Agile working (none software)

theone8181

theone8181

theone8181

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Joined
27 Mar 2013
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Hi guys, we've recently had this forced on us at work, but it seems now we just end up having roughly 2 days of meeting a fortnight and don't get any more work done (we actually get less done as it's a practical job and the meetings are at our desks via teams). Has anyone used this and it worked well? I suspect there will be a different in opinions between mangers and works (I'm a worker not a manager). It seems like a mega inefficient way of working.
 
dLockers said:
OP, share the Teams link with us and we can listen in.
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:D. We have a 30 minute scrum every morning, and every fortnight we have the product demo which lasts a couple of hours, the the retrospective which lasts a couple of hours, a planning session which lasts a couple of hours and now we have to have a pre demo meeting to discuss what's going on in the demo:rolleyes:. It seems to me management has palmed off all the work of managing onto the workers. For reference my job is probably quite different to most of you as its in R and D in developing fricking lasers. Unfortunately agile doesn't work with r and d as problems crop up (nature of r and d), which means all the times get thrown out the window. I believe it's been brought in to give a score to everything. The system as it stands seems to benefit people grossly overestimated they're score, 1 manager was boasting he had the most point, I then found out one of his guys managed 84 points in a fortnight :rolleyes:. Just out of interest, all you guys that think it works are you mangers:p.
 
So to try and elaborate on my issues, say a task is set, but a problem comes up our 'points' suffer and the boss gets unhappy:rolleyes:. Unfortunately there is no way r and d can avoid having issues (although ironically most of it is down to poor management and trying to cut costs on a product). I'm not sure how well it works with physical things. Our team has about 8 people in it, with 5 of is doing a job that the other 3 can't and vise versa. In all honesty it's not vastly different to how we used to work where we got new priorities each week. Now we just have a ridulous amount of meetings.
 
Kenai said:
It's interesting to note that despite the topic of the thread being the use of 'Agile' in non software environments, a lot of the pro Agile comments seem to circle back to referencing software development.

Is anyone actually using it successfully in an environment outside of software development? I'd be interested to read about it being used effectively in other environments, as most stuff online is also fairly software focussed and there's not much out there about it's use in other environments in practical terms.
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That was the general feeling I got. When we first started agile (bearing on mind were only on our 5th sprint) one of the things the boss mentioned was that it's mainly done for software, which was a massive red flag to me. Also the boss loves to micro manage, so a few times we've agreed on work for the sprint, then extra work gets shoved in, with a stupid deadline. For instance we needed to do about 3 weeks work testing a product, but due to meetings and removal and rushing, I think it got about 3 days work on it, then the customer complained it had problems:rolleyes:. I'm opened minded about it but I know my boss won't leave stuff alone.
 
So for my next sprint (which is really only about 8.5 days of work), I've been given about 40 points:rolleyes:. Thats why it doesn't work for us, **** poor management.
 
Participant said:
Thankfully I'm in a business where over-enthusiastic PMs, internal consultants, and continuous improvement people get politely ignored and sidelined while the real professionals like engineers and accountants get on with it.
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I envy you:p. It was the start of our sprint when I got set those tasks, the problem is most of them were assigned to me without me saying yes which is the complete opposite of what we were told initially. What you guys have got to remember is that as its not it, we can't all do each others jobs (generalising here, but in it if it's software related I'd say the whole team should be interchangeable, assuming same language). With our job being physical and a different set of skills that's just not possible.
 
Narj said:
Well none of my local colleagues use video either so it's not just me. We see it as a waste of CPU time and bandwidth. :D

Stand-ups are generally useful for making sure other people know what's going on and getting help when needed. I don't mind those - we have them down to 10-15 mins.

Some of the retrospectives/planning meetings etc take hours. In our case we are talking over 40 hours combined of people's time for those sort of meetings when they could be doing far more productive work. It's staggering to me.
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Our tean has 10 people in it so wasting 10 hours of time of meetings seems very counter productive. We used to manage on 2 hours of meetings in the same time so we obviously can't magically get more efficient.
 
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