily mean "best."
To clarify the trade-...
12
Why would you need to? The daily stand-up meeting should only take five to fifteen minutes, depending on the size of the Scrum Team. If it is taking longer than that, then that's a separate issue you should probably be looking into.
If it does only take five minutes, then are your developers really so hard-up for time in the day that the presence of a ...
11
Command-and-Control vs. Self-Organizing Teams
Should I collect all the phones before a meeting? ...I don't want to punish everyone just because a few people can't pay attention[.]
It depends. Are you facilitating a meeting between adults, or babysitting kids? If you treat adults like kids, then you abandon all hope of creating teams where people step up ...
11
The Problems
Reading between the lines a bit, it would seem that you have a few related issues.
Your "team" is too large to be truly agile. You may want to consider splitting up into cross-functional tiger teams with a focus rather than a multi-project, matrixed organization.
The purpose of your stand-up hasn't really been defined. Truly agile stand-ups ...
10
Every industry has lingo. It slowly evolves and becomes a sort of sub culture of the industry itself. Even if technically not correct in terms of a literal definition or even proper grammer, it becomes okay and common and accepted.
So, no matter how any of us dissect the word, I doubt any of us can say we have never heard anyone use post mortem in our ...
10
option 1: it might work if you make these standups extremely quick and efficient (15 min is the maximum, standup could be much shorter)
option 2: sounds like a disaster to me; having so many people and projects, it would be impossible to process it all in a meaningful way and still keep it under 15 minutes; you might end up with long boring "standups" (I've ...
10
The stand-up in Scrum has a distinct purpose. As do the other meetings defined by Scrum. There is no overlap between their purposes, so having another meeting is not a good reason to cancel the stand-up.
What could be a good idea though is to have both meeting directly following each other. In other words: shift the time of the stand-up to immediately ...
9
The easy solution is to have only one standup which is for the team. My recommendation is to talk about only the upcoming work and focus on those issues which my cause some troubles later on such as cross-project tasks, integration tasks, tasks which are on the board for a long time.
With this approach the three personal oriented questions need to be ...
8
Quick answer: It depends.
It depends on:
Frequency: If you're having a daily meeting, sending the minutes one day later make it useless.
Action Points: If you're dealing with several people that will follow the actions discussed during the meeting, better sending the minutes before having the other people doing anything. Otherwise, if the attendees carry ...
8
The simplest answer is to ask the team. Go with what they feel most comfortable with. If it doesn't work out, adapt and shift the meetings around.
I have worked with some teams that prefer to have all the meetings in one day. They see that as a 'hands-off' day and like to get it out of the way rather than having meetings spread out.
Other teams don't like ...
8
I think the most useful advice can actually be found in the comment on your linked Question.
My manager was absolutely shocked to find out that we still had our stand up when he canceled it (a regular occurrence). My response to him was "The stand up isn't for you. It's for us. Whether you're here or not, we still need to sync up as a team.
The Daily ...
7
Depends on the metric you want. If it is about the meeting, one hour describes time spent on it. If you are after how much it costs, you are going to need the five labor hours.
For any metric, you have to answer a question. If you are not answering a question, you don't need the metric. Your question here implies you don't have a business question to ...
7
Post-mortem also has strong connotations in English of examining something dead to see what killed it and it is hard to see why it would be appropriate for a successful project. Lessons learned is better as it covers positive and negative experience from a project.
Your gut instinct is correct and you can do your bit by not using the term in that sense and ...
7
I think is it completely fine. I googled it and organizations outside of the Agile world often call their lessons learned sessions postmortem. I found a great article by Jeff Atwood about postmortem in case you are interested. Pawel also has a post about the very same topic and he called it postmortem (in 2008).
The naming is interesting though: I found ...
7
The physical Kanban board offers the face-to-face meeting approach. It necessitates all team members to come together. Moreover the feeling for "What I'm now responsible for" increases. We introduced a physical Kanban board at our customer once before we shifted to a digital one. The method is initially better taught in a physically way
Get a Whiteboard and ...
7
I am drawing assumptions on your PO's agenda, based on my experience of other PO meetings, and discussing a stakeholder's objections on spend would not be consistent with that agenda. The PO, or you, or another leader of the team, should acknowledge the issue, validate the issue, and then table it with a promise of an immediate meeting to discuss further. ...
7
TL;DR
I was thinking at the back of my mind to either:
defend the PO and budget
defend the team, since they were kept busy delivering items from the backlog
Bring focus to the meeting by telling POs to keep focus on delivering high value items in the following sprints
The correct answer is "none of the above." Your goal as Scrum Master isn'...
6
there are a select few that cannot seem to take their eyes off of their phone
imho, it's quite common for creative people to get bored during all those endless meetings
perhaps you could change the way you run meetings? I've seen too many project managers who just loved all kinds of meetings and couldn't understand why developers would find these ...
6
Treat the symptoms or kill the disease. Taking the cell phones away will certainly cure the distraction problems. I'd hate to think what the side effects might be.
A high performing team doing work with which everyone agrees will not be distracted. It is simple as that. Like others have stated, take a long, hard look at your meeting and ask the right ...
6
In my experience, we should distinguish post mortem meetings from regular retrospective meetings. But I do not agree with the other answers as I don't think it only applies to a failed project.
In software development, teams usually have retrospective meetings throughout the project, typically after each iteration, sprint or whatever you call them. The ...
6
You are really looking at issues associated with multi-tasking. There are a number of questions on PMSE addressing this issue that you could look at. If you want something a bit more dry you could try this paper, but I would suggest that your friend:
Document the lost time. This would be the amount of time it takes to prepare for and then physically get to ...
6
You do need to make him aware of the impact of his pontification, and it sounds like he has some awareness now. However, it will not cure the issue. It is a well constructed behavior pattern he has developed over his life time and is likely consistent with his personality make-up and a ton of social engineering, i.e., he has been rewarded in his past for ...
5
CodeGnome's answer is about perfect... But here's my 2 cents as well:
Is the daily scrum 15mins meeting mandatory for successful scrum project?
For a successful scrum project, yes. You're not doing scrum if you don't have daily scrum meetings.
For a successful project in general, probably not. People have been successfully building software without any ...
5
Well, if you were recording it in MS Project, you'd simply untick the effort-driven box. It doesn't matter how many people you pile into that meeting, it's still only going to take an hour.
For effort-driven tasks, you can use man-hours, man-days etc.
For example, if we consider that it takes 2 man-days to build a wall, assigning one person to the task ...
5
TL;DR
Your part-time people need to be present for Sprint Planning. Specifically:
Do NOT:
act as a team member's proxy during essential framework meetings.
attempt to circumvent framework-mandated meetings such as Sprint Planning or the Daily Stand-Up to accommodate resource constraints.
Instead, you should:
accept that part-timers create additional ...
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