A brief interlude to our focus on meetings in agile frameworks to discuss the use of the word overhead.  

Once upon a time, my grandfather wanted me to be an accountant, just like he was. With all due respect to my uncle (who later became a lawyer), brother, and brother-in-law who found their way into that profession, that was just not in the cards for me. But despite that lack of desire, I have spent a lot of time with accounting over the years as a manager and business owner with income statements (not to mention all of the classes during my undergrad and grad studies) and balance sheets. The term overhead has a precise meaning. Overhead encompasses all the costs on the income statement except for direct labor, direct materials, and direct expenses. In all of the businesses I have been intimately involved with, day-to-day operations is a balancing act between spending on overhead and direct expenses. How much should be spent on planning, content marketing, office space, insurance, management, billing, and rent versus creating or selling a product or even billable time. Both overhead and direct expenses are important (we are assuming what you are doing is efficient and effective for the sake of discussion) but only to the point of diminishing returns. For example, recently I had a conversation with a person in the office down the hall (yes . . . I am working from home) about how much backlog refinement and prioritization was needed. The Scrum Guide suggests this can consume up to 10% of the capacity of the team. Note: I have asked Scrum Masters to validate my own experience and received a wide range of answers that rarely reach 10% (not a great sample) — the important part of the responses was that everyone has an opinion informed by how they practice and the context they find themselves in. My office neighbor suggested that the right amount, in their opinion, was that a team should spend the amount of time so that the backlog was refined to a point where periodic planning could occur and if someone got their story done with an hour left in the day that they could pull the next ticket. The focus was on doing just enough so that there could be a continuous flow of work.

In Does Meeting Overhead Scale In Scrum? I performed a thought experiment using the amounts of time called out in the Scrum Guide. Based on those calculations and using a 40 productive hour work week, I calculated that 22% of a team’s capacity would be spent in meetings. Craig Imlach commented on LinkedIn that “If you looked at the 22% as a means to ensure there is a customer and value focus I would think it a good investment.” I don’t disagree with the comment IF 22% is needed to provide an effective means of delivering a customer focus. But if the same impact could be delivered using 15% of the team’s capacity and the other 7% used to keep a consistent flow of value delivered to the customer (assuming that the constraints allows this to happen — See the Re-Read of Tame Your Work Flow) the team would be remiss in their fiduciary responsibility to their customer.

Joseph Hurado commented on the same article on LinkedIn making the point, “Absolutely there is an overhead, and meetings continue to be one of the most “hated” parts of Scrum.  But they don’t have to be.” The comment made me smile, as coaches and leaders we need to challenge our beliefs, to push past doctrine and consider different ways of working so that we can help teams push past their own cognitive biases.