work

I recently had a day where I had about 10 different meetings - all on different subjects. I knew that I would struggle to be productive in each of them if I turned up for them unprepared and had to switch subjects each time.

As part of our processes we regularly hold retrospectives. We used to do this all in a room with post-it notes - a fairly traditional approach. We would set up 4 areas: Liked, Longed, Learned and Lacked and proceed to plaster post-it notes over the different sections. Once everyone had finished we would organise each section into themes and then discuss and agree actions.

It is very easy for your work week to become a random collection of meetings - all with different attendees and different agendas. For developers in particular this can cause a huge hit on productivity as their day becomes disjointed and they are unable to stay focussed for the longer periods they need for their work.

We have a lot of remote meetings as most of our team work a significant amount of time from home. Face to face meetings are much better for some types of meetings - especially workshops and retrospectives. As the level of expected collaboration increases the more it favours face to face interactions.

On most projects there is a tendency for someone involved to become the "expert" in one or more areas. As they become comfortable and more knowledgeable in an area they will naturally gravitate to picking up tasks related to it. The need to deliver as quickly as possible can also drive this as the person who knows most is likely to be the person who can do the work quickest.