I think anyone who works for a big company, or at least most who do, will have experienced going to meetings that should’ve been e-mails?
Some of those probably shouldn’t have even been that. Like, for instance, yesterday’s all-departments show-and-tell meeting, where literally no departments had anything new to show.
We had a reorg about a year and a half ago. Before that, there was an app team, a web team and a backend team. Now there’s a webshop team and a website team, each containing app, web and backend people.
The web and app people have been complaining that whenever people from the other product talk about in daily doesn’t matter to them. That wastes 5 minutes a day of their time. So we had 4 retrospectives, 4 workshops and 3 discussion meetings on how to restructure the dailies to save time during daily. That’s about as much time as would be wasted over the course of maybe 200 dailies. We still don’t have a decent plan. The current idea is to split the dailies and have two dailies, and everyone who is not web or app (so backend, testers, product owner, team manager and UX designers) need to be in both dailies where all the announcements will be repeated twice.
We apparently don’t have bigger issues.
(And there’s me, backender, sitting there listening to both web and app people chatting away for 10 minutes a day about things like accessibility and layouting that really don’t matter for me, just barely listening in case someone mentions my name, so I can quickly scramble and act as if I was following along what they were saying.)