Times A Wastin’!!!!
One thing I love about Agile is the amount of time spent in meetings. Lots.
On many teams we instituted a “no-afternoon” meeting rule too. There are stats that will tell you even a single IM interruption will take up to 25 minutes to recover from (you’d better look that up). These days our Shift Foremen really like to see our green light on and ask us “is it done yet, is it done yet??” Imagine how much time is wasted.
Well honestly I (OK Gary-O just came on — “here in my car . . . “) uh uh honestly the one thing I can prove now, this moment, is the waste alot of organizations go through with these meetings due to poorly prepared management. And right now I work for one of those.
Very plainly, the meetings are always late, and usually run over more tham the time alotted and solve very little. Weekly, we have at least one big meeting with several DBA’s, a few developers and a few QA. This manager’s meetings always run late, 15 minutes minimum. So, eight people times 15 minutes is two hours wasted per week for the big meeting.
Then, there’s the daily and that’s usually late and overruns. Since this meeting doesn’t start on the hour, most of a half hour is a wash. Anyway, every day another 15 over/under times eight people = 10 hours a week.
Conservatively, 12 hours a week is wasted by this manager. In month, that’s 48 hours. If this person is there 50 weeks — the waste is 15 weeks of peoples’ time, almost 4 months. Doing “Agile.” And that’s not counting all the extra things that happen due to the daily interruptions. We aren’t talking about team bonding etc. We are talking a person who is poorly prepared, runs late, runs over, and is disrespectful of others’ time.
Now, most of the Huge Company, Incs. hire mouth breathers that need to be told exactly what to do. Also, the only place a lot of incompetents can hide is in the large hiring crowd of Huge Company, Inc. So time suck is unavoidable just by the stereotypes.
Wow. So next time you buy that . . . whatever . . . imagine if 30% of the cost was due to a manager living the fast paced life of time suck.