I don’t like the term weekly.
It sounds fixed, it does not sound agile.
Used in contexts such a weekly meeting: do you really need a meeting every week? I would rather consider to have a meeting as needed, when there’s a real problem, when the benefit is evident.
A weekly status report? Why? Why not pulling the status of the project directly from your continuous integration system or from your tracking tool (Mingle? Track?).
A weekly catch up? Why not having informal catch ups, only as needed, only when there’s something to talk about it?
A weekly release? Why not releasing as soon as you have working software, why breaking your work flow in weekly iterations?
I worked in a project where there was the bad habit of a weekly commit (!), on Friday late afternoon, to close the week.
I worked in a project where there was a weekly remote standup meeting, nothing more useless and boring: people talking at the phone and no one listening.
Weekly doesn’t sounds good for nothing, not for iterations, not for releases, not for meetings.
A Value Stream Map might help you to understand if your weekly commitments are really giving you value or not.
3 Comments
Well, I agree with you partially about how weekly sounds rigid. I always find myself in dilemma of missing a weekly meeting just because there is not enough content to discuss about. Sometimes, I find those meetings useful too because those are needed. Now here is my other perspective which I need to put on table to defend the term weekly:
- What if there are many business users involved in a meeting related to requirements? Doesn’t a planned weekly meet help? On ad-hoc or need basis we might miss some of the users due to unavailability.
- Business users and people who are outside team needs to plan their calendars. How those people are going to mark their calendars or decide what is their weekly agenda?
For developers or people internal to the team (customer analysts etc. who are sitting with team), I don’t find any issues because development and related meetings (stand-ups, huddles) are something which they can decide on their own as it doesn’t affect the external participants.
All I could suggest is, in the beginning of meeting just ask do you really want to carry out those meetings.
Thats just me!
What about a daily standup? Is weekly bad, but daily good?
Oh daily is good, weekly is also good.
I didn’t had the time to reply the Sachin comment, there was something missing and unclear on my post.
The anger on the weekly term was coming from an upfront planning, was coming from a request to plan to do every week something. Without a real understanding if it was needed or not.
Weekly project checkpoints for example are necessary to feel the rhythm of the project and understand how is going, daily standups are something I can’t imagine working without.
Or let’s remove standups too, let’s try that, as an experiment, let’s imagine working without standups, what will happen? What else can we use in the team to make everything working at the same way or even better?
Can we improve the team performance removing standups?