Why Are Agile Coach Calendars Full?

Have you noticed that it is hard to get on the calendar of an Agile coach? Or a Scrum Master’s calendar for that matter?

I once looked at a Scrum Master’s calendar and was shocked to see that there were almost no unfilled spots during working hours. I looked at another’s for the same product, and it was the same situation: his calendar was also full.

Agile coaches tend to be completely booked too. These are people who are supposed to be observing and paying attention to ad-hoc conversations. How can they do that if they are always in a meeting? And why is their time so fully committed?

The answer is simple: standing meetings.

(Note: A standing meeting is one that is permanently on the calendar, to recur with some cadence. It has nothing to do with whether people are standing up or sitting down!)

Agile coaches want to stay plugged into everything that is going on; and they also want to have an opportunity to give advice. If the organization operates through standing meetings, then coaches need to be in them all, because the job of a coach cuts across every function: if they are to advocate for their teams, which depend on many of the organization’s functions, then the coach needs to be a party to all the discussions, and that means being in every meeting - and most meetings tend to be standing meetings that recur on a weekly basis or other cadence.

The calendars of managers are full too, for the same reason. Do you want to have a conversation with a manager about something important? Good luck: their calendar is full. They might have half an hour two weeks from now, at 8:30am or during your lunch hour; or they can meet at 6 on Thursday if you want to stay late.

This is toxic. It means that one cannot have ad-hoc conversations! It is not Agile! And it also means that one cannot have deep conversations, because there is never enough time: deep conversations often require two hours or more at a stretch.

Organizations that attempt to adopt Agile methods often find that the number of meetings that managers have to attend increases. This is because everything is now cross-functional, and so everyone needs to be aware of everything - hence everyone needs to be in every recurring meeting, to stay current on everything.

That is a highly ineffective way of working.

A meeting is extremely costly: a large number of highly paid people are all gathered together, taken away from their responsibilities and their focus, made to sit in a room for an hour. If you are going to engage is an activity that is that costly, it had better be worth it and better than alternative approaches.

Most of these standing meetings serve one purpose: communication. They are to share updates so that everyone is aware of what is happening. What happened to information radiators and dashboards?

If your meeting is for communication, unschedule it now. It is the worst possible use of everyone’s time.

Some meetings are for more than communication. But then do they need to be recurring? Or is is better to bring the right people together when an issue pops up? You might think, “But their calendars are full, so we can’t have a meeting when an issue pops up” - but their calendars are full because of the standing meetings!

Some standing meetings serve another purpose: maintaining a relationship, either with a team or with a particular individual. Those are important. Don’t nix those. But nix all the standing meetings that have the main purpose of communication: replace them with dashboards and maybe a weekly update by email or Teams channel.

The leaders of an Agile organization need to establish a culture of communicating through passive means: dashboards; and the flip side of that is that they need to establish a culture whereby people feel compelled to check the dashboards for the various activities that might impact them - those of other teams, other functions and so on. Instead of going to a standing meeting, check their dashboard. Put it on your calendar if you have to - a five minute check each week. Then, if you need to discuss something, think, “What is the best way to raise that issue?”

The best way to raise an issue might be a quick email, or a Teams message, or a phone call rather than a meeting that pulls everyone in for an entire hour. A message is asynchronous - people can respond to it in a way that is best for them, and you can send it to just those who might be affected by putting it in the right Teams channel or CC-ing only those who might have an interest.

This is what Gitlab calls embracing asynchronous communication. It translates to working in a non-disruptive way; a way that enables people to manage their time well, instead of always having to disrupt the flow of their own work, and their own focus, and take them away from their own teams, so that they can sit in a room or a Zoom session just to receive updates that they could easily see in a dashboard.

Sometimes one hears, “I don’t stay on top of my emails”, or “I don’t have time to check other people’s dashboards”. One could just as easily say “I don’t have time to get to work on time” or “I don’t have time to meet my commitments”. In other words, these are excuses. The first two are often accepted today as permissible norms; the second two are not. These are cultural values and they can be changed: leadership needs to change them, by making it clear that people are expected to stay on top of the email threads and Teams channels that are important for their work and awareness, and check dashboards, as well as create dashboards for one’s own areas of responsibility.

These behaviors need to be part of the culture.

You might wonder why I singled out Agile coaches in the title of this article, if standing meetings are a dysfunction that are broader than coaches. It is because coaches are change agents: they are in a position to explain to leaders why standing meetings are a problem - and get people to stop using standing meetings for communication!