Productivity
Three Things My Team Does To Minimise Distractions
How my software development team has taken meetings, communications, and unplanned work under control
Meetings, communications, and urgent requests are well known productivity detractors for software engineering teams. In this article I’d like to share how my team maintains high productivity by carefully designing the team meeting schedule, optimising team communications, and taking distractions under control to maximise uninterrupted time that each developer and designer can spend on actually doing their job.
First of all, I should tell you a bit about my team so you could get an idea how similar or different it is from yours. My team is building and maintaining the online and mobile banking apps for one of the Australian banks. We are an integrated team of software engineers and designers and we closely collaborate with several teams and stakeholders at the bank: Product, BA, Testing, and other engineering teams. We work in two-week sprints. We have fortnightly sprint planning meetings, daily stand-ups, weekly retrospectives, weekly all-company demos, and regular 1–1s, weekly for some team members and fortnightly for others.
