Maybe it's a project mgt position. You get to go to 10 team scrum meetings for 15 minutes each and then you go to the scrum of scrum meetings for 30 minutes.
Oof, the frequent meetings have been the hardest thing to adjust to as my company slowly limps toward something vaguely Agile-ish (most of us have realized we're not actually doing it by the book).
I'm on 4 scrum teams. I'm told by friends in tech that this isn't normal. But, we don't have enough people left after the layoff to have 1 person be on 1 scrum team at a time. It's exhausting. My boss is like "well, I'd rather have the daily standups than what we used to do - have a weekly meeting for each project that was long and always ran over where everyone saves up their issues and grievances and vomits them out all at once, at length."
True! But having so many 15-minute standups every day breaks my focus. Some only have 15 or 30 minutes between them - so, go to a standup, start doing actual work.... oh shit, time for ANOTHER standup, that standup finishes.... shit, what was I doing, again? It's making me less productive because I keep having to switch gears and stop what I'm doing to log into yet another fucking meeting. This isn't counting the sprint planning meetings, the sprint retrospectives, the "grooming" meetings (I hate that word, it makes me think of online predators grooming their young victims. Or, I dunno, bikini waxes or something, haha.). Times four. When does work happen?
This is the bit I find especially maddening. Someone upthread said, in response to me bitching about how we have emergencies ("emergencies") all the time that are not listed as tasks in the sprint, that, well someone just needs to MAKE that a task. I agree. We can't - because the emergencies invariably involve a project that doesn't have anything at all to do with the project that the scrum is dealing with, and was going on before we switched to Agile.
This just happened this week - I had this project that more or less wrapped up in September other than some last minute edits, but we've been sitting on it since then, rather than releasing it and being done with the damned thing, for Reasons, financial in nature I suspect. So of course it gets to be nearly the end of the year, the layoff happens, we're ass deep in Agile by now, and this thing rears its head again because someone apparently realized OH SHIT it's the end of the year and we need to get this done in 2019. It ended up being way bigger in scope than we thought, I'm told by my boss to prioritize this and that "the scrum master will just have to understand" that very little sprint work happened on my part for a few days, because this was OMG NOW URGENT.
This project was never assigned to a scrum team. It wasn't done using Agile. It is a different project for a different market with a different job code to put on my timesheet to bill my work. It has a different PM who is not involved in any of the 4 scrum teams I'm currently on; he is on a completely different project now (and, I assume, also has new, unrelated, scrum team(s) that he's in charge of). I don't think that mid-sprint, I can ask the PM of my scrum teams to add (to borrow Askamanager.org terminology) a llama wrangling task that belongs to Other PM to the sprint, when the entire sprint - and entire scrum, for that example - is only for chocolate teapot production and has nothing at all to do with llama wrangling?
Is that what should happen, though? This totally different project, completely unrelated to what the scrums are otherwise doing and with a different job code, PM, customer, should get a task *somewhere* simply because the task needs to be done by a person - me - who is on scrum teams? I don't even know which of the 4 teams I'm on it would be shoehorned into because it has nothing to do with any of them.
Anyway, that was a super long rant. I am grateful to have some place to discuss all of this shit among people who sound like they actually know what they are doing! :)
