In my organization, these were called Execution Control Meetings. Organizations that claim to be using an Agile process will usually call them stand-up meetings or scrums. They are intended to provide a formal way for a small team to communicate with each other about the status of their project.
In theory…
The purpose of a daily status meeting is to communicate information about the project among the team members. The team meets for 15 minutes at the same time every day. Each person takes no more than a minute to explain what they have done since the last meeting and to identify any problems that they have encountered. The team is not supposed to analyze, let alone solve problems in a status meeting. People stand up during the meeting to reduce the temptation to lose focus and wander off into problem solving or finger pointing.
In practice…
The group expands beyond a dozen people. The leader allows digressions into analysis of the causes of a problem and a discussion of solutions. Time expands to half an hour or more. People start sitting down and checking their email.
Worse yet, program management repurposes these meetings to become a tool to enforce adherence to a schedule. These meetings soon become widely hated by the engineers required to attend them. But do they help achieve management’s goal of completing a project by a scheduled date?
Birth of an Anti-Pattern!
In fact, status meetings that are used to enforce a schedule are a classic example of an anti-pattern (“An anti-pattern is a common response to a recurring problem that is usually ineffective and risks being highly counterproductive”). How do they subvert the goal of finishing a project as quickly as possible?
First consider what you learn in a typical status meeting dedicated to enforcing a schedule:
- The project is behind schedule.
- I am behind schedule (usually).
- Other people are even further behind schedule than me. (Assuming you are not the unlucky person furthest behind schedule!)
- As long as I’m not the furthest behind schedule, I’m not holding up the project.
If the meeting leader indulges in shaming or scapegoating the person furthest behind schedule, you also learn that the following behaviors will make your life much easier:
- Don’t bring up problems you’ve encountered in this meeting!
- Do just enough work to ensure that you are not the one furthest behind schedule.
Aftermath of a Status Meeting
You leave the meeting demoralized and depressed. The project is behind schedule! There are so many problems! Poor X really was treated roughly this time! You spend a few minutes consoling X, the meeting’s scapegoat. You wander off to the breakroom to take your mind off the meeting. After you have regained some energy, you return to work.
You have just wasted an hour, as has everyone else attending the meeting.
Effects on the Project
To summarize how a status meeting focused on the schedule actually delays the project:
- The meetings reduce the productivity of the team. Each person attending a meeting wastes up to an hour of time that could otherwise be spent actually working on the project!
- The meetings delay solving problems. When you encounter a problem, you may be tempted to wait until the next status meeting to bring it up to the team. Wouldn’t it be better to start solving a problem as soon as you find it?
- The meetings encourage a management mindset that tries to force reality to fit a model rather than adjust a model to fit reality. After all, a schedule is just a model created to help the project figure out the best way to develop a product. In most other endeavors, when a model fails to predict reality, the model is revised. In status meetings, reality is blamed for the failure of the model.
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