The issue with all of this addition process, ceremony and meetings is work still needs to get done. Sadly the only time to do work is often outside of working hours since then, finally, the meetings and ceremony have ended.
I don't think this is the case. A two week sprint should have about 100 minutes of standup, 1 hour of planning, 1 hour of refinement, half an hour of review and 1 hour retro, ish (I can't remember the exact timings). About 5 hours every 2 weeks. Saying that adds up to a full 2 weeks of work is just... pointless. So falsifiable.
I can only speak from personal experience (perhaps our Scrum consultant did it wrong). We have a large group and even running through the all of the demos (mostly slides really) from all of the teams at the end of a three week period took days. Added to this the retrospective, multiple planning sessions as well as all of the meetings that we used to have prior to doing this.
In the end, it was just so obviously unworkable to everyone it had to be stopped.
However, you are absolutely right, we were not in meetings 100% of the time - it just felt like it. Many people need good swaths of uninterrupted time (perhaps 1.5-2 hours minimum) in order to be productive. Rapid context switching between various meetings and development work can be expensive. It is unfortunate when this time can only be found outside of working hours.
My suggestion is to start with no process and no regular meetings and carefully add process/meetings as required. If you need to talk with one or more people... call them right now (or arrange a meeting with a clear agenda - right now). All overhead should be carefully evaluated in terms of its actual ROI.
> We have a large group and even running through the all of the demos (mostly slides really) from all of the teams at the end of a three week period took days
I have several product teams (about 25-30 engineers depending on how you count them) on different products and we often squeeze a "show and tell"-style sprint review, where it's much more broadcast than interactive mode, in 30-60 minutes.
I think a general rule is if it feels like death then bring it up in the retro and change it. And if you can't change it, even with good reason, guess what - turns out someone's disallowing agile :)
I agree with all of that. To me Scrum is a reasonably minimal set of meetings that involve everyone who needs to be involved as little as possible to get the job done, but that won't be everyone's experience. Partly because Scrum is a methodology with a pretty specific use case; it's definitely not for everything.
