Project management: Does your calendar have a memory leak?

When a team regularly fails to meet its sprint commitments, there can be various reasons. One of them is that in addition to working on sprint tickets, other things are running in parallel. These can be unexpected tasks that are not mapped in a ticket or – if there is a ticket – are not pulled into the sprint. Another popular source is sprawling meetings with at best little, at worst no, relation to the sprint goal.

Escape the Feature Factory: Stefan Mintert english

Stefan Mintert works with his clients to improve corporate culture in software development. He currently sees the greatest potential in leadership, regardless of hierarchical level. He set himself the task of leveraging this potential after a career path that involved several changes of direction. Originally coming from a computer science background with several years of consulting experience, he initially founded his own software development company. In doing so, he realized that leadership is something that needs to be learned and that good role models are rare. It became apparent that his customers' greatest need for support in software development was not in producing code, but in leadership. So it was clear to him where his company Kutura was headed: improving leadership so that the people who develop the products can develop and grow themselves. Stefan has been writing for Heise as a long-time freelancer for iX since 1994.

The most damaging case is regular meetings that started many years ago. They may have been sensible and productive back then. But today they are often just “there”. Without an agenda, without clear results, with a “historically grown” list of invited people. Since there is no shortage of topics, time is never enough. Sometimes the timebox is then increased without the quality increasing.

When I observe something like this, I sometimes ask the annoyed participants why they are going there. I don't often hear a real reason that goes beyond “that's how we've always done it”. My suggestions to simply cancel attendance are obviously irritatingly radical; in other words: people continue to attend these meetings.

Lately, I've tried the following analogy: the calendar has a memory leak, and these meetings are occupied and unused memory. And what decent developer would accept a memory leak? Unused memory should be freed.

This analogy has actually had an effect, and a dialogue arose about whether the time occupied by the meetings actually corresponds to the unused memory. Is it therefore a worthwhile investment of time? The question must, of course, be decided on a case-by-case basis. A blanket answer in this post is not possible.

In the case of my client, we resolved the issue by creating tickets in the sprint for the meetings. This killed two birds with one stone: Firstly, the previously invisible working time was now visible. And secondly, the meetings came up for discussion in the review. There, one can at least discuss the value and benefit of the meetings together.

Read first, then act

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(rme)