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Not Yet a Team All fifty notes

The events

What an all-hands is actually for

The widest row on most pyramids is an hour that everybody attends. It is good at exactly one thing and is routinely asked to do four others.

The people this page is about, and which of them have ever worked together

0102030402030405
  1. 01The team's managerTwo working pairs, both from assigned work rather than from any event
  2. 02The second engineer
  3. 03The engineer who joined in MarchAttended every event of the quarter and has no pair
  4. 04The designer
  5. 05The QA engineer
Have worked on something togetherHave only been in the same meetingHave never done either

five people · 10 possible pairs · 2 of them have worked on something together · 2 have only been in the same meeting · 6 have never done either

Five of the eight, chosen because all five attended every social event of the quarter.

Home / The events

Argument

For a distributed group, shared project time reporting provides a practical way to review where work travels, where it stalls, and whether responsibility is concentrated in one person.

The broader organisational question can also be checked against resources from Scrum.org.

Eight people, one hour, every week, fifty weeks. That is four hundred person-hours a year, which on most teams is more than the entire training budget and roughly the cost of a small project.

It is the widest row on the pyramid of what this team shares and it produces no pairs at all. That does not make it worthless. It makes it an instrument with one function that is being asked to perform four.

The one thing it does well

It distributes a decision to everybody at once, with the person who made it in the room.

That matters for a specific and narrow reason: a decision delivered in writing is read by eight people who cannot ask a question, and five of them will interpret the ambiguous sentence differently. Delivered live, one person asks the question and all eight hear the answer. The synchronisation is the product.

Everything else an all-hands is used for is either better done another way or not done at all.

The four things it is asked to do

  • Report status. Each person says what they are working on. The other seven cannot act on any of it, and most of them are not listening by the third speaker. This is the largest consumer of the hour on most teams and it exists because the alternative — writing it down — requires somebody to write it down.
  • Coordinate. Genuine coordination happens between the two or three people whose work touches, and they do it in the meeting while everybody else waits. A five-minute exchange between two people has been given eight people's attention.
  • Build cohesion. This is the one this site is about. An hour in a room produces no exchange between any two attendees, which is the whole argument of the note on the pair that only exists in a meeting. A hundred such hours a year produce a hundred times nothing.
  • Demonstrate that the team exists. This is the unstated function and the real reason the meeting is hard to cancel. Deleting it would feel like admitting there is no team. That feeling is information worth taking seriously, and the meeting is a poor remedy for it.

What to take out of it

Status, first. Replace it with something written that one person compiles. This costs an hour of somebody's time and returns seven, and if the writing is rotated it does something the meeting never did — whoever writes it has to ask seven people what they are doing, which is seven real exchanges, which is a pair-making device. There is a whole note on this in the last part of the site.

Two-person coordination, second. If the same two people have the same exchange every week in front of six others, that exchange has a home and it is not this meeting.

What is left is usually fifteen or twenty minutes: decisions that affect everybody, delivered by the person who made them, with questions taken live. That is a good meeting and it does not need to be weekly.

What to do with the time

Not more events. The reclaimed hours are not a budget for cohesion activities; that is how a reorganised calendar ends up back where it started.

The honest answer is that most of it should go back to people. An hour a week returned to eight people is a real improvement in their working lives and requires no further justification.

A fraction of it can go to the structural things: a review roster takes a few minutes a week, a shared duty takes an hour at the handover, a rotated weekly note takes one person an hour. Those are small costs and they are the ones that show up on the count.

The cost in somebody else's evening

One more item, and it falls on the same people as everything else in this part of the site.

A weekly meeting for a distributed team is scheduled in the hours that suit most of it, which means it sits outside somebody's working day. On the team counted here, three of the eight have less than three hours of overlap with the rest, so any whole-team hour is early morning or late evening for at least one person.

Fifty of those a year is fifty evenings, spent receiving announcements that could have been read. If the meeting is going to survive, the least that can be done is to rotate the hour so that the inconvenience is shared, including with whoever schedules it.

And the feeling

If cancelling the weekly meeting makes the team feel like it has stopped existing, that is worth sitting with rather than solving.

A team held together by one shared hour is a team whose only common property is attendance, and the correct response is not to protect the hour. It is to put something underneath it — a shared duty, a shared artefact, a pair of people with one deadline — so that the team continues to exist on the weeks when the meeting does not happen.

Also on whether this is a team