Agile Development in Interaction Design…Too Many Meetings?
One of the biggest challenges in my professional life has always been trying to keep up with my workload while spending so much time in meetings. Take a look at the week I just had:
The white areas are time that I have to actually produce work. I tend to work well when I have 3 or more hours sectioned off just to get into a zone and be highly productive. The little 30 - 45 minute chunks between meetings usually don’t amount to much other than catching up on email.
In previous jobs, I used to be able to mark off blocks of time on my calendar as “busy” but I don’t think I’m able to do that at my new job. We’re working in a psuedo agile development style, where we are rapidly producing iterations (of wireframes in this case) and meeting at least once a day to discuss. This process has been super valuable and has resulted in a stronger final product. Less time has been wasted heading down the wrong path, but you can see the danger of losing too much time to meetings in this process.
My recommendation for a User Experience team considering an agile development process would be to emphasize quick (possibly impromptu) meetings that last no more than 30 minutes. We seem to still be caught up in “classic mode” as far as the length of our meetings — minimum 1 hour. If you block off 1 hour, the meeting will take at least 1 hour. Forcing short meetings keeps the conversation moving quickly and on-topic. Shorter meetings also are in the spirit of agile development and ideally leave reasonable chunks of time to get work done.
Has anyone else worked in an agile development environment as an Interaction Designer or Information Architect? Any ideas on battling time lost to meetings?
June 26th, 2006 at 10:02 am
I don’t think I need to re-hash my philosophy of meetings, but I never understood why people like to have so many unless they are intentionally trying to stay away from their desks. I suspect that in the case of middle management, this is often true. After all, that is the layer of the cake that gets paid merely to be a catalyst. Consequently, if they’re not in a meeting with subordinates, they are either in meetings with superiors accounting for lack of productivity, or sitting at their desk pretending to be busy.
October 31st, 2006 at 5:37 pm
Wow I hate meetings. They’re so abhorrently necessary it’s uncomfortable. Sales meetings are good when they’re short and enthusiastic. But those management meetings are BRUTAL. During those especially long ones I try to amuse myself by coming up with good nicknames for all the others around the table.
That said, the calendar screenshot is what caught my eye–which calendar were you using??
October 31st, 2006 at 6:10 pm
Haha, lately a small group of us have been deciding on a word or phrase before our meeting that we are challenging each other to work into the meeting somehow, like “lock box” or “tighten up.” Then we get the giggles when someone says it.
The calendar shown here is the lovely iCal, from Apple.