Agile introduces and requires meeting time. If you were doing Just Shut Up And Get It Done before, Agile is definitely meeting-heavy. Agile is agile compared to Waterfall, but overall it’s a process of no one trusting the workers to take on work and hit deadlines if they’re not in meetings telling you about it.
The only constant between every Agile organization I’ve been in is the forced meetings. Everything else was up to interpretation.
> but overall it’s a process of no one trusting the workers to take on work and hit deadlines if they’re not in meetings telling you about it.
I mean... sometimes you need to course-correct, no? And cross pollination is useful, isn't it?
"Just Shut Up And Get It Done" workflow means that people might be spinning their wheels building the wrong thing (or duplicate things) in their silos.
Come on, there's got to be a few meetings to synchronize vision, scope, etc. within a team.
It's practically impossible to get rid of that bit of the cargo-cult thinking. It's funny because it's not even really a part of "Agile", just Scrum. The best Scrum team I've ever worked with (and best team really, that's probably part of it) decided to drop daily meetings and it was great. We did keep the end/start of sprint stuff, because that was important to us.
One thing mentioned in Sutherland's book on Scrum I rarely see repeated is the idea of also delivering happiness, and the sprint "kaizen" (or "improvement").
One person on our team suggested the daily standups were dumb, and we should try dropping them as next sprint's kaizen idea. Everyone else disagreed, but he felt really strongly against meetings, so we did it, it was only one sprint. And it turns out he was entirely right, at least for our team. We kept it that way until eventually that project was completed and the team was shifted around to other teams. We can't convince any of our new teams to try any of these things, but the same dynamic also isn't there to really encourage that.
We unfortunately have some Agile/Scrum cultists who bring everything to a grinding halt with their mindless adherence to their view of how it should be done. Completely paralyzes our team when they start bloviating.
The usual Agile Methodologies (the manifesto had something to say about methodologies) have all the wrong meetings. The only ones that can correct the developers course are a sprint away or after the feature is complete, while all the daily or weekly ones are pure bullshit where nobody present can decide anything.
People keep talking about "waterfall", but I have not seen real, actual "waterfall" in the last 15 years, anywhere. Last time I've seen it was at Microsoft in early 00s, and even there it wasn't super-strict, people just spent their "planning" time prototyping stuff so as not to have to work as hard when the "design" phase ends.
Moreover, for certain types of work (such as, for instance, building platforms) a forced "design" and specification phase would probably be a net benefit. As they say, "half a year of coding can save you two weeks of planning". Except when you also release your shit to users you can't fix your old design mistakes because everyone depends on them now.
The only constant between every Agile organization I’ve been in is the forced meetings. Everything else was up to interpretation.