Establish a team process

It is easy to start rattling off the artifacts of Scrum, a form of Agile methodology, but it is much harder to explain why you want to have those meetings. Why do we need daily stand-ups, planning meetings, estimations, and retrospectives? Why do we want more overhead, more meetings?

Consider the negatives: we spend more time together as a team in a room, than individually, working on our respective portions of the project, and slow down the development process. We have to interface with each other, instead of our computer screens and terminals, and we lose that deep focus of staring into hundreds of lines of code and refactoring them into a neat little bundle. We have nothing to contribute to the topic of discussion in the meetings, and it really would feel more productive to not discuss the work.

Consider the positives: we improve team communication and culture, with clear goals and progress to our goals. We provide better estimates of time and effort, so we know how to plan for unexpected work (which always happens, no matter the sprint), and adjust our execution for quicker results. We consistently deliver quality work because we have clear requirements and improved understanding of our impact.

Strangely, it seems like the primary reason for team process is whether or not you want to spend more time with your team, and talking to your team, and talking to your team about the right things, with enough context, but still allow yourself to get the work done, so you are not doing all the talking and have nothing to show.

Sounds pretty straightforward.