0900 till 0930 - 15 min standup meeting.
0930 till 1000 - focus time.
1000 till 1100 - Pre meeting for customer meeting at 1100.
1100 till 1200 - Customer meeting.
1230 till 1300 - Post Meeting catchup.
1300 till 1330 - focus time.
1330 till 1430 - JIRA board update meeting.
1430 till 1500 - priorities review meeting.
1500 till 1645 - focus time.
1645 till 1730 - EOD standup.
That concept is lost on so many people and I don't understand why. One of the last teams I was on had two weekly meetings. One was 9:00 AM Monday morning and the other was 4:00 PM on Fridays. They were both running through all of our projects and always seemed surprised that the Monday update was the same as the previous Friday update.
It is to their advantage to be act surprised, therefore they are "surprised", see? This was your "opportunity" to show how dedicated you are the company, having worked all weekend long...
"Are you don't yet? Why aren't you done yet? Help me update infinite plans that will be outdated in a week. Also, I just promised a bunch of stuff... all that stuff we already promised, I think you can do that faster."
When I was a dev, I once had a PM with no technical skills that decided he would "learn to program to help catch us up"... He did not succeed.
Hey, at least he had the right idea. He saw that the delay was due to a lack of skilled workers and tried to fix that problem instead of just talking more about the project. That's more awareness than most PMs have in my experience.
PMs act that way because people above them ask for updates regularly. Bad PMs don't know how to push back. If you need things done faster, the answer is usually "we need more resources".
"we need more resources" is bounded by the rate at which you can incorporate new teams members without absolutely destroying your productivity, or having a bunch of untrained fools running around breaking things (of course the later is standard at many places already, so I guess it doesn't always matter).
The right answer is usually : "No". Or at least "Prioritize". Or "This is what we need to get it done" at which point they might start to get software takes time to make decently, and they don't want software that doesn't work decently in the first place.
Calling people “resources” and the mindset that delivery teams are just a number that you can spend money to increase is a mark of poor project and personnel management, as well.
If a PM has enough time to try to learn programming on the side, then they are a shit PM. A PM should shield the team from unneccessary meetings, be the main initial contact point and the initial refinement guy. Those are 4 seperate jobs at once.
We do standups twice a week. At worst they run a half hour for my team of about 10 people. Usually we're done in 15-20 minutes. Please tell me it's just an absolutely made up joke that you have an hour and 15 minutes of stand up meetings every day. I would shoot myself.
I had a job that had > 1hr standups for our two man project because we met with QA, BA, and management and they wanted everything changed every day so we had to explain why we couldn't do anything with constantly changing requirements every morning.
The really funny bit is that the Standup comes from Agile, which is a software development process class exactly about being able to cope with frequent changing requirements, and the Standup is definitelly not the point when new requirements are introduced.
The other half are about useful things, like what to do next, how your interfaces will look like, and "if you need help, just tell me, I can escalate it".
