| What I dislike about this is how preoccupied people are with how the rules of daily meetings should be enforced. As if it is a given that a) there must be daily meetings, and b) they must be defined as rules. I would rather we focused on the goal instead: The dev team must be coordinated, and they must not deviate enormously from the schedule without the project manager at least knowing about it. So here's our process for ensuring this: Nothing. It turns out that when you have skilled and motivated people working without process handcuffs, they are able, and actually eager to self-organize. - How do we keep in touch? We set up a HipChat room where we discuss things both on and off topic asynchronously. Is our process "we will use a chat room for daily chitchat"? No. We use it because it makes sense, and when it stops making sense, we do something else instead. - How do we catch one dev needing help? He says so. Then we can meet up and pair program or discuss the issue or whatever makes sense. Do we have "pair programming tuesdays" to enforce this? No. It just happens when it needs to. - How do we make sure one dev doesn't drift off procastinating for two weeks? Turns out that's not really a relevant problem for us. We find that skilled devs given freedom and responsibility will live up to it. But on the off chance that it happened, we would notice the lack of work flowing from checkins and code review and work tasks. - How do we make sure the project manager knows of any problems? We tell him. Simple as that. And usually on the way to luch, he asks "things going ok?" and we answer "yep" or "slightly behind it seems, we might delay task X till next week". Do we have a "pre lunch meetup" process to define this? No. It happens naturally because we all have a desire to cooperate. - How do we make sure the devs don't shit in the sink while on the bathroom? We could have a process in place with a post-bowel-movement checkup rota. Or we could enforce pair toiletgoing with a senior architect. But we decided not to. It turns out the devs have a sense of hygiene, and therefore shit into the toilet bowl of their own accord. |
What you're talking about is, at least in the Agile world, described with the shu-ha-ri model. People at the "shu" level really want rules so they know what to do. People at the "ha" level want rules for others. It's only at the "ri" level, that of mastery, that you can fluidly do what works without discussion.
Getting a team to self-organization is tricky. Sometimes rules help.
For example, I know one team that really loved their daily stand-up, but they had a problem with chronic lateness wasting a lot of time. So for a while they created a rule that lateness was punished by $1/minute into the beer jar. I once saw the CEO put $45 in. He was pretty pissed, but he was on time after that. Eventually, everybody got their shit together and they didn't need the rule anymore.